His Unexpected Baby by Jamie Knight

Chapter Twenty-Four - Skye

The clock ticked like a countdown to something. My mind flashed back to an old British comic-book as I lay in the dark. I had found it by accident in the library while looking around one day.

I was a bit surprised to find the publication date from the late 1980s, convinced at that time that the world had basically started the day I was born. That was a bit of arrogance I would soon be relieved of, with the more history I read.

The cursed clock ticked in my head, more maddening than Captain Hook’s crock or the Tell-Tale Heart. I would have had a modern, digital design but my parents were worried I might electrocute myself.

They basically had an Edwardian’s knowledge of electrical gadgets and were generally of the opinion that technological innovations should have stopped with the electric light.

I’d tried counting sheep but stopped after I got to a million. Besides which, the baaing noise in my head had become distracting. But even worse than the tick of the doom clock or the baaing of the flying sheep, was the sense, like the presence of a ghost, of Simon, holding me from behind.

It was the first night I had slept without him in what seemed like forever. Love could do some strange things to your sense of time.

I had slept so well with him. Drifting right off and waking up usually only when prompted. Having my master with me, even downstairs, made me feel safe on a deep and essential level that let me surrender to the night.

That was something I had never really too good at, having orderliness insomnia most of the way through elementary school, certain something terrible would happen if I dared to go to sleep.

What exactly this might be, I had no idea, but the risk of it was still enough to keep me up at night. It took years of trying different things to be able to sleep and even then, it had never been gone completely smoothly.

There were pills I could take to help me fall asleep and to suppress my dreams but my parents wouldn’t get them for me, medication being for weak-willed losers in their opinion. They believed that truly strong people prayed for strength and healing and those who were worthy got it.

This was a tune that in no way changed when my paternal grandfather died of cancer. They didn’t even attend his funeral.

Now I was back where I’d been before: lying awake fearing something terrible. The fact that I was alone in what felt like my big empty apartment didn’t help much. The bigger irony was that if that weren’t the case, something terrible might well have happened.

I knew Simon would want to stay with me, but he was trying to save both our jobs and that might not be possible if we got fired, anyway. I guess he had savings, but they would only go so far.

While I was confident that he would want me to live with him and support me, I didn’t want to put that kind of pressure on him. Meaning basically, at least in my reductive mind, that it came down to a choice between breaking up with Simon and maybe staying in the city, or staying with him and possibly having to go home to my parents, therefore losing him anyway.

This was truly a choice between poisoning or stabbing and both led to the same damn result.

I wondered who had turned us in and figured it had to be Amber.

She had nothing to go by but baseless suspicions, so I didn’t see how the investigation could reveal anything too untoward— Simon and I had been careful not to put anything in writing, of course, and we had taken every other possible precaution to not expose our secret affair around the office— but it was all over, anyway, now that we were under a microscope.

Jealous Amber had gotten her way. It seemed that if she couldn’t have Simon, she wanted to make sure no one else could, either.

My relationship with Simon was doomed, and I wasn’t sure I would ever get a good night’s sleep again without him by my side.