I’m Keeping You

Jason gave me a subdued smile. It said what he wouldn’t: I keep telling you it’ll all be okay because I know that’s what you want to hear, but I’m not convinced.

I smiled back. He was looking out for me. That’s what Jason did, he cared, with a heart that was as big as an ocean.

But our smiles hadn’t used to say it’ll be alright or I’m sorry—we used to smile because we were happy together.

The seatbelt light was on. I looked down. He’d buckled mine back up while I’d been out of it. I looked out the window. The plane was banking around, flying in over the Upper Bay of the Hudson. I leaned over to look down at the city that had been my home for a large part of my miserable life. I had so many bad memories, memories of me being crazy and stupid, but then I saw the Brooklyn Bridge, and behind it, Manhattan Bridge, as the river’s path split. I’d met Jason on Manhattan Bridge, on a night I’d cracked up entirely and decided I’d had enough. Jason had found me there and saved me from myself.

“Brooklyn, Manhattan Bridge, and DUMBO,” he said in a low husky voice.

I glanced back at him. He’d remembered the moment I’d met him too. He’d taken me to his apartment in DUMBO that night; we hadn’t left each other since. He pressed a quick kiss on my lips, then we both leaned over and looked down, watching the plane come around, following the Hudson, rather than the East river.

I took a breath, a part of me was terrified about coming back and facing Declan, and yet, with my distorted bipolar brain, another part of me experienced a sudden fizz of excitement. New York.

CHAPTER THREE

Jason

I walked out of JFK airport, pulling our suitcase on its wheels and gripping Rach’s hand like I was hanging on to her as luggage too. But I felt protective. This trip was scary. Saint’s life was hanging on a line, and the other end of it was wrapped around Mr. Rees’s finger, and he kept jerking it, messing us around.

I’d worked for him for a year, and thought him an asshole, but then I’d met the side of him Rach knew, when he’d tried to drag her into his car with three other guys, like it was okay to snatch a woman when she didn’t want to go. No way did I want him to take Saint. Saint was my son and he might have Mr. Rees’s DNA, but that was the only tie he should ever have to that asshole.

We were booked on the SuperShuttle to get out to the hotel. There was a van waiting. I handed over our tickets and stashed our luggage in the back while Rachel waited on the sidewalk. Then we got in. I made sure she was by the window so she didn’t have to cope with any strangers too close.

We sat in silence as the van filled up, and stayed silent as it drove through the city. New York. The Big Apple. Rachel looked at the streets as the van dropped people off at the Manhattan hotels. She had more history with New York than I did. I’d never really settled here, my roots and soul had always been back in Oregon. But Rachel had tamed this place and played it for the years she’d lived here. She’d taken a massive bite out of the apple. I’d left it to go rotten. It had never tasted good to me.

Our hotel was in Brooklyn, near the area where I used to live, DUMBO, Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. The hotel was a narrow, sky-scraping building. It stood out, tall amongst the lower-story buildings surrounding it. We unloaded our stuff and walked into the place.

I guess its whole theme was tall and narrow; the welcome desk area was the same.

I checked us in as Rach stood near me, her arms crossed defensively in front of her chest and her hands clasping either elbow.

The last time I’d checked us into a hotel it had been in Las Vegas, when we’d gotten married.

We were up on the fifteenth floor. Rach pressed the button for the elevator, then stood staring at the numbers above the elevator doors. The doors opened. I lifted a hand encouraging her to go in first. I followed, with the suitcase.

She leaned her shoulders against the wall, so I stood next to her, slid a hand around her and gave her ass a pat to make her smile. She did smile—slightly.

Everything was ruined. She never gave me bright smiles anymore, and it was all Mr. Rees’s fault. She’d been fine until he’d started messing us around over Saint. First off, before all of this, he wouldn’t do the DNA test and I’d needed him to do it so I could start the adoption process. That was about the time she’d walked into the river with Saint. So then I’d come to New York, alone, and forced him into doing the fucking DNA test. Only since then he’d stopped not wanting Saint and started sharpening fucking knives to chuck at us.

