After The End: Book 2

2. The Elephant in the Room

Louis POV

"It's your turn," Naomi muttered into her pillow. She didn't even sound awake. Next door I could hear the baby crying. She was wrong. It was actually her turn, but I was already awake. I tried to not wake her up as I slid out from under the covers and walked the short distance to the bedroom next door. It had been Lux's bedroom briefly but I wasn't sure she ever actually slept there. It looked nothing like hers now. The nursery was bright and colorful and full of more stuffed animals than I could count. In the far end of the room, the wooden crib that had been carefully assembled by Harry carried the crying infant, my son.

I scooped him out of the crib and he immediately quieted. "What could you possibly have to be upset about?" I mused down at the now smiling baby. He was going through a phase now where he seemed to wake up out of nothing but loneliness. It was quite adorable however inconvenient it felt to be woken up so frequently.

I truly didn't mind. I was a light sleeper by nature and there wasn't anything better to wake up to than to see the smile of my own child. I hadn't truly known love until the day I first laid eyes Oliver. The day he came into the world, my priorities shifted. The only thing that truly mattered was him.

I made my way to the little blue armchair that sat in the corner of the room, and settled with Oliver snuggling comfortably in the crook of my arm. The chair used to be Naomis reading chair before it had become the babies assigned "snuggle chair." I had spent many repetitive nights sitting in this chair waiting for the baby to fall back to sleep before I could put him back down. It could take a while. Outside the little window, the city lights cast shadows across the decorated walls of Oliver's room. That's the last thing I remember acknowledging before drifting off to sleep.

I woke up a few hours later to the disapproving stare of Naomi. Her voice had permeated my dreaming state, saying "This isn't safe."

I blinked hard as my senses came back to consciousness. She scooped Oliver out of my arms with an annoyed expression. "I'm sorry," I muttered rubbing her eyes.

"You're doing to drop him doing that," she said plainly, setting him back into the crib. Outside, it was still dark, although the sun was looping it's orange glow along the horizon.

Things between Naomi and I had been... happening. That seemed like the only safely accurate word I could use. Before the baby came, we'd found peace between us. We'd found ways to be content with the new unfamiliar world we were living in together. Then the baby had come. The first month had been amazing. I'd stayed home the entire time. Harry, always the wild card, married and moved downstairs with Lux the same week that the baby came home. I didn't even have a chance to react because Naomi and I were so busy trying to get to know the small newly formed life that now inhabited the flat with us. The newness and the excitement of it all made us feel closer than ever before. We felt like a real family, just the three of us. I was optimistic. Things felt good.

Then I'd gone back to work. Naomi told me she didn't mind. She agreed that it made sense. I had just launched a new career. I couldn't afford to disappear without it falling apart and as Lux was inexplicably linked to me as one half of our "Creative Dream Team," she was relying on me to return too. It was supposed to be a smooth process. I was still home the majority of days and I worked on what felt like a mostly part time basis.

Then, as time passed, the tensions creeped in. Naomi withdrew slowly and there was no explicit statement made from her, but I knew she wasn't happy. I'd tried to address it more than once and she just told me that she had the "baby blues." I had considered more than once that she was depressed. I knew it was common for some women to develop postpartum depression. I had even helped my own mum through it when Daisy and Phoebe had been babies, but she insisted it was fine. Some days, things were better and I believed her. Other days she was waking me up with a scowl, telling me off and leaving me in the dark in a blue armchair to trudge back to bed without so much as a "thank you" to me for getting up with our child out of turn so that she could sleep.