Fever

by Carnal, MJ

  “Yeah. The club,” I reply.

  We sit there, him holding me in his arms, my legs brought in tight against my chest, and my arms thrown tightly around his body. His arms are around my neck and his legs are stretched out on either side of my balled-up form. We sit there and silently offer the only thing we can.

  Each other.

  It’s hard for me to put myself in his shoes. I don’t doubt that he is feeling the heaviness of the situation, but he hasn’t had any time to even process the fact that there was a baby. We would have had a child, made out of love. Even with our young hearts, we both know that any child we would have made would have been our greatest accomplishment. A joy we would have welcomed, even being babies ourselves.

  “I bet she would have looked just like you, that round, beautiful face with the softest of skin and the palest eyes you ever saw. Hair that would catch fire when she ran through the yard, laughter that would make even the surliest of bastards smile—the picture of fucking perfection,” he says against my ear. The lightness in his tone does nothing to blanket the sadness. He’s trying to reassure me when it should be me reassuring him.

  “No, he would have been the spitting image of his handsome father. The strongest face you ever did see on any child. Hair so dark it would give midnight a run for its money and eyes so green you would have sworn we robbed a jewelry store. He would have been so brave and strong. Just perfect. And I would have loved him just as much as I love his father,” I whisper, ending on a soft catch that gives me away.

  We can try and lighten our sadness, but there is no getting around the fact that we both have lost and lost hard.

  “Never again, Izzy West. I will never again let anyone take you from me. Or anything from us.” His words hang between us both as a promise and a threat.

  I know in this moment that this man would fight to the death to keep me by his side, protecting me from the world.

  “I don’t want to be anywhere else but here.” I lean off his chest and give him the softest of kisses. It doesn’t take long before we are using our desire for each other to erase the pain we still hold heavy in our hearts.

  “Come on, Princess. Let’s go to bed, yeah?” He helps to pull me off the floor and then, to my shock, lifts me into his arms and begins to walk through the house.

  “I can walk, you know?” I joke, leaning into his neck and inhaling his intoxicating scent.

  His arms tighten around me before he replies, “I know, but right now, I need this. Just be quiet and let me lead.”

  I can give him that.

  I lean up from where my head was resting on his shoulder and look at his strong profile. This man, this incredible man, I never thought I would have again, is hurting. I can tell by the clenched jaw and the focus determination in his hard lines. Rightfully so, it isn’t every day a man learns that he was a father. Even if the child never made it past a much-loved fuzzy ultrasound image—an image he didn’t even know existed five minutes ago. A sharp pain shoots through my heart when I think of how much he would have loved our child. We had always talked about how much we wanted children.

  “You okay?” I whisper when we hit the landing on the second floor. He ignores me for a while, and I have almost convinced myself that he didn’t hear my question until he breaks the silence.

  “No. But I will be. We will be.”

  He stops when we reach his room and gently lowers me onto the bed. I look up and meet his sad eyes before he breaks contact and pushes his sweats down his lean hips. I sit up, and pull the tee off my body, and throw it to the floor seconds before he presses his weight into my body, pushing me into the mattress. Every inch of our skin from shoulders to toes is touching. I open my legs and welcome his weight, his hips sliding against my arousal.

  He presses his forehead to my own, his breathing fanning my lips and dancing with my own heavy pants. His hands, which are holding my head reverently, warm my cheeks.

  “I need you, Princess,” he softly whispers against my lips.

  “You have me,” I reply.

  He lifts his hips and I help guide his heavy erection into my waiting body. He doesn’t move his hands from my face or his weight from my body. His forehead comes off of mine so that he can press the most loving and tender kisses to my lips.

  This isn’t the heavy, fast sex we had earlier. This is pure lovemaking. This is two souls that have been adrift for too long finally coming home to each other. This is healing.

  I bring my legs up, circling tightly around his hips. My arms curl up and around his shoulders and I hold on tight.