Our room was alright, nothing special. It had a desk in front of a mirror outside the en suite, a chest of drawers, a king-sized bed with a nightstand either side and a long window which looked out across the city. Rach walked over to the window as I lifted the suitcase up on to a stool.

“This reminds me of your apartment.” She turned back and looked at me.

“Yeah.” It did a little. I’d had a floor-length window like that; it had looked out over DUMBO.

She looked back out.

I walked up behind her, slid my hands over her belly and kissed her neck. “What do you want to do, go out?”

Her head fell back on to my shoulder. “I don’t know.”

I missed my Rachel, the vibrant, half-crazy girl I’d met. She was smothered by her meds. But she’d been vulnerable then too, and lonely, and easily hurt behind all her bravado. She had crashed down into sad moods as fast as she’d gotten happy and dragged me into doing something I’d have avoided like hell if it hadn’t been for her.

I’d been reading up on bipolar on the internet, though, and she might need to be on her strong meds right now, but people didn’t have to stay on heavy doses forever, they reduced them. She’d get back to herself one day. Soon, I hoped. “Then let’s walk down to the Brooklyn Bridge Park?”

She turned around and pressed her face into my neck. Her lips touched my skin when she said, “I’d like that.”

“I thought you might.” It was one of our old haunts. We had memories there.

I pressed her back against the window and kissed her properly. Her arms lifted up on to my shoulders and rested there as her tongue wove about mine slowly. My hands slid to grip her butt and I pulled her hips against mine.

Many things had gone wrong in our marriage in the last few months, but the one thing we’d recently managed to fix was the sex. We’d been to a party a week ago, for Halloween, and gone outside in the dark. But then she’d told me about this threat from Mr. Rees.

I broke away from her. “Come on, let’s go to the park.”

I got the first proper smile I’d had out of her all day. Those smiles were way too rare.

We walked through Brooklyn holding hands. Then headed into the park and looked up at the massive bridge, with Manhattan Bridge as its shadow. I let go of her hand and slung my arm around her shoulders.

The Brooklyn Bridge was a giant. It dwarfed us. I’d forgotten how dominating the New York skyline was. It put you in your place, made you realize how much of a nothing you were in the world. That’s how I’d always felt in New York.

We walked along the path by the river.

This park was so familiar and yet we’d been different people when we’d been here last. She’d poured out her sordid past to me here, the night I’d found out about Saint. But that had been in the dark. We’d generally come here in the dark after I’d picked her up from work, when all the lights were reflected on the water, swaying with the rock of the waves. It was a different place in the daylight and there were more people here, tourists as well as locals.

When we were far enough away from the main tourist area, I stopped and held the railing, looking down at the water as it washed up against the bank.

Rach gripped the rail too.

I looked at her.

Her gaze stretched to the far bank. “When will we go and see Declan?”

“Monday, so we can have tomorrow to do normal stuff before we face him.”

She turned around and looked at me. “What will you say?”

“I have no idea. It depends on what he says… and what he’s like.”

“An asshole.” A smile parted her lips as she quoted back what I’d called him for the year he was my boss.

I chucked her under the chin. “That I can guarantee. He’s always that. Shall we walk up to Manhattan Bridge?” Where I’d found her, alone, destitute, and desperate. “Then I thought we could go and eat at Joe’s, where you used to work.”

She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “Thanks, I’d like that.”

It was nearly a year since I’d found her in a tee and jeans, she’d had nothing else on but her sneakers, on a freezing night in New York.

A subway train passed as we reached the DUMBO end of the Manhattan Bridge’s path. It rattled along on the rails, making a racket. I’d used to deaden the sound with the music in my earphones when I’d jogged along here. We didn’t walk out very far on to the bridge, but we walked along the path until we saw where she’d been the night I met her. She caught hold my fingers and turned away from it. “Can we walk back past where you used to live? Some of those days were my happiest.”

Her words cut, but she hadn’t meant them to cut—it’s just—I wished she was happy now. She should be happy now. I needed to make her happy again.

Joe, the restaurant owner, her old boss, made a fuss of her when we went in there. Rach was really pretty and one of those girls that when you met her you didn’t forget her; so even though she’d only worked there for a few weeks, Joe and the others remembered her. But the thing was, that when we’d lived here, what had made her memorable had been the light of joy and mischief that had shone out of her. That light had gotten snuffed out by her meds.

