#rereading a comment left to me and reliving the good moments from last chapter

[orcelito]

Only in Discordant Accord can u read about akechi goro punting Morgana like a football

[hiraeth-doux]

Untouchable (7/8)

It’s been a while but I’ll try to post the remaining chapter as soon as I can. Thank you for your patience, guys. 

AO3   |   FF.net

There were moments in each person’s life that were meant to stay with them forever. Some memories would fade off eventually, losing their sharpness and focus, while these other few select snippets of time would stay seared in their minds for the rest of their life.

Claire had heard her kneecap break before she had felt it. A soft, dry sound like knuckles knocking, or one’s stiff neck rolling from side to side. Her fall had happened like in slow motion, and when her knee met the ice, her only thought had been – Who left crackers here? It couldn’t have been more than a fracture of a second before the white-hot pain, so intense that Claire had nearly blacked out, zapped through her entire body, pulsing in her left leg as if it had been set on fire.

Somewhere in the periphery of her attention, she could hear voices, could hear someone running towards her – her coach? Other students? She had tears streaming down her face, her vision blurred and her entire body coiled into a tight ball on the ice. And all the while she couldn’t stop thinking – why me?

There was a pale vertical scar running closer to the inside of her left knee now, nearly 4 inches long, a constant reminder of the day that had turned her life upside down in a matter of seconds. The first time Owen had noticed it – on their first morning together, both of them delirious beyond themselves – he traced it with his fingertips, pressing soft kisses to the whole length of it. Long accustomed to it and barely ever shying away from short shorts and knee-length dresses, Claire felt self-conscious all of sudden and tried to pull away from his touch, but he’d told her that everything that had made her who she was was beautiful.

In the past, the men she had been involved with were either curious about it in a way that made her feel vaguely uncomfortable, or pretended it wasn’t there at all, either not interested or not caring about that part of her life. That was something that she knew how to deal with. Hearing someone say that it was a part of her, acknowledge it as something that had ultimately led to who she’d become was new. It had filled her with exhilaration, and the previously unfamiliar to her wholeness of sorts as though no one had ever really seen her or accepted all of her before.

In the years following the accident, Claire couldn’t look at the scar without reliving that fall time and time again, one excruciating second of it after another, followed by months of painful physical therapy mixed with her fear of never being herself again that threatened to tear her apart from the inside. It had taken her a very long time to learn to perceive her scar the way Owen did – as something that was as much a part of her as her lungs or her heart or the colour of her hair. An attribute rather than a defining factor. That there was more to her than those few seconds on the ice.

And yet now she was certain she’d much rather get the phantom pain back than deal with the memory of his lips pressed to her skin, his breath rising goosebumps along her whole body, lazy strokes of his fingers over her skin.

It didn’t surprise Claire he’d pulled Harper out of the ice-skating classes, and if she were completely honest with herself, it came as a relief, too. A bittersweet one, but a relief nonetheless, although she certainly appreciated finding her planner, one that she’d forgotten entirely about on the day she’d left him standing in his driveway watching her speed away, sitting on the outer windowsill on her porch one night when she’d returned home from work.

The one thing she didn’t anticipate was, perhaps, the feeling of dullness that had settled over her after he and Harper disappeared from her life. It was as if everything went from technicolour to mono, the world around her switching to faded shades of grey.

The rational part of Claire knew it made little sense. They’d barely been together for a few weeks, and yet…

Even Karen, for once, made no comment about the change of her ‘circumstances’, and it unnerved and unsettled Claire. Surely, one barely-a-relationship wasn’t meant to tear down her carefully constructed world in a matter of days, was it?

She was not going to let it do it.

So she did the one thing she knew how to do – she threw herself into her work and countless hours on the ice, ignoring the dull ache in the overworked joint and choosing to pretend that nothing had happened, until her heart stopped leaping whenever her phone would ring or a car would pass by her house at night. Until on the night of a fierce thunderstorm, she found herself sobbing into her pillow, her body trembling as nature raged outside her window.