  There is nothing fast about this moment. His breathing against my lips is coming in heavy pants, mirroring my own.

  He rocks against me, not breaking his slow and steady rhythm for what seems like hours. It isn’t until our tears start mingling together down my cheeks that he releases my cheek with one of his hands and brings it behind my knee to hook my leg higher up his side.

  “Oh, God…” I cry as lights explode behind my eyes and my toes curl. My fingernails are digging into his shoulders, anchoring me against his powerful movements.

  “Never. Going. To. Let. You. Go,” he rasps out, punctuating each word with a hard thrust into my wet core. His pelvis is grinding against my clit in the perfect friction. I cry out once again when another orgasm hits me so close to the first.

  He buries his head into my neck and, with a strangled cry, empties himself into my body. We lie there, covered in sweat and connected in every way possible, for the longest time. His body feels wonderful against mine.

  My breathing slowly returns to normal and I feel like I am able to speak. Turning my head slightly so my lips kiss his ear, I whisper as softly as I can the words I have longed to speak to him.

  “I love you, Axel Reid. I have loved you forever and I will never stop. Made for me, baby. You were made for me. Don’t ever leave me. Never again. I would rather die than be without you again.”

  He tenses for the smallest of seconds before rolling our bodies so that he is taking my weight, my legs straddling his hips and my arms still wrapped around his shoulders. He brings his arms up and pulls me even closer to his body. I can feel our joint orgasms leaking between us, reminding me that we are still intimately connected.

  “You wouldn’t be able to get rid of me if you tried.” I lean up and look into his face, memorizing each feature before rubbing my cheek against his. “It feels like my heart has been ripped from my body knowing everything that happened to you. I can’t even begin to process all that we lost. This is our second chance, Izzy and nobody is fucking it up this time.” His voice is soft against my cheek. His lips are warm when he presses a soft kiss against my ear before he rolls me back over and slowly slips from my body. I cry out weakly at the loss of him.

  “Princess, that’s twice now I haven’t used protection. Promise you, I’m clean, but I can get you papers if you don’t believe me. Is this going to be an issue?” He says this lightly, but I can tell by the way he is staring at my stomach he isn’t talking about anything I can catch. “As much as I would love to have you carrying my baby inside you, we aren’t there yet. We will be. But not until my ring is around your finger,” he adds almost as an afterthought, leaving me stunned.

  “Um…” I clear my throat a few times and look back up into his smiling eyes. “We’re okay. I’m on the pill,” I whisper.

  “Good. Then I guess I don’t need all those boxes of condoms, huh?” He laughs as he walks to the bathroom and shuts the door behind him.

  I can’t help but wonder what the hell just happened here. Was that some weird marriage proposal? No, surely not. We might have agreed to see where this goes, but marriage?

  I am silently freaking out when he returns to the bed and tenderly cleans me off. He throws the towel off in the direction of the bathroom before pulling me into his arms and holding me tight. My head is resting against his chest and I can feel his heart beating slowly under my ear. I wrap my arm around him and hook my leg ove
r his hip, brushing his still-hard dick in the process.

  “Easy there, Princess. You might want that in working function later.”

  I laugh before I allow his warm body and steady breathing to pull me under into the most peaceful, dreamless sleep I have had in twelve years.

  Chapter 17

  I woke up feeling the most delicious soreness between my legs and an ache in muscles haven’t been used in years. Stretching out, I reach over expecting to find Axel’s warm body next to mine but only meet cold sheets.

  I open my eyes and look around the room. Empty. Climbing out, I pick up the shirt from last night, pull on a pair of yoga pants from my bag, and continue my search for Axel. The bathroom is empty and so is every room I check after. Not in the kitchen, not in the garage, but his truck is still out front.

