Who Do You Love - Dean Ambrose

Chapter 45: I'm Your Baby Tonight

I feel asleep feeling pretty much like I'd been sucker punched –

Not helped an awful lot by the sheer amount I cried and the fact that the tears were the big, itchy hot ones that tore down my face like a never ending stream and mingled with my nose until my full face was plastered with bodily fluids and deep misery blubs.

Ugh.

How on earth had I fallen so heavily and what had I done to merit having such wild lows? Maybe I had murdered a prostitute in a past life or kicked a puppy or turned a turtle upside down. Either way I had to have done something terrible, because otherwise why was I going through the mill?

First my mother and then my father –

Both of them one way or another had been lost and on each of those occasions I had been forced into grieving and moving on without the paternal love they had held out. My mom especially had been the worst of those two endings and losing her had pretty much ripped me apart, finding my father therefore had been special and had briefly helped to fill a tiny part of that loss. But when I had met him, he had been big and charming and loving and protective like I had wanted and more. His fall from grace and from my life had been brutal, but he hadn't been ripped away.

Instead he had walked.

Dean had too although I hoped it wasn't permanent but still the thoughts tore at me –

Maybe I wasn't good enough?

If one or two people had left after knowing me, then I was pretty much able to chalk it up to bad luck, but the more and more my loved ones washed their hands of me, the more I had to figure that there was something I had done.

Perhaps I didn't deserve to find someone?

Perhaps it was my destiny to be on my own?

I buried my head into the pillow and bawled again but at least on that occasion I seemed to manage to cry it out, since I eventually fell into a baffled exhaustion that dragged me right through to the following dawn. In fact, I didn't wake until a hand palmed my hair back and the bed depressed a little to my left although because I was so gone none of the movements seemed to register and neither did the very gently smiling sounding tones,

"Princess?"

"Wha – ?"

Dean's aftershave seemed stronger but I assumed it was still seeping from his pillow's soft folds and therefore merely twisted myself in deeper and blew a breath out to try and get back to sleep.

"Lauren? Princess, you wanna open those eyes for me?"

"Hmmm, okay."

I made the move in a haze but was rewarded not only with the grey light of morning but also the bright blue blaze of my boyfriend's loving orbs and the feeling of his rough thumbs gently stroking my cheekbones, which was lovely but confusing.

"Is – is this a dream?"

He snorted at me,

"Nope, real life baby."

"You came back?"

I sounded pretty spaced and it made the lips turn until the dimples popped at which point actual butterflies lit up in my soul and something warm and safe tingled through me and cut in softly through the post-exhaustion folds, because surely that meant he was actually there in front of me? In the interests of checking, I poked at one.