Sitting in the restaurant, remembering how she used to be, made me miss that girl more than ever. But then, maybe this was who she was really—the person who wasn’t sick—and I had to just suck it up and get used to it.

She’d have to get used to it too, though, and she wasn’t coping so well with it either. She was scared I’d stop loving her now that she was different.

I’d spent the last seven days proving to her just how much in love with her I still was. I still was… But it was painful loving her now, not an exciting rush. My heart hurt and my head was a mess—and I hoped when everything was fixed with Mr. Rees it would all calm down, and she and I, we could just be us again.

When we got back to the room, Rach dropped her purse on the bed, then bent over and took out her cell. “I’m gonna call Mom and speak to Saint.”

“It’s too late.”

She looked at the clock by the bed. It showed eleven-thirty in red digits.

Her expression crumbled in distress.

Ah shit. Now she’d kick herself that she hadn’t called earlier. She’d be telling herself she was a bad mom.

Tears flooded her eyes, making the unusual soft mossy green sharpen and sparkle in the electric light. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Because I’d thought about it and decided it was best to let her settle in here and do normal stuff for an afternoon and we hadn’t eaten dinner alone since Saint had been born.

I caught hold of her hands before they could lift and clasp her hair. I hated that pose. She’d been in that pose for all the days she’d been in the hospital, when they’d put her on the shitty meds she was taking now. “Hey. It’s okay not to speak to him for a day. We’ll call first thing in the morning.”

“But why didn’t I think to call earlier?”

“Because you’ve got a ton of stuff going on in your head. You were thinking about facing Declan and coming back to New York.”

“But I should think of Saint first. Why don’t I think of him first?”

“Because you’re on a load of meds…” and your bipolar brain just doesn’t work like that, sweetheart.

Rach had always been scared she’d turn out like her mom, who’d been so crap at motherhood Rach had run away at fifteen, and since Rach had walked into the river she didn’t trust herself at all. She challenged everything she thought, and why she thought it, or more frequently didn’t think it. She was trying to make her brain work like normal. But Rach wasn’t normal, and that was one of the reasons I’d fallen for her.

She hadn’t tried to drown Saint anyway, she’d been thinking of him and trying to teach him to swim. She’d walked into the water with him to swim with him. Fully clothed, yeah. But she’d just lost her hold on reality in a moment of distorted euphoria. That happened with bipolar. It wasn’t because she was a bad mom.

Rach started to cry. I pulled her into a hug and stroked a hand over her hair. “He’s okay.”

“Why didn’t you remind me? You aren’t on meds!” She pushed me away and smacked my shoulder.

“Because he’s with Mom and Dad. He’s fine.”

Her eyes accused me of not loving Saint enough.

She challenged me as much as herself. She challenged everything lately. She’d been bruised inside by her error. But she was really sick and the meds they’d given her to make her better were making her judgments even more distorted. So I was letting her get away with insecurity and accusations against me, but I wouldn’t lie, they cut.

She broke away from me, turned, moved her purse over on to a shelf beside the bed, then collected her stuff from the suitcase and disappeared into the bathroom. Her movements had been hurried and twitchy with anger. When she came back in she was wearing a t-shirt only and she’d wiped off her make-up, ready to get into bed.

I went into the bathroom and got ready too. I washed my face and stared at myself in the mirror. It had been a long year. My life had turned around completely.

When I went back into the bedroom, I stripped off my jeans and my tee, but left my boxers on. I switched off the main light, then got into bed, and switched off the lamp on the nightstand. “Do I get a cuddle?” I said into the darkness.

“Yeah.”

I lifted my arm and she shuffled over and leaned on my shoulder. But I figured it wasn’t a night for sex. I wasn’t getting that vibe from her.

CHAPTER FOUR

Rachel

Sunlight poured through the transparent curtains. Jason was sitting on the bed, looking at me, and the TV was on. “What?” I breathed from a croaky throat.

“It’s eleven-thirty; you’ve had twelve hours’ sleep.”

