“Noah Blackwood,” I said.
“We don’t have a Noah Blackwood.” The short, stout woman behind the desk looked up at me, her eyes wide, her chair squeaking as she leaned back. She looked afraid of me, and I couldn’t blame her.
“Noah Thompson,” Liv corrected.
The woman typed at her screen again before nodding. “We’ve got a Noah Thompson here, but only his parents are allowed in.”
The smallest, tiniest bit of relief hit me for the first time in hours. “I’m his father,” I said. “And this is my wife, Olivia.”
“Do you have identification with the same last name?” she asked.
And there went any relief. I buried my face in my hands as I leaned against the high end of the desk. “No, I don’t. He has his mother’s last name.”
“And the mother isn’t here?” she asked, eyeing Olivia.
“His mother passed away a few months ago,” Liv offered. I wasn’t sure if I was thankful or disturbed by her air of calmness, but whatever it was, it was helping the situation. The woman seemed much more up to talking to her.
“Do you have anything to prove that?”
“Um, no, but…” Liv fished in her bag for her phone and pulled it out, flipping it around to show the lady her lockscreen. “But this is Noah and I in Disney. Does that count for anything?”
If I had any bit of me that wasn’t engulfed in stress, I could have cried from realizing that Noah was her fucking lockscreen. But I couldn’t do that right now.
The woman sighed and sucked her teeth, weighing up her options. But then she hit a buzzer and the doors to the pediatric unit opened, and I grabbed Liv before the woman could change her mind.
“Room 208!” She called after us.
We rushed down the hallway, checking room numbers, sidestepping IV carts and abandoned beds. I gripped Liv’s hand, my heart pounding in my chest, all cylinders firing on anxiety. She’d thrown up back at the reserve, and I’d felt like I was going to every second since.
The sign for Room 208 shone like a fucking beacon at the other end of the hall, and I sprinted toward it the second I clocked it.
I pushed the door open.
“Daddy!”
“Damien, thank fuck.”
Noah sat on the bed bolt upright in a tiny hospital gown, his toy car in front of his crisscrossed legs, my sister by his side. Despite the IV port in his arm and the cannula hanging half out of his nose, he looked okay, he looked alive, and oh my God, I could breathe. I could breathe.
I pushed across the room, minding the wiring and the tubes, and pulled Noah into my chest. I could breathe, but my throat was closing, a lump forming. A sob wracked my chest and I bit it back, far too worried about concealing that from him to deal with the implications of stuffing it down.
Across the room, a nurse spoke to Liv in hushed tones, and she eyed me warily. He must have assumed she was Noah’s mother.
“Where were you?” Noah asked, and I pressed a wet kiss against the top of his head.
“Don’t worry about that. I’m here now. Just give me one moment.” Slipping out of Noah’s arms, I sidestepped my way to the doorway, pushing myself into the conversation with the nurse.
“You must be Dad,” he said. “I was just explaining to Mom here that we’ve run some tests and nothing to suggest a reason for the seizure has come back.”
“That can’t be right,” Liv said, her brows furrowing. “There must be a reason. Fever, epilepsy, something?”
Thank God she was composed. All I wanted to do was wring the man’s neck and let his guts spill out onto his scrubs.
He shook his head. “No fever. Epilepsy is only diagnosed when two or more unexplained seizures happen, so I would suggest keeping an eye out. He was a little dehydrated but not enough that it would cause something like this, so we’ve got him back up to normal levels.”
“I don’t understand,” I interjected, the words too biting, too angry. “There’s not a cause? How do we know it won’t happen again?”
“Dame,” Liv breathed, her hand slipping back into mine and squeezing.
The nurse didn’t even seem phased. “You don’t,” he said. “It could just be a one-off. That happens sometimes. The MRI showed nothing of significance so it doesn’t look like there’s any damage.”
“A one-off? People don’t just have one-off seizures,” I snapped.
Liv squeezed my hand again and pulled my attention to her. “It happens, Damien.”
