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MADDIE
I slide my finger along the spines of the books on the shelf. It reminds me a little of one of my favorite Disney movies. There has to be hundreds of stories in here, thousands of hours of adventure.
It’s subtle, the shift in the air that precedes one of my men stepping into my space. It’s not a predetermined amount of feet, more like some sort of cosmic circumference. My soul recognizes each of theirs in a way that I’m not sure my mind has caught up to yet.
He’s quiet, so I don’t call him out yet. I like the weight of his gaze along my back as I stare at the muted spines.
He shifts, a soft scuff against the hardwood floor that runs throughout most of the house. “Would you believe me if I told you I read all of these?”
I look over my shoulder and see Leo leaning against the doorjamb, arms folded across his chest and one ankle crossed over the other. His face looks soft, and if I didn’t witness everything firsthand, I would never know that he was kidnapped, drugged, and dragged two thousand miles across the country just a couple months ago.
“You don’t have to babysit me, you know. No one knows I’m here, remember?”
“I’m not. I’m spending time with my girl. Is that such a bad thing?”
I shake my head a little, a smile teasing the corners of my mouth. He’s too smooth for his own good sometimes. “Did you read them?”
He smirks, this sinful little smile before he pushes off the wall. In three long strides, he’s behind me. His crisp citrus scent surrounds me, and contentment settles into my muscles.
My nerves feel permanently frayed, the ends flapping in an arctic breeze and sending my heart skipping a beat too often. The only time I ever seem to calm down is when one of my men are near. It’s great in theory, but it’s not plausible. Not forever.
Though if you asked any one of them, they’d vehemently disagree. But as much as I love them—and I do—I’ll need my own space. Eventually.
An area where I can start to breathe without the persistent anxiety that creeps up on me whenever I think about some of the big life changes.
My cousin, Lainey, thinks I’m struggling with some post-traumatic stress coupled with the idea that our family is growing. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about having a baby.
I had always planned on having kids, so it wasn’t that, more of the self-crippling doubt in my ability as a mother, mostly due to my own mother’s shitty parenting. Intellectually, I know that I need to work on moving through her betrayal, but emotionally, I’m just not ready to unpack it yet. How do you even begin to process that betrayal?
Hey, Mom, don’t worry about the fact that you lied to me my entire life, and even when caught in the lie, still backed my biological father who’s probably an actual psychopath. See you at Christmas.
I mentally roll my eyes at myself and sigh. That’s a problem for another day.
“Hey, where’d you go?” His palm presses against my waist, a gentle coax.
“Hmm? Nowhere, just daydreaming. So, did you read all these?” I smile, a soft twist of my lips that he can’t even see from behind me.
“Nah, not all of them. But I did read this one a few years ago.” His fingertips from his other hand skim the tops of the spines in front of me, stopping on a dark blue book with gold lettering.
“Romeo and Juliet?” I don’t bother hiding the wide grin at the vision of a young Leo curled up with a Shakespearean tragedy.
“Mm-hmm. Here, look.” He tugs on the spine, but instead of the book sliding out, it stays at a forty-five-degree angle. A mechanical hum fills the air, and Leo slides his palm across my stomach. He steps backward, bringing me with him.
“What is that?”
“Just wait.” He tugs us back another step as the sound of gears shifting fills the air.
My mouth falls open as I stare at an entire floor-to-ceiling bookcase that hinges open from one end. The other end slides into the room, toward us, and a triangle of soft yellow light spills onto the abstract black-and-gray rug.
“What is this?” Wonder fills my voice as I take a step toward it. I cut a glance over my shoulder at him. “I’m not about to be trapped inside your walls, right?”
He chuckles and steps into me, nudging me forward with a hand on my lower back. “You watch too many true crime documentaries, Maddie.”
I tip my chin up and watch as the bookcase stops perpendicular to the wall. “No such thing, Leo.”
It opens up to reveal a small hallway. Small wrought-iron lights are every few feet along the walls. The air smells stale, like dust and mildly damp. The walls are drywall, and the floor is surprisingly clean for being inside of a wall.
“It’s an escape route. Whoever my parents bought the house from had this framed-out and installed when they built the house.”