He knew what that meant. It meant my mood had dropped. I was morose and tired when my mood was low—but it didn’t have to mean the meds were wearing off, the meds made me sleepy anyway.

“Do you want to call Saint, then go for a run?” He also knew that running was a good trigger for helping me lift my mood.

I sat up. “I’d like to call Mom and speak to Saint.” Jason was fully clothed in running gear, he looked like he’d been up for ages waiting for me to wake up. He got up and walked over to pick my cell up from the nightstand, then threw it on to the bed next to me.

My heart raced as I looked up Mom and Dad’s number. An image of Saint hovered in my head, the one of him laughing for the first time last week. I touched the call icon for their home number. It rang about five times as my heart pounded out the seconds.

“Hello. This is Mrs. Macinlay.”

“Hi, Mom.”

“Rachel. How are you?”

“We’re okay. We walked around where Jason used to live last night. Is Saint okay?”

“Yes, dear, he’s fine.”

“Did he sleep okay?”

“Yes, all through the night. We’ve put him in our room as he’s used to sleeping in with you and Jason.”

“Thanks…” I sighed the word out in relief. Saint was okay. Yet… What if he didn’t miss me because I was such a crappy mom? That thought made me want him not to be okay, but that made me feel more of a shitty mom. “Could you put the phone to his ear?”

“He’s with Grampy, wait a moment, I’ll take the phone to them.” The line was silent for a while then she said, “Here you are.”

I heard breathing. “Saint, it’s Mommy. Hello, sweetheart.” There was a slight catch in his breath, that said he knew my voice.

Jason came over to the bed and bent down near my cell. “It’s Daddy too.”

“I miss you. I love you,” I whispered into the cell.

“We miss you and we love you,” Jason said loudly, before he straightened up.

Why did I keep judging Jason badly? He was here to fight for Saint. He wanted to adopt Saint. Of course he loved him too. If I kept doubting him, I was going to push him away. I had to stop my head from doubting him.

His mom came back on. “Saint was smiling and listening like he was trying to work out where you were in the room.”

“Give him lots of cuddles and kisses from us. I’ll call again tonight.”

“Okay, call as often as you want, and we’re going to cuddle him all day long.” Jason’s mom had become my mom too. She was really patient with my weirdness and paranoia.

“Thank you. Bye.”

“Goodbye, Rachel, give our love to Jason.” The call went dead.

I looked up at him. “She sends you their love. Saint smiled.”

Jason smiled at me, with his mouth shut. I wanted him to give me a big full-on broad smile. I wanted to smile like that too—I wanted my meds to wear off so that I could smile like that again.

“I’ll get up and go running with you.” I threw the comforter back. I had to walk past him because the room wasn’t very wide. He smacked my ass.

“Good girl.”

I glanced at him over my shoulder. The smile pulling at my lips had a warmth that came from my belly. Maybe my meds had started wearing off.

I turned around and looked at him. “I’m sorry I shouted at you last night.”

“It’s okay, you’re forgiven.” He shrugged it off.

We ran down to Prospect Park, one of the places we used to run when I’d lived with him here. I hadn’t run with him for weeks and it meant he had to go a lot slower, but Jason had never cared about that, he’d always made it clear he liked running with me.

Just by living with him, I held him back—but he kept saying he didn’t care.

Blood pulsed in my arteries and my muscles flooded with energy, as the sounds of the city absorbed and consumed me while we ran: cars, cabs, people. Jason had his earphones in, but I hadn’t put any music on, I was just running to the heartbeat of New York.

When we got into the park, the noisy sounds of the city drifted into the distance and the closer noise became the birds amidst the jewel-like colors of the leaves on the trees that had changed for the fall, and there were kids and some guys playing a game of baseball. We ran a circuit around the park, then ran back to the hotel, I was breathing hard when we arrived and I doubled over in the elevator trying to get my breath back, but it was a good sort of breathless.

Jason had pulled out his earphones and they dangled from his neck, still playing music.

“What are you listening to?”

He gave me a smile that was a little wider than any other smile I’d had from him today. “The compilation you gave me last Christmas.”

