23. Just a Dream

23

JUST A DREAM

MAZEN

Flying into Tampa, I offer Sophia some space on the plane. It's for the best, seeing how I want to simultaneously rip the truth from her lungs, then fill them with my cum as a punishment.

Goddamn it. I can't even think straight.

The usually crowded aircraft is empty of my other bandmates, managers, and randoms from the label. The silence from their absence is deafening, even with the incessant noise thundering in my skull. It's just the plane's captain, flight attendant, me, Sophia, and her lie—or omission, as Oliver put it—that fills the cabin today.

I glance over on reflex a couple of times, eyeing her from across the slender walkway. She's sitting in the same position she sat in a couple of hours ago when we boarded, her thin fingers tense in her lap, tapping aimlessly to a steady beat only she can hear. I can't help but wonder if it's one of our songs that fills her head. A melody that I wrote, my voice plaguing her head and thoughts, like hers is mine. I can't help but wonder a lot of fucking things right now.

How much did my son weigh?

What time was he born?

Does he have a headstone or one of those flat plaques?

Why doesn't she visit him?

How could she not visit him regularly?

The most astonishing question lingering in the forefront of my mind is the deep need to know if Sophia remembered me a lot sooner than she's letting on.

Words dangle on the tip of my tongue, each syllable primed, ready to let loose. How did she not recognize me? The father of her child. And if she did, if she knew the truth and hid it … what was her motive?

A thousand scenarios play on a big screen in my mind. There's nothing else to do, to focus on, as we glide through the air. They're on a constant loop. I sit and stew and think and mourn until the silence is too much.

My insides twist from the battle waging internally. Though I fight like hell. One leg is planted firmly on each side of the war, pulling me in both directions. It's a battle as old as time. Love versus hate. Forgive and forget. Be the bigger person or take the low road and build a fortress so high that no other woman will ever have the strength to knock it down again. In a battle cry of epic proportions, my restraint starts to crumble.

I hate how much control she has over me.

I want to scoop her into my arms and breathe in her essence. Smelling the citrus scent that is only her. It's my favorite smell. I could bottle it up and use it as aftershave, and I'd still long to smell her. I want to take her body—petite but curvy in all the places that make my dick hard—and bend her over every surface of this aircraft. Claiming her. Marking her so deeply that she feels it in her marrow. I want her to scream my name at thirty-five thousand feet and then use her own tattoo gun on her flesh and carve my name, to scar her heart like she's done mine.

What I need is to not want her. My body and heart protest, each picketing on their own side. I need sleep. I need to regain some damn sanity. I'm pushing far past delirious at this point.

Sighing into the exhaustion that's whirling in my mind, I cup the back of my neck. Sleep feels like a distant memory at this point. I shift in my seat, sagging into the plush material. My index finger runs alongside my jellyfish tattoo, tracing each line. It's a distraction. One that almost works to quiet my thoughts long enough for my heavy lids to close.

Sophia's pained voice cuts through the silence, causing my lids to spring open.

"Please." Her voice is as weary as a newborn fawn finding its footing. A faint exhale, followed by a small whimper, floats through the air around us before she mumbles, "Don't."

I'm up and out of my seat. Another whimper escapes her mouth, and I'm called to her on instinct, like a beacon in the night, a moth to a flame. There's a part—a large part—of me that is seething, submerged in anger and grief, but then there's this other part. The part that has me standing motionless in the middle of the walkway, rocking back on my heels in the center of the aisle, staring at her with a mixture of concern and curiosity.

What's she dreaming about?

"You can't. Please. He's not yours to take!" Sophia sobs.

Her sweet whimpers morph into blatant agitation. Her lids are still closed, and I watch her intently, my eyes peeled with curiosity of what's haunting her dreams. My heart pounds when I get closer, sliding into the vacant seat beside her. There's a thin sheen of sweat on her forehead. Tiny wisps of red hair at the base of her neck are wet from whatever horror she's facing in her dream.

Suddenly, my throat feels dry. I'm on edge. What do I do? Think, Mazen. I'm not good under pressure. I never have been.

The temper that filled my chest dissipates when she lets out a full-blown gasp. "He's mine," she cries, eyes still closed.

I watch in stunned silence, scared to move. Scared to breathe.

I'm such an asshole.

I might have been robbed of meeting my son—hell, even knowing about his existence—but Sophia was there. Her cries, the guttural pleas she shouts into the air, are the evidence that he had a parent who loved him as deeply as one can. As much as I wish I were there when she was pregnant, when Roman was born and laid to rest, I don't know if I would have survived it. Losing my sister was one thing. Losing a child … I know I don't have what it takes to survive that kind of pain.

