A/N: Tiny one shot. Inspired by yesterday's E4 with Ste visiting Pauline and by the wonderful Sarah (Empathist)
Arms
Most kids wanted a tenner off their mams. Or a new bike. I just wanted her to put her arms around me after a nightmare.
The closest we ever got to a cuddle were when she was so drunk the whole bed reeked of it. She'd be unconscious, practically, even her toes poking out the covers getting frozen didn't wake her. I must've only been about six but I tucked in beside her and looped her arms around me. I didn't even mind that her breath was bitter in my face, she warmed my skinny little bones and she was my mam. I could drift off back to sleep and pretend we was the closest of family and she loved me.
And in the morning she'd kick me out, calling me a lazy baby and I'd be late for school trying to find my one and only shirt.
She never put her arms around me sober and never again as soon as Terry moved in.
Then I turned sixteen and it was my turn to put me arms around someone. Amy Barnes. She was the prettiest girl in school and I liked that she wanted me to look after her. Two years on we had our own family and I'd hold her in bed for hours and stroke her hair. I'd have done the same to the kids if they'd been older and had dreams of being chased. They were lucky enough not to have the nightmares I did. But their mam, faced with the monster in me, left me. And once more I slept with my own arms tucked around my middle. I deserved the loneliness.
And then - years down the line when I was dad and ex-chef and barman, sleeping almost always in an empty bed – I had a man's arms around me for the first time.
It was a new ceiling of strange shadows and unfamiliar lines that I stared up at. A new bed; never-ending sheets and a man's sized mattress. A new world and new feelings; new fear and new excitement. He had broad shoulders and hot muscles and hair that made me warmer. He held solid and tight like protection and comfort all at once. I liked the security in his arms; the far cry from the danger that he carried with him like a thundering storm cloud. Until Brendan Brady, I'd never been cuddled in bed by a man. It was the third thing I'd done with a man that night, for the first time. The forth came after; I didn't know people even did that with tongues. I hoped we'd do it again.
And we did. Countless times. And he held me long into the night even when I thought he wouldn't. It felt like nothing else in the world mattered when it was just the two of us – him squeezing me close to where his heart beat. He was different like this, tamer and safer. And when we weren't hiding out, fucking in toilet stalls and offices and anywhere that had a surface I could bend over, he'd brush his fingertips along my hair and shelter me from the nightmares he created.
When he stopped holding and started only hurting, I didn't have arms around me anymore. My arms wrapped around another and then my kids all at once. I realised that, maybe, I was too grown up for comfort, to be held and protected. Perhaps only the arms that hurt are the ones that are supposed to protect and maybe I was looking for love in the wrong places from the wrong people.
But then on a summer's day when you think the world isn't going to change; it does. And he needed my embrace like no one ever had.
Six months of a lifetime later we shared a bed like we shared comfort. My arms, his arms. We had hours against each other and a future of hope and body-to-body contact. He were the arms around me at night and the fingers on my belly in the morning. I was the hug when he needed it most and the reassurance of tomorrow. We held the kids – daddy and daddy – and kept the world outside our tight hold on each other.
He was taken from me. Ripped from me. Prised. And I would have held him until death.
Then there was me mam. Cold as ever. The only one left that might ever hold me again. And we did, before she died, and I choked my arms around my waist alone in bed.
There might've been others between, ones who I held and who would hold me, but none of them felt real until he came back to me – tired and worn and hurt. After the nightmare, he put his arms around me and I held on and never let go.