---

Claire didn’t pick up any of his calls, and Harper refused to go anywhere near the Community Center, and eventually, Owen had to give up on both fronts. Between his daughter’s unwillingness to explain anything past I don’t want to , which she considered a good enough reason to stop doing anything, and Claire’s closing the skating rink down for two weeks, he was starting to feel like he was flinging himself against a brick wall, except there were walls wherever he’d turn, thick and tall and impenetrable. Trapped inside them, Owen was starting to feel like screaming, except he doubted that it would work.

When after a week of complete radio silence, he finally saw the light in the round windows and there Claire was again, performing her routines, weightless and smooth and entirely magical, Owen found the doors locked and the music too loud for her to hear him knocking.

The image of her, so close and yet so unattainable, her eyes half closed as if she was moving in a dream, felt like a sucker-punch to his stomach. He considered waiting for her to finish, finding a way to talk to her, but even though he was many things, dense wasn’t one of them. Her message was loud and clear – she wanted to be left alone, and the best Owen could do was give her just that.

In the days and weeks following their odd conversation, he went through it at least a thousand times in his mind, trying to hear what he hadn’t heard the first time around. But after a while, it got easier to accept her words for what they were rather than keep driving himself crazy over the possible hidden message in them.

Instead, he piled up the hours at the shop and the VA office, barely leaving one or the other to snag a few hours of restless sleep and take his daughter out for ice-cream. But even in those moments, Harper had a detached air to her, like she was also doing it for him and not for herself, which left Owen even more confused and lost and exhausted. More often than not, she’d be more than eager to go back home and read her goddamn Lorax.

“Are you trying to leave us all unemployed?” Barry asked Owen jokingly a time or two when he’d arrive at the shop to find his friend already hard at work barely at the crack of dawn and leave while Owen was still tinkering with something. But even he had dropped it after a while, in part because of lack of response, and in part because the Owen had started to resemble a ghost.

The only drastic change that happened in this time, one that no one else seemed to have noticed, was that Owen moved his wedding photo from his nightstand to the dresser across the room. And that he finally took off his wedding ring – not for or because of Claire, but for himself. It was time, he decided, to close that chapter of his life, seeing as how trying to reread it couldn’t possibly lead to a different ending. Maybe he could try and turn the page at last.

One night, a few weeks later, he woke up when a peal of thunder exploded outside and scattered across the sky, rattling the windows in the hallway and making the trees outside his window shiver. The lightning pierced the clouds, splitting the world in half, so bright that for several long moments, he could see every item in the room like it was daylight.

“Daddy?”

Owen rubbed his eyes and turned his head to find Harper hovering in the doorway, her arms wrapped around her bunny.

“C’mere,” he jerked his chin toward the other side of his bed, and she ran around the heavy oak frame and climbed under the covers, pulling the blanket over her head.

She’d been doing this for as long as Owen could remember. As soon as they had swapped her crib for a ‘big girl’ bed, whenever the storm would hit, Harper would pad into his and Jenny’s room and wiggle her small body between them. She wasn’t scared of the weather, she’d tell them, she just didn’t trust it when it was angry.

The memory brought a small smile to his lips. How long had it been since this happened? He tried to recall the last time it rained this hard, but came up empty, saddened by the realization that some part of him must have started to believe that she grew out of her fear of thunder without him noticing.

“It will be over soon,” he whispered, patting a lump of her body.

“Big ones never last,” Harper’s muffled voice came from under the covers.

Frankly, Owen had no idea, but since it was the only consolation he could offer in the situation that was entirely out of his control, they both chose to believe it was true.

“Never,” he confirmed nonetheless.

“I’m sorry, daddy,” she said when Owen started to believe she’d fallen asleep, and when he glanced at her, she was looking at him from her small cocoon.

He threw a hand behind his head. “Hey, I don’t trust this weather, either,” he reassured her.

“No.” Harper’s face grew serious, her dark eyes huge. “I’m sorry I made Claire go away.”

