One Christmas Knight

or how. He only knew it affected him deeply-more profoundly than any kiss ever in his life before.

It ended when the contraction did, but for both of them the shock of it seemed to linger, so that their first words were whispered across an airless space of only inches.

“What did you do that for?”

“You were hyperventilating.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No-that’s okay.”

“I didn’t mean-”

“I know.”

He felt her grip on his forearms ease; until then he hadn’t noticed how her fingers were digging into his muscles. She sat back, widening the space between them. He watched her draw in a breath, long and deep, then slowly let it out, at the same time lifting both hands to sweep and hold the hair back from her face. He noticed that she still looked horribly pale-almost greenish. The residual effects of the carbon-dioxide imbalance, he was sure.

He smiled at her and lightly touched her cheek. “You gotta watch that, you know? Next time, you keep your eyes on me, you hear? Breathe with me. That’s assumin’ I’m not hyperventilating.”

She didn’t smile back; her eyes had a glazed, distant look. But as he watched, he saw them darken and focus on his face, and she nodded gravely. “I will. I’ll try. You have to help me, Jimmy Joe.” He nodded, and she took his hand and held it in both of hers. “We didn’t have much time to practice this, did we? We barely had time to get to know each other.”

“We still got time,” he said, his voice husky. But she shook her head.

“I didn’t tell you-I had two contractions while you were out there. Two. Jimmy Joe. Hard ones. It seems like there’s hardly any time between them. I just feel like one big raw nerve.” She said the last words with a kind of breathy desperation, then paused as for a moment or two she struggled to regain control. She cleared her throat and continued in a low voice, clinging to his hand. “So, I guess it’s getting serious. Isn’t it?”

There had been a couple of other times in his life when he’d wished and prayed for something to be different from the way it was, and he’d never wished or prayed any harder than he was doing right now. But he knew from past experience that in the end all a person could do was accept what was. So he nodded and said, “Yeah, it is.”

And now she did smile, a little crookedly, with her head tilted to one side. “So, it’s true? You’ve never done this before, either?”

He ducked his head and made a rueful clicking sound with his tongue. “It’s the truth. Missed the big event completely.” Lifting his eyes back to hers, he forced himself to smile. “So I guess I’m as much a novice as you are.”

“I kinda doubt that,” she said dryly. Then after a moment, “Jimmy Joe? A while ago you said-” she frowned, and his heart began to beat faster “-both times. What did you mean? You told me about your son-J.J., right? So, what…”

Impulsively he lifted his hand, the one she was holding, and added his free hand, enfolding both of hers in the process. Closing his eyes, he pressed them, his and her hands together, against his lips. His throat had locked up tight, but she waited in patient silence, not rushing him but not letting him off the hook, either. And presently he swallowed past the pain and began to push words against their tightly clasped fingers. Eventually they came more easily, and to make room for them he let their hands fall to the space between his knees-though he didn’t let go even then, and neither did she.

“J.J. was my second baby,” he said. “My first was a little girl. Patti-my wife-was pretty heavy into drugs and alcohol then. She’d promised me she’d quit, you know, but she lied about it, and I was gone so much, what with tryin’ to get my business goin’-my daddy had just passed away not long before, and I was out there on my own for the first time… Ah, hell.” He stopped, shaking his head. He’d made the same excuses for himself so many times. “The fact is,” he said, exhaling in a rush of guilt, “I didn’t keep as close a watch on her as I should have. She had the baby early…way too early.” He heard Mirabella’s soft sound of distress-he’d been waiting for it-and pushed past it before she could say anything.

“My little girl was born so tiny and sick, I reckon she never had a chance. I was out on the road. When I got there, they had her on life support-just this tiny little scrap of life, all hooked up to tubes and wires. Patti, she didn’t want to have anything to do with her, wouldn’t touch her, wouldn’t even come to see her. I guess I couldn’t blame her, really. They told me my little girl couldn’t live without those machines, wasn’t ever going to have a chance for a normal life. And they asked me if I wanted to hold her. So they unhooked her and wrapped her in a little pink blanket and put her in my hands. It seemed like she hardly weighed anything at all. They had this rocking chair…and I sat there and rocked her and sang to her until she left me…”

His words became whispers, then nothing. It hurt too much. His chest, his throat, his whole body, like an old wound torn open again, raw and fresh as if it had happened yesterday. But how could he tell her about that when she was in so much pain herself? He had no right!

His face was wet. He knew some of the moisture and warmth he felt was his own tears, but there was something else there, too. Something miraculous. Somehow there was the soft flow of breath, her breath, issuing from her lips as they gently brushed his cheeks, his eyelids, his brows. And her fingers, stroking through his hair.

“I’m sorry…” It was a whisper of sound-no more-breathed against his temple. “Another contraction… Please hold me.”

Nothing had ever seemed more natural to him than to do as she asked. He pushed his fingers through her hair and cradled her head in his palm and drew it gently down, tucking it into the hollow beneath his chin. And it felt to him as if he’d been keeping that place for her for all of his life; a special nest, just for her head. Her arms came around his neck, not frantically clutching, but holding fast with complete and unquestioning trust. His hands stroked down her sides and around to her back to find the place where the pain was sharpest and the tension lurked, and as he began a kneading, circling pressure, he felt the breath gush through her in a sigh of sheer relief.

They rode it out that way, facing each other across the space between the seats, arms wrapped around each other, legs comfortably sandwiched, breathing almost as one being… Entwined like lovers.

How natural it seemed. How sweet and easy.

Chapter 10

“I’m gonna start noddin’ off, here, pretty soon. Talk to me…talk to me.”

I-40-Texas

“What was her name?” Mirabella asked, her voice muffled and dreamy.

Still dazed, Jimmy Joe mumbled, “Pardon?” and she lifted her head from his chest and gazed at him with an earnest-but-unfocused smile.

“Your baby girl. Did you name her?”

“Oh.” He coughed and cleared his throat as he straightened. At the same time she took her arms from around his neck and let them slide through his hands, until that was the only part of them still touching. “Amy,” he said, without taking his eyes from their clasped hands. “We named her Amy.”

“Amy… That’s pretty.” She said it absently, then rose abruptly, breaking even that small physical contact.

He watched as she moved away from him, rubbing at her back, distracted and restless again, and was conscious of a sense of loss and regret. He had an idea it was the way she would be from now on, becoming more and more introspective and closed off from him as her time grew nearer and she concentrated all her energy, mind and body, on the job ahead of her. She would be focused on that, wrapped up in it, consumed by it, deaf and blind to everything else, including him.

Which was normal, he told himself. Just as it should be. And which made what had just happened between them-her compassion and concern for his pain-seem so miraculous to him.