This gaping void of knowing I never got the chance to see him, hold him, kiss his sweet little forehead doesn't hold a candle to the pain radiating from Sophia as she quakes in her seat. My usual strong-as-steel woman crumbles. She's resilient, and I'm a sorry piece of shit for blowing up on her like I did. The confirmation slaps me across the face with each tear that falls.

She carried him. Then buried him. That burden, that responsibility, rested solely on her shoulders, and it's enough to clog my throat with a thousand apologies for how I acted last night and this morning .

An ache as deep as the ocean emits from her body, tears cascading freely down her cheeks. That's my breaking point.

Fuck.

I can't stomach watching her endure this nightmare any longer. I'll suck up my own grief. I'll swallow it down like a fistful of tacks if only I never have to see her like this again.

Raising my hand, I go to gently nudge her shoulder, to wake her from whatever hell she's living in, only to be dragged down with her as her body trembles once then twice before it thrashes in the seat. Her mind begging her to wake up.

"Wake up, Rosella." When she doesn't budge, I grip both of her shoulders, my fingers digging into them. "Sophia, wake up," I demand, my voice hard as the iron of my eyes boring a hole into her head, begging her to come to.

Her voice breaks, along with my heart. "Roman."

One word. One name. His name. That's all it takes for any residual anger and pain I harbored to disintegrate. Only a heavy bed of concern is left in my heaving chest.

"Please, wake up."

"Mommy loves you. I'll see you again soon. I promise." Desolation like I've never heard booms in her plea.

Oliver and Cannon never mentioned anything about her talking in her sleep.

Shit. Did she take an Ambien before we boarded? Or is the stress of everything the cause of her sleep talking?

The internal throttle in my chest goes haywire. I shake her. Hard, until her jade eyes spring open, wide with worry. They dart past my shoulder, back to my bunched brows, then toward the window in a quick swoop. When they land back on me, they're wet, reminding me of moss that's been weighed down by the morning dew .

There's no hesitation when I scoop her into my arms and onto my lap. My hand is large enough that it cups the back of her neck and half of her head. I hold her fiery-red hair in place as I nestle her into the crook of my neck.

"Shh. I've got you."

The words it was just a dream taste like acid as they form on my tongue. The hint of metal pools in my mouth when I bite the inside of my cheek, forcing them down. It wasn't just a dream. It was a memory as vivid and strong as the sun's rays that dance across the clouds we're flying over.

I clutch her to me, our ragged breaths syncing. The pain of losing our son is like a tether, a stain on our souls. Except I've only lost his memory. She lost his touch.

There's nothing stronger, more impenetrable than tattoo ink seeped into skin. That's no longer my truth. The bond we share, regardless of how we both feel about it, is forever. Even if our little foursome fades, and we go our separate ways romantically, she will never be able to fully rid herself of me. Sophia will never have to endure this kind of deep-seated pain alone again.

Through her veil of hair, I take a shaky breath. "Do you want to tell me what happened?" There's a childlike hesitancy to my voice, like I'm tiptoeing into the unknown. And I am.

Why would she feel comfortable enough to confide in me about what is most likely the worst part of her life? I made her feel like shit. Painted her out to be a liar and a fraud. I'm probably the last person she wants consoling her right now.

Oliver was made for situations like this. He's patient. Tenderhearted. A fixer. Even Cannon, who sports his unsociability like armor, is better equipped to soothe her than I am .

"He died." Her eyes close as she shakes her head. "This wasn't how you were supposed to find out about him."

"There are puzzle pieces still missing, Rosella. I'm sorry I wasn't patient enough to ask the proper way last night. I'm asking now. I want to know about him…" I choke on the thought of speaking his name out loud. "Roman. Our son. And I want to know why you didn't tell us you had a child in the first place."

"Not confirmed," she adds.

Trying not to allow her comment to rub me wrong, I take the mature road for once in my damn life. "I feel it in my chest, Rosella. I can't explain it. I'm sure I sound like I'm delusional. I just know. Please don't rob me of that instinct."

Nestling into me, she seems to find comfort in my arms, in my calm tone. A minute passes before a long exhale presses her chest into mine.

"I'm going to skip the money-laundering father bullshit because I know that's not the part you need to hear."

I nod, and she sits back in my lap, giving me the pleasure of staring into the depths of her eyes. I could get lost in their lush green, like fields of land, uncharted or unexplored.