For a long moment, Owen didn’t say anything, his eyes locked on the shadows moving wildly over the ceiling as the wind tore at the trees outside, nearly bending them in half. After months of hearing Claire this, Claire that every single day, Harper barely mentioned her since the day she’d caught them kissing, usually saying her name in passing, like she didn’t mean to.

Owen waited for her to start asking questions after a while about why Claire wasn’t around anymore, but she never did. Then again, she barely mentioned his and Jenny’s friends from Michigan, or even her own from preschool. He never thought much about that, deciding that for a child, those memories didn’t stick for long. Out of sight – out of mind, something like that. Plus, he’d figured she might have still been harbouring a minor grudge against the whole incident in the kitchen, which was something he didn’t know how to approach.

Now, though, he turned to her slowly, not sure how to respond.

“You didn’t, baby,” he promised her at last. “Wasn’t your fault.”

“But it was,” she insisted.

“No, it wasn’t--”

“I asked her to leave and she did,” Harper blurted out, cutting him off just as another clasp of thunder rolled outside, nearly making the whole house shudder and setting off a car alarm or two somewhere down the block.

Owen’s brows knitted together in confusion. “What do you mean?”

And so she told him.

---

Claire saw them the second they walked through the doors, the sight so unfamiliar now, after several weeks of their absence, that she’d nearly lost her balance for a moment, a sharp edge of her skate catching in the dent in the otherwise smooth surface. It left Claire teetering in fear for a second, not used to being thrown off balance in her only comfort zone.

They were not the first though – a few other kids were already practicing awkward jumps, showing off in front of one another, and a couple of parents were sitting on the bleachers, seemingly set on staying to watch the practice.

She was tempted to ignore Owen and pretend that she didn’t see him, but this kind of attitude felt hardly fair toward Harper. It was not the girl’s fault, after all, that the three of them had collided into one another in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Claire skated over to them, a plastic smile on her face. Her gaze slipped past Owen, barely registering his hair that was slightly longer than the last time she saw him and a sheer layer of jittery energy that was impossible to miss, choosing to focus on Harper who was smiling earnestly at her.

“Hey there, buddy, haven’t seen you in a while,” Claire said, hoping that her ability to read the room wasn’t entirely askew. “You here for a class?”

The girl nodded, then paused for a brief moment before beaconing for Claire to lean closer to her. Her eyes darted toward Owen who immediately stepped back, his hands lifted in the air in a universalYou’re-on-your-own gesture.

Puzzled, Claire stepped off the ice and crouched down in front of Harper, reaching for her hands, surprised by how much she’d missed the girl and trying oh so hard not to think of her father, standing about ten feet away from them, his eyes boring a hole in her skull.

“What is it, honey?” Claire asked softly.

Harper bit her lip, then exhaled through her nose. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, he fingers squeezing Claire’s. “I was wrong, and we miss you and want you to come spend time with us again. A lot.”

Claire’s smile softened. “I missed you, too.”

The girl’s forehead creased, her face serious. “Will you forgive me?”

“Always.” Claire put her arms around Harper, feeling her eyes start to burn again. She blinked away the tears before they spilled down her cheeks and pulled back, slightly less disoriented. “Why don’t you put on your skates now, okay?” Habitually, she smoothed down the girl’s hair. “I’m very happy to see you again.”

Afterwards, when Harper hurried off toward a cluster of other kids and Claire had no excuse to avoid Owen, she turned to him.

He stepped toward her, a wooden barrier between them, and cleared his throat. “She told me everything.”

Claire winced involuntarily, hands clasped on the railing more for the sake of not sliding down to the ice than anything else. “It wasn’t her fault, Owen.”

He looked down at his feet, then raised his gaze reluctantly, making her wish she could reach over and smooth out the crease between his brows. “It wasn’t her decision to make, either.”

“Yes. It was mine.” Claire rubbed her forehead and glanced over her shoulder when someone called out her name. “Look, I’ve got to…”

Owen nodded and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his pants. Took a step back, finding it hard to maintain the eye contact and harder still to look away from her. “Sure.” He cleared his throat. “You think we could maybe talk later?”