  I’m standing on the back porch, looking off across the lake at the sun just barely peeking over the tips of the trees. The lake is calm in the early morning hours, and the world seems to be asleep. I am about to give up my search when I see a slight movement down at the end of the dock. The path to his dock is covered slightly by a line of trees, and in the early morning hours, I am worried my eyes might be playing tricks on me. When I see the movement again, I realize I have just found him.

  Tiny pinpricks shoot through my feet when I hit the cold pebbled walkway on the way down to the docks. I keep my eyes on his naked back. He is sitting at the very end of the dock, his legs are folded up, and his arms are resting against his knees. It isn’t until I get a little closer that I realize his head is resting against his arms and his back is heaving with deep breaths. He has to have felt my footsteps against the wood of the dock, but if he did, he didn’t change his posture.

  “Ax?” I ask softly.

  No response.

  “Baby?” I try again.

  Nothing.

  Sighing deeply, I sit down and bring my body close to his. My legs fall open and the cold skin of his back hits my front. He must be frozen.

  “Jesus, Axel, how long have you been out here?”

  Nothing.

  “Ax, baby, please. You’re scaring me. What’s going on?”

  He’s silent for a while. His body jerks slightly, giving away his silence for anything but what it is. My big strong man is breaking. I knew he was holding his pain tight last night, trying to be strong for me. Trying to keep his torment from showing.

  I bring my arms around and lace my fingers together against his chest, his heart beating rapidly against my arm. His body stills when I place my lips against his back and whisper the only thing I can think of. “It’s okay, Ax. You can’t hold this in. For years I have and it doesn’t help.” Then I fall silent and hold him tight, hoping he opens up to me.

  “It’s my fault,” he finally says, his voice thick with emotion.

  “What? What is?” I question.

  “Everything.”

  We fall silent again while I puzzle over his response. We were both victims here in fate’s cruel game of keep-away. I don’t understand how he can even begin to blame himself.

  “Baby, you have to give me more than that. There is no way any of this is your fault,” I plead.

  He straightens his body but doesn’t make the move to turn. Letting his legs fall to dangle from the end of the wooden path, he turns his head and looks over at the sun rising slowly above the tree line. He brings his arms up from their relaxed position at his sides and closes them over mine before pulling my arms away from his chest and clasping our hands together on his lap.

  “The first thing I did when I left June and Donnie’s was report them to child services. Between the conditions they forced us to live in, the food they refused us, and Donnie’s creepy behavior with the little girls, there was plenty to shut them down. They lost every child the state was paying for. It’s no fucking wonder she slammed the door in my face when I went on my search for you.” He lets out a humorless laugh before continuing. “I wouldn’t have even bothered, Izzy…but I was fucking desperate to find you.”

  “She opened the door, and when she saw it was me, the bitch spit in my fucking face. I didn’t even get a word out. She did manage to tell me about your parents. I will spare you the details on that, but I got nothing else. She must have loved knowing she had the key to my finding you, the key to keeping me from you.”

  When I feel wetness fall on the arm resting on his lap, I lift my cheek from his back and look up at the cloudless sky before realizing it was coming from him. My heart is breaking just a little more from knowing just how deep his agony is rooted.

  “I never got your letters, Izzy. You know… You fucking know I would have come running. Not a single one. I wasn’t at base long. I can’t give you much but they scooped me up quick and I had to leave. Top-secret shit and I went dark, baby. I wrote you a letter that explained it all, but the timing of your parents… It makes sense you never got it. I had no fucking clue you were writing, trying to find me.” He shakes his head as if that simple move can purge the bitterness of his memories.

  “Baby…” I don’t know what to say.

  He squeezes my hands and lets me know that he needs this. He needs to get this out. “Fucking killing me, Izzy…to know that I was so close to you but so fucking far. Knowing that you and our…baby…” He pauses on a sob that catches his words, “Our baby, God, our baby… That baby would have been the most perfect child ever born.” His big body folds over and he starts crying in earnest. Tears of my own are falling down my face and onto his back, but I just hold him tighter.

