A Storm Is Brewing

Perfect?

As a teenager, it was hard to fathom that I would ever be a part of something like tonight. We'd been here many times before, sat around the kitchen table in Amanda's house, arguing over the real rules of whatever game we were playing. Tonight was different, though. Tonight was the first night that we had been here since we'd become parents and there was something about having our little boy sleeping soundly beside us that made it feel more complete than it ever had.

I often wondered if my parents wished they'd tried harder, if they wished they'd held more family nights, or even held a conversation that didn't result in mum throwing a loop over the mere mention of a female name associated with me.

Watching him sleep, that little tiny chest rising and falling, and seeing how content he was caused something deeper than happiness within me. It was almost like someone had taken every ounce of protectiveness from my body and used it to build a guard around him.

Leah had developed it first, perhaps unhealthily. She had vowed to protect him from things that we couldn't even guarantee would happen. Then, somewhere along the line, the madness of her claims began to make sense to me. Here I was, deep in thought at family night, thinking of the things I would say to him should he ever need to tell me something that would be difficult for him.

Maybe feeling this for myself was what made me understand Rhys. He wanted to protect Liv from the possibility that one day I'd forget her, and he wanted to do that because he knew how I'd felt when members of my family slowly began to forget me. Leah didn't have that same experience, that had become evident to me pretty early on. Her family supported her in every decision, sometimes to her detriment. They would pick up the pieces of the sillier decisions she made, and be there to celebrate the more positive ones.

It didn't mean she was less adequate to understand than me, I just felt it gave me that edge in understand Rhys, even if I could tell that Leah was more than a little done with him right now. Maybe that would be the silliest decision I would make.

"Soph?"
"Hm?" I widened my eyes, startled by the sudden hand on my leg.
"Your go. You okay?"
"Yeah, sorry. Just admiring."

Amanda chuckled, her eyes glancing over to where mine had been before I was rudely interrupted.

"Who could blame you? He's just perfection."
"He is." Leah smiled.

I wondered how many members of my family had cooed over my sleeping frame as a baby and called me that. Perfection. It was so easy with a baby, so easy to think that they could be the next prime minister, or someone who came up with a cure for cancer. So easy to think that they would always follow the path you hoped they would, whatever that path was. I wondered if my family looked at babies differently now. Perhaps, I had been the example that not all perfect babies end up perfect adults.

"Soph?"
"Sorry. I'll be back in a second."

I wasn't quite sure what had gotten into me, I just knew that I needed to not be in that setting for a few minutes. It wasn't there fault, they hadn't done anything to make my mind reflect on things that should've been buried years ago, but I couldn't help but think maybe I'd needed this to surface for a while now.

I stepped outside the front doors of the house, trying to inhale as much of the fresh air as I could in the hope it would force my body back to normality. Nothing seemed to be working, my breathing still shaky and my lungs feeling like they couldn't release the excessive air I'd tried to heap into them.

"I've got you. Breathe. I've got you."

That sound. The mixture of that comforting voice and the arms that wrapped around my waist loosely enough to not make me feel more restrained but tightly enough to reinforce that she had me were the only things that could communicate to my brain that it was the only thing stopping me from breathing normally.