Claire hesitated, tempted to find an excuse to say no, full of reasons she couldn’t explain even to herself to do just that. Watching his stand this close to her stirred the longing that she tried to bury deep inside of herself, the unlived life, hiding behind the walls she’d built, looking for a way out.

Instead, she nodded. “Of course.”

She owed him that much. Owed something to herself, too, although this was harder to put into words.

---

The spring in Madison was uncertain and temperamental. Like a timid animal, it would hold back and lurk on the outskirts of winter, its weather unpredictable and moody. It would tease them with sunny afternoons only to snap them back into submission with chilly mornings and a coating frost on the car windows, reminding them all who was really and truly in charge.

Right now, however, the evening was warm and calm, the sky streaked with reds and oranges and the wind tugging at the tree branches and chasing dust along the footpaths. A true promise.

Claire didn’t know how they ended up here, in this packed café. Wasn’t sure the decision was hers, the past 30 minutes of her life feeling smudged, like someone had run an eraser over a picture drawn in pencil, blurring the lines. Being face to face with Owen, talking to him threw her off, and she couldn’t stop her hands from shaking. During that hour she had spent with kids, she was very much aware of him sitting on the bleachers, his presence like static in the air – not something she could feel or hear, per se, but not exactly an easy thing to ignore, either.

After gulping down half of her cup of hot chocolate, Harper spotted a friend from school and took off for the kids’ corner, leaving her and Owen alone, staring awkwardly into their coffee and avoiding eye contact.

He needed a haircut, she noted absently. Not because it looked bad, but because he hated his hair being much longer than it was right now. She could smell the garage on him, and the memory ricocheted achingly with longing inside of her. It made her wish she could bury her nose into his neck and breathe in that weird combination of his aftershave and Skittles and motor oil that got imprinted in her mind with such clarity it almost hurt.

“So,” Claire cleared her throat, breaking the pause that was starting to feel suffocating. “How have you been?”

Owen, who chose that exact moment to take a sip of his coffee, nearly choked on a scalding hot drink. He swallowed it, allowing it to burn his tongue and throat and studied her across the table. Her hair that had been pulled into a braid earlier was now falling down her shoulders, framing her face and trapping the early evening sunlight between the strands. Her mother’s jade ring the same colour as her eyes winked at him when she picked up a spoon and stirred her cappuccino. And all the words he had wanted to say to her in the weeks since their separation were suddenly gone, replaced by a think lump in his throat that rendered him speechless, his mind numb.

Like someone punched me in the gut and I haven’t been able to breathe ever since , he thought.

“Good,” he uttered after a few moments. Managed to smile even, like this was no big deal. Like having a casual chat about nothing with the woman who he kept reaching for in the night only to find a cold pillow was his regular Friday night. The absurdity of the situation would have been hilarious had it not been so damn painful. “Barry found an old bike at what I assume was a junkyard. He said I could keep it if I manage to get it running.”

Claire’s eyebrows quirked curiously, the corners of her mouth lifting. “A bike, huh?” she echoed.

Owen chuckled. “A heart wants what a heart wants,” he started, but faltered when it hit too close to home. He knew he should have laughed it off, maybe asked her about her job, her family. She probably knew he had gone to one of Zach’s games because the boy invited him, and that was as decent a conversation starter as any. Instead, he let out a long breath. “That shirt you used to sleep in still smells like you.” His voice dropped and he shook his head. It felt odd to say out loud the words that left him bruised on the inside. “I keep typing the text messages to you and erasing them. Random stuff, but you know what they say about the force of habit.”

His lips curved humorlessly as he started to fold and unfold the paper napkin, needing to do something with his hands. Their food was sitting between them, untouched, save for the half-eaten cookie Harper had asked for and forgotten about.