I straightened up as a sound of humor slipped out of my throat. I smiled at him with parted lips. I loved him so much, it gripped in my belly as well as my chest and sent a tingle through my nerves into my muscles, that were warm from running.

When we reached our room and shut the door behind us it was like we shut out the world.

He’d said on Halloween we’d become us again because we’d had risky sex in the garden.

Now I felt like we’d become us again.

He took his cell out of his pocket and put it on the nightstand, then stripped off his sweaty top and tee. He was good to look at, his body did stuff to my belly too, and what it did to my belly was as powerful as what his love did to my heart, but this feeling didn’t touch my heart. I smiled even wider at him when he turned around and flashed his sinewy, sculpted abdomen at me.

“What?” he asked of my smile.

“Nothing. Are you gonna have a shower?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I get in with you?”

“Yeah.” He sent a smile, like mine, right back at me.

I pulled off my top as he stripped off his jogging pants and walked into the bathroom naked. I heard the shower turn on as I undid my bra. I took my panties off, then headed for the bathroom.

He’d pulled the shower curtain halfway across the bath, so I could still get in around it. He was standing under the stream of water, with his back to me, letting the water run over his short hair. His hand lifted and brushed across his head. I stepped over the side of the bath and moved forward. My hands settled on his lean hips, then slid down, my thumbs following the curve of his tight butt.

He turned and then his hand was at the back of my head and his lips came down on to mine. I opened my mouth to press my tongue into his, but he beat me to it, his tongue passing through my lips. I sucked it slightly then bit it gently. A growl left his throat, then his hands were at the back of my thighs, just below my bottom. My arms wrapped around his neck so he could lift me.

He pressed me against the tiles as he slid into me, filling me up with a hard, slow pressure.

I kissed his temple and he bit my neck when he withdrew and pressed back in.

His palms held under my thighs, his fingertips pressing into my muscle.

One of my hands clasped the back of his neck, while the other grasped at his shoulder. “Jason,” I said into his ear. All the sex we’d been having in the last week made me feel as though we were clinging to sex, trying to reclaim what had been normal between us. If we had nothing else right between us—we had gotten the sex back to being right.

He shoved into me, over and over, working hard. Working like he loved sex with me, not just loved me.

My orgasm exploded in a swell of sensation, and I cried out. Jason growled and bit my shoulder. I laughed. He just thrust into me harder, glancing down to watch, then he looked back up, right into my eyes.

From the moment I’d met him, I’d had a weird connection to him—or maybe I’d just fancied the hell out of him. But I’d always known we were meant to be together.

My butt and my back bumped against the tiles as the water fell on our sides. I laughed—but it was strange—fake. It came from my throat not my belly.

He kissed my lips. My hand slid up and cradled the back of his head, holding his mouth to mine so we kept kissing as he pressed hard into me over and over until I came again. Then he came with a deep, long sigh that released into my mouth.

He smiled at me, with his lips closed. But, this smile, softened the look of his eyes too and his gaze said, I love you. He was the fixer, he was working hard to fix us, and he was doing it the only way he probably knew how, with sex. I loved him more for trying to heal what had broken in me. He could have chosen to walk away.

He could still choose to walk away. Most guys would.

He withdrew from me, then lowered my legs. “Shall we go to Times Square after we’ve showered?”

“Yeah. I’d like that.” It was where he’d proposed to me, after Christmas, last year. In a few weeks we’d have been married a year.

We washed each other’s hair, ran soapy hands over each other’s bodies, then washed ourselves off under the stream of water, switched it off and stepped out.

While Jason was drying himself with one towel, I wrapped mine around me and picked up my cell.

“Hey, don’t tell me you’re going to call Mom because you didn’t think about Saint while we were having sex?”

A blush flooded my skin. Because that was why.

“He’s okay, and it’s okay not to think about him for half an hour, it doesn’t make you a bad mom.”

But the fear that I was, was part of the one-ton weight pushing me down, and the iron chains holding me there.

I pressed the call icon to ring Mom and Dad.

I didn’t sleep so well, I was drifting in and out of dreams again tonight. Declan was in them, and Jason, and we were in New York with Saint.