Lost Without You/A Jordan Knight FanFic✔️

14

Now

I sleep on the sofa so I can hear Lucy and Alice if they need me, but in the middle of the night, a glass clinking in the kitchen wakes me.

"Sorry," Alice whispers. "I forgot to take a glass of water into the bedroom. And I'm parched."

Sitting up slowly, I rub my eyes against the light she turned on above the sink.

"It's fine. Lucy sleeping okay?"

She takes a sip of her water. "Mmm-hmm."

When my eyes focus, I catch her gaze planted on my bare chest, and it makes me pause for a moment. Is she meaning to look at me like this? Or is she just really tired, and it's simply an absentminded look like when one spaces out? I choose to think it's the former, and I let my gaze take in her short nightshirt and toned legs.

"Don't look at me like that."

So fucking typical of her.

I lift a brow and pin her with a pot-kettle-black expression.

"I don't have my contacts in or my glasses on, so if you think I was looking at you, I wasn't," she says.

"Well, I don't have my glasses on either, so back at ya."

She chuckles, setting her water glass on the counter. "You have twenty-twenty vision."

"Not at night."

Rolling her eyes, she pads her bare feet toward me and curls up in the chair, shoving her legs up into her nightshirt.

"Every time I wake up, I have this brief moment where I think everything isn't what it seems. There was no accident. Lucy is spending the night at a friend's house. And my biggest concern is making up a new routine for my dance students. Then I blink and the weight of my reality hits so hard I can barely breathe. So I close my eyes and try to get back to sleep where my dreams involve Lucy not in a wheelchair." Her gaze lifts from the floor between us to meet mine. "Do you ever have moments like that?"

I nod slowly. "I think the first time I remember feeling disoriented about reality upon waking was after your miscarriage. Sometimes I'd start to reach across the bed to rest my hand on your belly and catch myself at the last second."

Alice looks away. "I think when we sleep, our minds try to fill in the holes. The emotional wounds. And for a split second when we wake, everything doesn't hurt. For a few breaths, things feel right and normal. Then we blink and it all shatters like illusions do. Everything starts to hurt again."

Running her teeth along her bottom lip, her usual look of contemplation, she hums in agreement.

Silence settles between us, leaving only the soft tick of the clock on the bookshelf. It's funny how over the previous five years I imagined having a quiet moment like this with Alice where she didn't look at me like I singlehandedly destroyed her whole world. There's been so many things I've wanted to say to her. Yet, here we are, and I can't think of anything to say.

"I feel ..." She starts and then stops.

I glance up, waiting for more. It takes another minute or two for her to continue.

"I feel like there's something I owe you. Something I should say. But I can't figure it out."

My expression remains neutral, and my tongue remains idle.

"It's as if part of me feels like I should forgive you now. Yet ... it feels weird to forgive you just because I put Lucy in a wheelchair." She shakes her head and pinches the bridge of her nose. "God ... that sounds so awful. Just because I put her in a wheelchair. Like it's nothing. Like it's a scraped knee."