There was an almost tangible uneasiness to her that reflected his own inner turmoil, but instead of being relieved by it, by not being alone in this weird limbo, Owen couldn’t help but wish that there was an easier way to talk about this giant elephant in the room that no one even bothered to tell him about. Last night, when Harper spilled everything to him while the storm raged outside, as if trying to cleanse the world, wash away everything old and start anew, he was filled with near-exhilaration, the explanation so simple that it had left him feeling elated.

In that moment, though, he wasn’t so sure, all hope drained out of him.

“I had to learn how to French braid Harper’s hair,” he added softly. Paused, allowing his words to sink in. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Claire looked away from him and out the window, her eyebrows furrowed and her bottom lit caught between her teeth. “Look, Harper went through a very traumatic experience. I don’t think either one of us had any right to force any changes on her for our own selfish reasons.” She shook her head. “I knew I couldn’t.”

Owen nodded slowly and reached for her hand, but she clasped her palms around her cup and he pretended that he was going for a packet of sugar instead, even though his drink was already sweet enough to rot his teeth in ten minutes flat. A little more, and it’d turn into a syrup. “But it’s okay now, right?” He sounded scared, bordering on desperate, and he hated it. Hated the edge in his voice that spoke of panic. “I mean, we can work it out, can’t we?”

Claire dropped her gaze, then glanced up again and met his eyes.

“It’s probably not a good idea,” she admitted at last. “You and I.”

“Claire…”

“I know I did what your daughter had asked me to because, at the time, she deserved not having her life turned upside down again. Which, I admit, wasn’t fair to you, but I still think none of us is ready for this.” Her voice cracked a little and she paused to take a steadying breath. “I don’t think I am, and you’re probably not, either.”

“You’re not doing anyone any favours by pushing away something that could be--” he faltered, searching for words that wouldn’t come.

“I don’t know how to do it, Owen,” she whispered. “I don’t know how to fix any of this for you. I can’t even fix my own life.”

“We don’t need you to fix anything,” he croaked. “There’s nothing to fix.” He took a shaky breath and leaned back in his chair, the spell broken, the closeness no longer meaning anything. He rubbed his eyes. “Look, I’m not going to force you into anything you don’t want to be a part of. But this—this is not about Harper anymore. It’s about you and me.” There was an uncompromising note to his voice, one that always appeared when he knew he was right. Except now, instead of triumphant, he sounded defeated and lost.  

“I know.” Her fingers were absently running over the handle of her cup. “But maybe it’s better that way.” She sighed. “Maybe we’re better off… like this.”

Is this it? He wanted to ask. Is this over between us? Is this the end? But the words glued his mouth shut, his jaw locked into place, his tongue refusing to cooperate. All the arguments washed out of his mind, replaced by the bitter aftertaste of defeat.

She swallowed, her gaze flickered toward Harper who was giggling over something with a girl who Claire recognized as someone from her class. “I’m glad you came back,” she added softly.

There were words rolling on that tip of his tongue, words he desperately wanted to spit out for fear of never having a chance to do so again. Words that seemed too big to be kept inside of him for much longer. There were things that he was still figuring out for himself, trying to find that balance between all the changes that were happening in his life, his fear of moving forward and the even greater fear of being stuck where he had been for the past few years.

Losing someone almost killed him, his very existence felt pointless and empty for so long he had started to think he would never get out of that black void that kept sucking him deeper with every breath, with every flicker of memories. He would’ve been terrified, if only he cared. Yet, it made sense to a certain degree, if only because there was natural progressing to death that he couldn’t fight against no matter how hard he tried. But with Claire… Losing her when she was within arm’s reach, looking at her and knowing that he couldn’t have her – somehow, the very idea of it was twice more excruciating. Not now. Not when he was—

Harper swept in on them then before he so much as opened his mouth, chatting a mile a minute and dumping her news on Claire she hadn’t had a chance to spill on their way here, all while trying to finish her cookie as well as Claire’s fries. There was going to be a concert at her school in two months and she had a role. Owen’s mother was teaching her how to plant flowers, and this had been quite a hit lately. Last week, they went to see How To Train Your Dragon in 3D at a movie theatre, and it was ‘so much more fun than the DVD’.

