Charlie's Angel

56

Aaron

Nothing affected me anymore. It was the exact same thing every single day, so I learned early on not to let anything bother me. Was that healthy for my sanity? Hell no but I could manage. I had to manage.

Eight more years. I didn't get the opportunity of parole, so there was no way I would be released early for my good behavior. But what behavior? I was caged in a dark hole for twenty-two hours a day. They swore it was for my own safety since the other prisoners didn't take too kindly to rapists and pedophiles.

I was neither of those things.

I was a man who had consensual sex with my wife and mother of my child, but because I was a man and she was a weak woman, I was labeled the scum of the earth.

Of course I was abusive–I was not oblivious to the beatings I gave her–but I was no rapist.

No one ever listens to a man's side of the story, and because of that I have to spend the next eight years behind a steel door that was just as cold as my heart.

Did I even still have a heart? I doubt it. I felt it wither away two years ago when I lost my little girl.

I replay that accident in my mind every second of every day and night. It haunted my thoughts and my vision, my dreams and my nightmares.

All at once, I began to hear everything within a five-mile radius from where I was. There were screams, shouts for help, and the air was thick with smoke and the aroma of blood. A lot of it. My chest struggled to take in air against the seat belt that had locked itself around me for my protection.

Everything was bright when my heavy eyes slowly opened and I tried to scan my surroundings to see what dilemma I was in. My body was throbbing, a numb throb that had me struggling to keep my heart steady. Weakly, I shifted my head to my right to see where the wailing was coming from. Paris was trapped in her car seat, covered in both her own blood and fragments of broken glass sprinkled all around her. There was a nasty gash over her eyebrow where a shard of the window was protruding. She just didn't feel it yet because her shock was her body's defense mechanism.

I failed to unbuckle myself from my seat belt, but then I heard something that had my face dropping in horror. Charlie, who had been knocked out, was beginning to stir and wake up slowly. I couldn't even see her legs because the dashboard and her car door were trapping her body where she sat. Her arms were a mangled mess and there was more blood than I have ever seen.

Her abdomen was caked with a pool of crimson. Her lips parted and she let out a low and steady groan in pain. Carefully and slowly, I reached over to her and felt around her stomach, my fingers being coated with a new liquid.

Her amniotic fluid. Her water broke.

"Shit," I rasped to myself, trying yet again to yank myself free from the seat belt.

I heard the shouting of a few people telling me to sit still so I wouldn't injure myself further, and I heard the blaring of an ambulance and fire truck in the distance but they weren't my priority.

I needed to save my unborn.

My vision was rippling and it was hard to focus on anything, but I felt around her abdomen and felt something. There was a gash in her abdomen from the dashboard.

Our baby was almost free.

"No no," I hissed desperately as a few firemen appeared with the jaws of life. "Save my baby!"

They didn't hear me, my words got lost in all the noise.

It didn't take long before her lifeless body was cut free and she was rushed to the back of the ambulance. Paris was taken to another one.