“Life changing?” she asked. “How was it life changing?”
I held out my hands to indicate his size, and the smile wiped right off of her face.
“You’re shitting me,” she said.
I was already shaking my head before she could finish.
“Nope,” I said. “Like for real, it was that big. And it was all I could think about. And… get this… I think he was the same cop that helped me that night.”
Now that really wiped the smile completely off of her face.
There were no lingering lines of laughter at all.
“What?” she questioned.
I swallowed. “During the warmup yesterday, they made us run outside. And when I looked into his eyes, I was so fuckin’ scared. I was right back there that morning in the middle of my own personal hell. And then he spoke to me, and his voice just did something to calm me. Then I opened my eyes and saw his eyes, and then I remembered. But he has no clue who I am.”
Mavis shook her head, the movement causing the sleeping boy on the couch to bounce slightly with her movement.
Vlad shifted so that his face was facing a different way.
She watched him for a little while, silent, before saying, “You’re the reason that I had Vlad.”
I scrunched up my nose in confusion. “What?”
“The day that I got pregnant, I was at that bar because of you,” she explained. “You’d had a bad day. You’d had a panic attack in the grocery store, and you wouldn’t calm down, so I had to force-feed you your anxiety meds. And… I just wanted to escape for a while. Which was why I was at that bar that night. Why I slept with the guy in the band.”
The guy in the band was actually named Bayne Green.
She’d had a one-night stand with him when he was playing in the bar that night, never once looking back.
Which worked for us, because after we tried to get into contact with him, and he’d told Mavis to ‘get rid of it,’ we’d decided that we would leave it alone and let it be.
If that guy didn’t want to have any part of Vlad’s life, then who were we to force him?
The only sad thing was, Vlad deserved everything in this world.
And the man didn’t know what he was missing by denying him his presence.
“You never told me that,” I admitted. “Mavis…”
She grinned then. “It was the best thing to ever happen to me, you know. I don’t think I ever would’ve had the courage to go and put myself out there like I did without seeing you struggle. Seeing you work so hard to become normal again.”
I poked my tongue out at her.
She snickered and stood up from the couch carefully, taking care so that Vlad stayed where he was as she walked over to me and hugged me tight.
“You’re my hero, little sister,” she whispered.
I felt my face start to crumple, and like I always did when she showed her faith in me, I fell apart in her arms.
By the time that we were finished with our crying jag, my phone was beeping to show me that it was time to go pick up a certain someone.
“I can’t believe you finagled that.” She shook her head, wiping her tears with her t-shirt.
I wiped my own and then sniffled as I tried to compose myself.
Still, by the time I was rolling up to the gym twenty minutes later, I knew I was still a bit puffy and red.
It was dark outside, and there wasn’t a single soul at the gym besides the one man that I could see doing something on the bar that I could likely never accomplish.
I idled next to the curb for a bit, right under the security light that lit up the front entrance of the gym, but he was still moving along on what he was doing, and hadn’t noticed I was there.
Gathering my courage, I turned my car off and got out, hand fisting around my keys as my heart started to jackhammer.
Still, I made it to the door without incident, breathing out roughly when I opened the door and walked into the gym.
The moment I did, I started to giggle.
Because when I was outside, I could practically hear the music that Taos was working out to.
At least, I thought I could.
But inside, I realized that he wasn’t rocking out to AC/DC or Bruce Springsteen.
Nope, he was listening to Disney songs.
The particular one that was on at that instant was “Kiss the Girl” followed by “Hakuna Matata.”
By the time that “Let It Go” came on, I was practically singing along while I watched him do move after move, until there was so much sweat pouring down over his face and arms that he ripped his t-shirt off in between reps and kept going.