Claire listened, asked the follow-up questions, and for a split second, it almost felt right again. The tightness is Owen’s chest loosened, his face splitting into a grin as she watched his daughter and Claire chatting away.

Until it was time leave.

Claire brushed off his attempt to take care of the bill, hugged Harper, getting the girl to promise her that she wouldn’t disappear again, and then she was gone, leaving a ghost of a memory of the past hour wrapped in a cloud of floral perfume behind. And for a moment, Owen felt so hollow inside he thought he would fold in on himself and disappear altogether. Quite frankly, it hadn’t even occurred to him that they wouldn’t be table to talk this through, not after Harper had come clean about the whole story, at least, the outcome so obvious in his head that the unexpected turn of events completely knocked the ground from under his feet.

“Did it work?” Harper asked, climbing into her seat.

“Did what work?” Owen echoed absently, strapping her in.

“Claire,” she pressed, watching him impatiently. “Is she coming back?”

He closed her door, then slid into the driver’s seat. Turned to look at her over his shoulder. “No, pumpkin, I don’t think so.”

Harper’s face fell. She dropped her hands in her lap, her eyebrows knitting together in confusion. “But I said I was sorry. Is she mad at me?”

Owen blinked, caught off-guard. “What? No, of course, she’s not. It’s not about you.” He sighed and explained, “We’re good, I promise. We… we’re still friends.  Things just… sometimes they don’t work out, is all.”

“Is she mad at you ?”

“Not that I know of.” He smiled, hoping it didn’t look at stiff as it felt. Shook his head and reached over to ruffle Harper’s hair, which earned him a displeased look and a tight-lipped pout. “It’s grown-up stuff.”

“That’s silly,” the girl muttered.

Owen buckled his own seatbelt and turned the key in the ignition, starting the car at last. “Tell me about it.”

---

“Are you done sulking?” Barry asked, squinting at Owen in the sun from the steps of Owen’s front porch, an open but barely touched bottle of beer sitting next to him.

Owen peeked at him from under the belly of the bike that found a permanent residence in his driveway while he fiddled and tinkered with its guts, trying to get it to be cooperative again. It was a piece of work, but one worthy of his time. It was a beauty, too – he owned something similar a very long time ago, and the familiarity of playing with one again was quite soothing. Kept his mind busy as well, which was all Owen craved these days.

Jenny hated his old bike, called Owen reckless and stupid for riding it, threatening more than once to leave him ‘before he killed himself’, somehow more okay with him going off to the army than with him owning a two-wheel vehicle. The memory had a wistful aftertaste to it, their bickering overselling ‘that killing machine’ every weekend now amusing rather than irritating.

“I’m not sulking,” Owen muttered, peering into the toolbox, looking for the right wrench, determined to bring this thing back to life again.

Something stirred inside him at the idea of owning this bike – a Triumph, maybe a decade old. He wanted to repaint it too, in black or maybe navy blue to cover up the brown rusty patches. He’d been working on it for two weeks, on nights and weekends mostly, unable to shut off his mind and finding solace in focusing on something that wasn’t a gaping hole in his life.

Harper loved it, if only because it made her the coolest kid in her grade. He might have been completely useless when it came to school bakes or talent shows, but he could very well pull the cool dad with a motorcycle thing without breaking a sweat. So long as he revived it, of course.

“’Course you’re not,” Barry huffed. “You’re putting overtime at both jobs--”

“Which is called bringing home the bacon,” Owen pointed out.

Barry gave him a Don’t give me that shit look and shook his head, chuckling under his breath.

It was refreshing, in a way, to have someone call him out on his crap. Artfully dodging his mother’s questions and diverting Harper’s attention was starting to get rather exhausting, all things considered.

He brushed beads of perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand and squinted in the sunlight. Working on the bike at night was undeniably a far less healthy, but at least it wasn’t making him melt all over the place, feeling like he was made of candle wax.

