Page 92 of Suck This

CHAPTER 19

Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck off.

-T-shirt

ACADIA

Seven nights later, I woke up disoriented.

What had woken me?

I looked around the darkened room.

My eyes came to a rest on the clock.

There was a constant thrum at the back of my skull, tying me to Constantine, but it was muted as it always was when he or I were sleeping.

Something was off.

Something had been off for a while now, but nothing like this. Constantine had been holding something back from me. Keeping something a secret, but it was obviously not bad enough that he felt I needed to know… yet.

If he wasn’t doing the same thing to his friends, people that’d been with him for years upon years, then I would’ve thought it had to do with me. Knowing that likely it wasn’t was enough to allow me to sleep… for now.

I got up, being careful not to rouse the sexy, contented man at my side, and walked to the window.

It was well past dusk, likely the reason that the shutters were no longer down, and I wondered what had happened to make me sleep so heavily. Normally, the sound of those bad boys was enough to wake the entire house.

I was a fairly light sleeper. Or at least had been over the last week since I’d entered my new existence. Anytime Con came to bed, I woke up. Anytime Con moved in his sleep, I woke up. Anytime someone in the hallway walked past our door, I woke up. Fuck, there was also this one time that the power went out and all of the normal background clatter no longer making noise woke me up.

And now that my brain was back online, it was unheard of for Con to still be sleeping. Hell, I wasn’t even sure that he slept at all. He laid down beside me, sure. He took the occasional cat nap, but never once had I woken up with him still asleep beside me.

My fingers hit the blinds, and I pulled them apart, staring out at the night.

And immediately saw the baby out on the lawn.

Not a baby, but more of a toddler. But she was out there. A little girl with no one around her at all.

“Con,” I whispered. “Wake up.”

My eyes were on the little girl standing in the yard.

It was snowing out. Her little feet were sunk in the snow up to her tiny little calves, and the only thing she had on was a threadbare nightgown that didn’t look like it offered that much protection against the cold.

“Con!”

Nothing from the bed. He still didn’t wake up.

I didn’t waste time waiting for him, either.

No, I ran out of the room, uncaring that I was in a t-shirt that was just as threadbare as the one the little girl was wearing, and slammed outside only to find the tracks in the snow leading away from where I’d last spotted the girl.

My feet hit the cold snow and I shivered.

I wasn’t going to be injured by the snow, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t feel the cold.

“Sweetheart?” I called out, following the footprints.

“Daddy?”