Home Ice.

Chapter Thirty-Four.

Finn

It's the first week of March and things are... good.

I hesitate to say more because Avery is still a ticking time bomb whose hormones grow with her bump, which is growing.

Of course I still think she's fucking gorgeous, hell I think she looks better and better every day but she damn near bites my head off when I tell her that.

"You look beautiful today, baby." "I knew you thought I looked bad yesterday."

"Is that a new shirt? It looks nice." "Are you saying that because I look fat?"

"Your hair-" "Don't even finish that sentence."

Yeah. Pregnancy hormones are no joke and I love every second of it.

I cannot even explain how lucky I feel being able to experience a new life experience with Aves. When you're with someone for so long, realistically those moments become fleeting. It never upsets me, nor have I ever really thought about it until recently, but getting to live this for the first time, let alone with her, means everything to me.

Well, that and the fact that everything was put into perspective at the end of last year and seeing her around our apartment makes me feel like I've been given a miracle that I get to look at every day.

I've shielded her from everything that's gone down with the Hughes investigation and she knows it. She hasn't asked about it once but she sees me step out of the room to talk to Jordan when she calls. I'll tell her when she's ready to talk about it, and if that's tomorrow or a year from now, that's fine. I will always put her needs first.

Tanya was taken into custody and her bail is pretty high, which means she is stuck in there. His dumbass lawyer is now her lawyer but even he can't get her out of the mess they've created. Not to mention that this story is national news now and my status has come in handy.

Avery and I are known public figures and that means that if anyone connected to what happened to her gets off easy, people will find out and be up in arms about it. It's really shitty that you have to have some fame in order for justice to be served but I will take it in this case, after everything that family has done to my girl, and I think anyone in my position would.

I will proclaim myself as the most conceited and arrogant bastard in front of the entire world if it meant the leverage would help the love of my life.

On the other side, it also makes a surprising knot of regret live square in my chest. I wanted to keep all of this a secret when it first started to go down all those years ago, I wanted none of it to get to the press so Avery could stay out of the spotlight but now I can't help but wonder if I brought it out to the public, he wouldn't have gotten released in the first place. Hell, maybe his sentence would have been longer too. We even kept his identity a secret when he stabbed Casey. I feel like by trying to protect our peace, I protected him too.

The guilt of all of this lives deep inside of me. Between his letter and the number I've been doing on myself, I feel like I'm a moment away from breaking about 95% of the time.

I know I'm not stronger than the trauma I've also faced which is why I'm back to seeing the therapist I went to for about six months when we first moved here. I stopped going because I'm a man and thought I got over whatever issues I had from seeing Avery get drugged, but realistically I just pushed it all to the side because things were going well for me presently. I can't do that this time. All of this roots so deeply inside of me that it has the possibility of consuming me whole. I can't let that happen. I can't let myself be consumed by this when I have to be here for my family. I won't let our trauma affect our babies.