"Caddell's guys were outside of my and Lacey's apartment door in Chicago when I was leaving to go to a lash appointment. I know. Stupid." She shakes her head. "When I opened the door, there were two of them in my face, shouting. One tried to grab my crossbody purse off my shoulder, and I slapped him in the face. He snapped. Pushed me against the wall, right into the corner of a fire extinguisher. Anyway, I struggled. Screamed. I tried to get the attention of anyone in our building." There's an unmistakable tinge of hopelessness in her voice when she mumbles, "No one came. "

You can't tell me no one heard her. Cowards.

"I was able to push myself off the wall and knee one in the groin. That's when the other shoved me. Are you a swimmer, Mazen?"

"What?"

"Have you ever gone swimming in a public pool and jumped off the highest diving board they had?"

"Sophia … my dad is the governor of Florida. I've never even seen a public pool unless it was that scene from The Sandlot. "

"Wendy Peffercorn." She smiles.

"The one and only."

"Anyway, that's what it felt like happened. Like I had dived off a diving board, except I was free-falling backward and landed at the bottom of a flight of stairs instead of in water."

A shock wave of fury slams into my chest, wedging my next breath in my throat. She must feel my body physically recoil because she cups both sides of my head in her hands.

"This is difficult to hear," she states. It's not a question, just the honest truth. "I'm sorry."

"Don't ever apologize to me again. I'm sorry, Rosella." Swatting her small hands from my face, I grab her cheeks in my grasp. "I am so sorry that happened to you. I promise you I'll find them, and when I do—"

"I don't want you to find them." A note of pleading casts over her face like a shadow on a sunny day.

"How could you not want retribution for what they stole from you?"

"I do want that. I want those sorry bastards to suffer. I want them to hurt ten times as bad as they hurt me. They left me there, lying in a puddle of my own blood. Just walked right over me like I was debris on the sidewalk. I just don't want you to be the one to serve it."

My thumb and pointer finger clamp over her trembling chin. "You can't ask that of me. They stole the only chance I had of meeting my son. They took him from you and left you to die, like human life means nothing to them. How can you expect me not to search, to scour the fucking planet for them?"

"Because hurting them, serving the justice that your heart demands, won't bring Roman back. It will only sully his memory." As her words flow, she seems to gather her strength, pulling it from a place deep within her. "I don't know if you're much on religion, and frankly, I'm not a saint, so this objectivity might be for nothing. But I know my … Roman is in heaven, waiting on me, and I won't do anything to jeopardize my chance of seeing him again. Acting reckless, indulging in doling out punishments might feel good for a moment. But what will it do in the long run?"

There's a bottomless peace that exudes from her as she lets out a long sigh of self-control. Sophia has had over ten years to come to terms with this, both her accident and his death. She's seasoned in tragedy. She's been hand-stitching her resolve, readying her heart for the day when she finally kneels on a cloud, arms stretched wide to hug him again.

I'm impressed as I look into her eyes, truly seeing her for the first time. The world tried its best to break her, to ruin the pure beating heart in her chest. I can tell that there are parts of her that will never ever be whole again. How could they be? Though she lost something that can never be given back, an unmistakable chunk of her heart is missing, and yet I know without a doubt that Sophia still won. I think she knows it too. The lithe body of the woman sitting on my lap isn't only a survivor. She's a fucking warrior .

Circling her in my arms, I lean forward, rubbing my nose along the tip of hers. There's something about her unwavering strength that calls out to the weakness that lives deep within me. The dark part that wants nothing more than illicit revenge is being called to like a ship in the night by the bright glow of a lighthouse that she's guarding.

Strong emotions fuel most of my songs. My pain bleeding onto paper has woven more lyrics than I can count. Now is no different. Not with my muse sitting in my lap, stirring feelings that pierce my soul.

Your light pulls me from the dark

Each ray piercing the steel of my heart

I'm powerless on my own

Floating forever into the unknown

The abyss of my self-made despair

I'm an anchor, tethered beyond repair

Guide me into your saving light

Cast your net

Lure me in

Lock me in your lighthouse of sin

I want so badly to reach into my pocket to jot down the lyrics flowing from my mind on my phone. Refusing to move her off my lap, even to type the words playing on repeat in my mind on a text thread, I divert my attention. Choosing to focus on my Rosella, my beacon of light in this gloomy fucking world, I offer her the one thing I can tell she's as desperate for as I am for her shining light.

My word.

"I won't search for them. You have my word. If we ever cross paths though, that's a big enough sign of fate for me. Before I end them for their role in this shit, they'll take me to Caddell."

"If fate is that courteous, then you have my word that I'll watch you burn them to the ground."