It was getting hotter with every day, the days growing longer in that way that would make summer feel like it had snuck up on them unawares. Harper’s school would be over in just a few weeks, her mind already brimming with ideas for the summer break. She had asked Owen if she could go to a camp because a few kids from her class were going, and the request echoed achingly inside him, leaving him torn between saying yes to adventures, the fear of separation, and outright bewilderment – how did she get so old without him noticing?

He didn’t say anything just yet, still toying with the thought in his mind, part of him hoping she would forget about it, switch to something else, overcome with the fierce protectiveness and scared of waking up tomorrow to her high school graduation.

“Daddy!” The door swung open and Harper burst out onto the porch, her heavy curls tied into a ponytail bouncing as she hopped down the steps. She thrust a house phone in his direction. “Grandma wants to talk to you.”

---

There was a certain degree of comfort in having the things go back to normal, whatever qualified as normal these days.

The one thing that Claire didn’t consciously notice until Harper had come back was how she would involuntarily search for her and Owen whenever the door would open before the class, telling herself each time that it didn’t matter, swallowing her disappointment and nearly choking on it. Now that this was out of the way, she could just as easily go back to accepting his occasional presence without the pressure of having to make anything out of it.

Granted, Owen didn’t try to talk to her again past the usual hellos and an occasional question or two about his daughter and her progress. They were right back where they had started all those months ago, plus an awkward attempt to avoid eye contact with one another at all costs and never being asked to watch Harper again.

She could deal with that.

When a few classes later the girl asked Claire about going to the stables again, she had gladly arranged it, although she didn’t join them this time, pleading the overflow at work due to rapidly approaching summer, which often resulted in a heightened number of moves and renovations. Her excuse even wasn’t a complete lie, save for the fact that it was Sunday and she actually spent it eating ice-cream on Karen’s couch, but who was there to judge?

“You’re pathetic,” Karen stated, taking the spoon from her sister and scooping half of the tub of mint chocolate chip ice-cream, ignoring Claire’s protests.

“You do understand that you’re sitting right here with me, don’t you?” Claire pointed out flatly.

“Hey, I never said I wasn’t pathetic.”

Hence was Claire’s surprise when she saw Owen hover near the gate to the rink one night a couple of weeks later when she was about to wrap up for the day, her muscles tight and her body pleasantly spent, and even the slight discomfort in her ankle after a fall a few days ago not bothering her as much.

It was getting late and the building was empty, the VA offices had been closed for hours, hers probably the only lights that were still on.

Claire’s stomach squeezed in a familiar way, consumed with longing at the sight of him, hovering where he would have in the past when their lives weren’t this damn complicated yet. As Paul McCartney’s The Never Happened Before continued to fill the space around them, she made a wide finishing circle around the center of the arena, ending it with a spin that turned the lights around her into a colorful kaleidoscope of twirling flares before she slid over to him, still unsure of what it could be that brought him here.

“Why, if this isn’t--” she began, trying to keep her voice light and casual.

However, the prepared quip died on her lips at the sight of his ashen face and frantic, haunted eyes that watched her approach him, his grip on the gate so tight that he knuckles had gone white.

“What happened?” Claire asked, realizing the moment the words fell out of her mouth that she didn’t want to know the answer. Not when he was looking the way he did. But it was too late.

“They want to take her away from me,” Owen said, his voice hollow. “They’re gonna take Harper away.”

“Who?”

“Jenny’s parents want to file for sole custody,” he muttered.

Claire wasn’t sure which one of them moved, but one moment there were three feet of space between them, and the next his arms locked around her, holding on to her as though his world would fall apart if he’d let go. His body was shaking ever so slightly, small shivers running down it in waves, his breath short and laboured like he’d run all the way here. She could feel his heart thudding so fast she feared it would fracture his ribs.

“I’m sorry,” Owen muttered on a shaky, shuddered inhale. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

Claire’s arms closed around him, a soothing hand on the back of his neck. “It’s going to be okay,” she whispered, pressing her forehead to his temple, his pulse hammering fast against her skin. “I swear, it’s going to be okay.”

To be continued...