Her softness, her ease, put that tiny bit of calm back into me. “What do we do, then?”
The nurse sighed. “You can take him home in a few hours once we get his discharge sorted. I’d recommend keeping a close eye on him and telling him what happened. Make him feel okay about it so that if it happens when neither of you is around, he feels comfortable telling you that it happened. And if it does happen again, we can look at diagnosing him with epilepsy and getting him on the right medication for handling it.”
“Sorry,” Liv said, cutting in. “Is there a reason why we can’t get him on medication now in case it happens again?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said. “Taking it when it could be unnecessary is likely to just give him the side effects of it without him needing them.”
Liv nodded and slipped past me, leaving me to speak to the nurse alone as she gave the biggest, fakest smile to Noah and sat down at the end of his bed. Through the anxiety and the words the man was saying to me, I could hear her introduce herself to Caroline.
“The woman who brought him in, she timed his seizure,” he said. “It was only about a minute and a half. That’s within the normal range, so you don’t need to worry about long-term effects. If it happens again, you or Mom or whoever he’s with should time it. Thirty seconds to two minutes is normal, but anything over five minutes is an emergency.”
“Any seizure is an emergency,” I countered.
“For you, yes. When we don’t know the cause then yes, of course. What I mean is — anything over five minutes means there could be serious damage,” he explained.
“Okay,” I sighed. “Have you checked his file? This definitely hasn’t happened before, correct?”
The man rose a brow at me. “I’d assume you would know if it had happened before.”
“It’s a long story and I don’t have the patience to explain.”
He sighed and flipped open his folder, scanning the page. “The doctor noted that there were no other occurrences on file for Noah, so I would assume this is his first. I’ll be back once we’ve got the discharge paperwork.”
————
I let Olivia drive us home from the hospital.
My built-up anxiety had left me crashing and bleary-eyed, and she was more than happy to get behind the wheel of the rental car I’d arranged for us when we’d landed in San Francisco.
The little bandaid over Noah’s already needle-bruised arm served as a constant reminder of that panic as I gathered him from his car seat. He was more exhausted than me, his eyes squinty and his excitement to be home already dampening.
I carried him inside, his head slumped over my shoulder, his legs and arms wrapped around me like a starfish. Even though I knew he was tired, it took everything in me to not assume something else was horribly wrong and rush him back to the hospital.
“Do you want some time alone with him?” Liv asked, her bloodshot eyes meeting mine across the living room.
I shook my head. “I’d rather you come up with me to put him to bed,” I sighed. “If you want to.”
She sniffled and nodded once. “I want to.”
Together, we walked him up the stairs, our bags abandoned in the car and carrying nothing but Noah and the toy car in Liv’s hand. Together, we changed him into his pajamas, careful not to brush against the bandage that he was already complaining about. Together, we read to him, taking turns doing silly voices for the characters. Together, we tucked him in far too literally, dragging a happy giggle out of him as we stuffed the covers under his legs and abdomen. Together, we handled the crash when he finally asked us where his mother was and why she wasn’t there at the hospital. It had finally clicked. Together, we set up the baby monitor I’d bought on a whim, making sure that the camera was pointing directly at him just in case.
Together, we parented in the only ways two people who had never been parents knew how. And I couldn’t help but want more of that, couldn’t help but want her by my side when anything like this happened again, couldn’t help but want to blend my professional and personal life with her seamlessly to make whatever this was work. And on top of that, I couldn’t help but let the rage bubble up inside of me that Grace wanted to take any chance of a future with Noah away from me.
It wasn’t until I’d shut the door behind me and put enough distance between his room and me that I let myself come to terms with what happened.
“Are you okay?” Liv asked.
“No.” I shut my eyes, letting the tears well up before smearing them away with the palms of my hands.
“He’ll be fine,” she said softly, reaching across the kitchen island and taking my hand, squeezing it.
“I know,” I sighed. “It’s just… all of this. All of it, Liv.”
