His Little Boy

I couldn’t hold my grief inside me any longer. The tears rushed down my face. A piercing scream left my throat as I let my anger take a hold of whatever was left of my consciousness. Body racking sobs erupted from me, giving me something to feel other than anger. How could this happen to me? To him? To us!!!

He didn’t even know I was pregnant.

But would it have made a difference? He still would have gone out into the war zone and died regardless of my current state. That suicide bomber didn’t single him out of all the armed men guarding the building. But that didn’t stop the crushing need for him to at least have known. I would give anything to hear his excited voice, the way he would laugh and imagine the dimples that would appear in his cheeks as he shared in my joy. It would have at least been nice to know how he would have felt. If he would have quit the air force with me to raise our baby.

I guess I will never know.

The shrill ring of the phone woke me from my depression on the kitchen tiles. I checked the ID and knew this conversation wouldn’t be a good one for my state of mind. I groaned as I wiped my cheeks of the tears and leant back against the sleek white cupboards on my kitchen island for support.

“Hello?” I rasped into the receiver, hoping they would understand my grief. He was their son after all.

“Honey are you okay?” I heard his mum, Natalie sniff on the other end. I could hear her husband, Richard trying his hardest to console his wife through her grief. I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy that she had someone and I was all on my own to deal with this. My dad lived on the other side of the world doing some research and my mother died when I was ten of cancer.

“No. I’m not even close to being okay, how are you holding up?”

“Better than you are honey. We’re going to come and stay with you for a while, make sure we get through this together okay?” She sounded like she was keeping it together for me and I didn’t want her to feel like she wasn’t allowed to share in my grief. In her own grief.

“Only if that doesn’t mess with your schedule or work.”

“Honey, I think work is that last thing one all our minds at the moment.”

“Okay, but I need to tell you something when you guys get here.” And with that we hung up with a promise that I would see them soon. As much as this was good news to me that I was pregnant, I wondered how his parents would feel. If they would be happy that we still had one last piece of him left? Maybe they would be able to tell me since I had no idea how to feel now he was dead. I’d never think about getting rid of the baby. That was against everything I stand for.

I stood up and pushed away from the granite counter top, rushing into my bathroom for a soak in the tub. For some insane reason I thought that it would give me some peace of mind. But everything around me reminded me of him. Of Aaron. Of the man that I fell in love with after he took a bullet for me in the middle of a warzone, using his body to shield my injured one as I had laid down and prepared to die for my country. I was twenty-two and felt invincible to the world, but I was no superman when it came to war. If it wasn’t for Aaron I would be dead. From then we stuck together. He taught me everything he knew in hand to hand combat and how to avoid getting shot, and after a year our relationship progressed. We moved in together, got deployed together and returned home together. Always.

But this time was different. He was asked to stay for three more days to complete a mission while I was sent back early as it was another squadron’s mission and I had no place interfering. I just wished that Aaron wasn’t the one they picked. That his skills behind a sharpshooter weren’t unparalleled. That he was home with me when that building exploded. That we were together as a family.