  I give him the time he needs to get it out, holding him tight and whispering words of love against his back.

  We sit there for a while. He lets out his anguish and I hold him, offering what strength I can. The sun is finally up when he sits back up and turns his head. His eyes are red and the tears are still falling silently. Seeing him like this is destroying me.

  “I would have loved that baby, loved that baby so much, Izzy. We would have been so happy,” he says, each word pushing an invisible dagger into my heart. I know it isn’t my fault that I miscarried, and I long ago coped with the loss, but right now, in this moment, I feel as if it happened yesterday.

  “I know, Axel,” I offer. “I wish I knew what to say to help you, to ease this pain.”

  He turns his body so that he is sitting completely on the dock before opening his arms; I climb in. “All these years, I was so mad at you and I held onto that anger so I wouldn’t feel the hurt. Fuck me, Izzy. I thought you were happy, that you had moved on without even a second thought. I don’t even know how to begin processing this. I don’t know how to grieve a child I never knew I almost had.” His words are soft above my head as we sit there looking across the water that is lapping up against the shore. We silently mourn the past that was taken from us without our knowledge.

  “When I lost the baby, I wasn’t in a good place, Axel. It took me a while, a long while, before I started to feel human again. At that point, I thought you were gone, Ax… I thought you were lost to me forever, and when I lost that baby, it was like I lost the last part of love we had.” I turned to look at him. “When I met Brandon I was vulnerable. I wasn’t looking for someone, but he knew how to play the part and he made me need him. Looking back now, I know I never loved him. I needed the love that I thought he could bring me. I was so alone. I need you to know that I never once stopped loving you Axel. Please don’t take that on your shoulders.”

  He looks at me like he is looking into my soul before placing a soft kiss against my forehead. “I know, Izzy. I don’t know all of the details to your marriage, but I know you, and I believe that.”

  We sit down by the lake with the cold November breeze blowing and I tell him about meeting Brandon and the early years before the abuse. Axel handles it well, only tensing up a few times. When I start to get to the bad stuff, I can feel the rage building. I gloss over a lot of the bad stuff, but by the end, he knows everything. I think he is going to blow a gasket when I tell him
about the letter from June.

  “She fucking told you what?!” he yelled.

  “Uh. She said that you were dead. I don’t know why I believed her. I really don’t. You have to know that I would never have given up on you and on us. But, Axel? She said you were dead and I had no other way of confirming if it was true or not. It was her way of making me think the worst, and I did.”

  He looks mad. No, not mad. He looks bloodthirsty.

  “I will kill that bitch,” he grinds out. His eyes are flashing and his nostrils are flaring with each rapid breath.

  “Seriously, Ax, can we just look forward now? No one wants to see her get hers more than I do but look where we are. We won. You and I, we are finally back to where we are meant to be. Don’t let her win. Please.” It takes a while but he calms down. We sit there in silence while he takes in everything I just told him. I can see all the emotions, from anger to resolve, cross over his face.

  “I wish I would have tried harder. I keep thinking if I would have approached you when I finally found you that things would be different now. We might have more kids; I would finally have my rings on your finger. It kills me, fucking kills me,” he says when I finish explaining everything the last twelve years has brought me.

  “Stop it.” I get off his lap and kneel in front of his relaxed form leaning against one of the posts supporting the dock. Taking his face between my hands and leaning in close, before I finish. “You can’t sit here and play what-if. It has taken me a long time to realize that what-ifs will never change the past, Axel. Right here and right now, you have to promise me that we look forward. No more living with what we could have had. From this day on, we are the new Axel and Izzy.”

  A small smile forms on his face and some of the sadness leaves his eyes. I lean in and kiss him quickly before releasing his face and sitting back down next to him.

  “Axel and Izzy, huh? That mean you want to be my girlfriend or some shit?” He laughs and it sounds like music to my ears.

  “No, I just want to be yours. That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” I answer, reaching over and linking our hands.