“I know.”
“Thank you,” I added. “For just… for being there. For helping me. For being a… second parent, when he needed it. When I needed it.”
She pursed her lips, offering me a sad little reassuring smile. “Of course. I care about him too, you know.”
I nodded as I moved around the edge of the counter. “I know,” I said.
She released my hand and I used mine to cup her cheeks instead, to hold her in place as I pressed my lips against hers. She was a comfort I didn’t deserve, but I needed it, needed her, needed the solace she brought and the idea of something more. I needed to feel, and she was one of only two people capable of giving me that — and the other was sound asleep upstairs.
“You’ve had a long day,” I mumbled against her lips, letting my fingers push back into her hair just a touch. “I’ll understand if you’re not up for anything.”
“I am,” she breathed. “If you need it, I am. I could use an outlet, too.”
“Thank fuck.”
Her arms snaked around my neck as she brought her lips to mine this time, her kiss so soft, so easy.
————
I buried myself inside of her until every raw, aching, angry emotion I felt about the situation with Noah was overwhelmed and diminished by her.
In the darkness of my bedroom, I loomed over her, my length fully encompassed by her, my everything swarmed in her presence. Her rear rested on my knees, and with one of my hands on her hip and the other cradling her head, I thrust into her.
“God,” I breathed, my lips brushing against hers, my forehead resting on the curve of her hairline. “You’re perfect. Every fucking inch of you. Everything… fuck, everything about you.”
Her fingers dug into my back, my neck, as she briefly pressed her lips to mine. She’d had her release twice already, and in her desperate pleas for me to give her a second to recover, she’d begged me to be inside of her at least.
“I need you,” I rasped.
“I’m right here,” she whispered, her voice cracking as I hit that spot inside of her that she liked so much. Her words turned to gasps. “I’m—I’m right, right here.”
Using my nose, I turned her head just enough that I could kiss her jaw, her neck, the soft spot beneath her ear. “Thank you.”
My thrusts grew erratic, and I shifted the hand on her hip and tucked it between us instead, drawing whimper and cries from her as I met her swollen, oversensitive bundle of nerves. She built quickly and drastically, her body locking, her breaths too fast, too desperate.
“Need this,” I groaned. “I need this, Liv, fucking always. I…shit, I need you, need you just like this, need—”
A beep came from beside us and both of us froze, shifting only to check the baby monitor on the bedside table. Heavy breaths wracked my body as I stared at it, Noah’s unmoving form lighting the screen. It was meant to alert when there was excessive movement, but all I could see was the rise and fall of his chest.
“It’s okay,” Liv breathed, her hand reaching out to point in the darkness toward the top of the screen. “It’s the battery alert. It’s okay.”
I couldn’t tear my gaze from it.
She took my face in her hands so fucking gently that they almost didn’t register until she was softly pulling my gaze back to her. “Dame,” she whispered. “He’s okay. It’s just the battery. He’s okay.”
My throat closed in. I didn’t deserve her, no matter what I did, no matter how many lifetimes I lived, she was too perfect to me.
“He’s okay,” she repeated, pushing the sweaty strings of hair that clung to my cheeks out of my face. “You’re okay, and he’s okay.”
She kissed my lips, my jaw, my nose, both of us unmoving below our shoulders and both of us locked to each other. She comforted me, she held me, and when I needed it, needed the distraction but couldn’t bring myself to do it, she moved for me, pitching and shifting her hips.
“You’re okay,” she said, over and over and over, interspersed with replacements of he’s instead of you’re. She pulled me out of the haze of panic as if she knew exactly what would work, exactly what would make me feel okay, exactly what I needed.
But she was what I needed. Her and Noah. They were all I fucking needed. And as the temptation to speak words I hadn’t said in over five years bubbled up, I found myself stuffing them down, burying them, demolishing them before they could take shape. I distracted my lips with hers. I said it in the way I moved, in the way I put her first in that moment.
I told her I needed her, and nothing else.
