You smell like love

Chapter 16

TK spent hours dreaming. He had only seen the twins in the videos Carlos had shown him, but both Luna and Daniel were part of his dreams and sometimes his nightmares.

He already knew that Daniel was a little smaller than his sister and he knew what had happened to his hip and leg. That had left TK with the feeling that it was somehow his fault and in his nightmares he tried to figure out where he had failed, what he had done wrong, when he had overexerted himself so much that he had forced his son to move and hurt himself.

He also dreamed of the future and imagined his life with the twins and Carlos. It wasn't easy, but he could see everyone being happy. It wasn't easy to put the lives of a cop and a paramedic in order when it was time to go back to work with newborns in between.

He dreamed of the times when one of them would come running home to Andrea with the twins. He knew his mother-in-law was going to be the best grandmother. His own dad was there too, but it wouldn't be easy for him either to be a grandfather and captain of his team. It had amused him to see him running back and forth trying to juggle the two jobs and at the same time be their father as best he could.

He dreamed of his children's smiles, Luna's green eyes and Daniel's dark ones. They were both going to have Carlos's curly hair and he imagined them with their smiles. They were perfect...although sometimes nightmares would appear about Daniel's possible limp, about how he would fall behind in school or how some of his future classmates would laugh at him.

But no nightmare could compete the feeling that his family would always be protected by the presence of his mother there, around him, a warm mantle that kept away all the great difficulties that fate might want to bring them. That knowledge always, no matter the fear, made him feel good and sure that the children had a protective angel watching over them.

He woke up with that feeling and also with the feeling that he was no longer in the ICU room. The smell was different, so were the sounds around him, nonexistent in the ICU and now he heard sounds in the hallway.

Although he was still drowsy, he opened his eyes and looked around. It was definitely a different room. It looked a lot like all the other hospital rooms he had been admitted to, only this one was painted in warmer tones and it was larger or laid out differently.

Next to the window was an armchair, in which Carlos slept in what must have been a particularly uncomfortable position. He was curled up, hugging his legs, his head crooked. He was going to have a bad neck and back pain when he woke up.

He smiled and reached out to try to reach him, but he had a line put in his hand and a couple more wires connected to the machines around him.

Part of him had hoped that being out of the ICU would also mean being off so many wires, but apparently he wasn't so lucky.

He kept looking around the room and then saw the crib on the other side of his bed. It looked like a small spaceship, completely enclosed and transparent, so he had no trouble seeing Luna's little body in there, all of her so tiny. Tiny little arms stretched out above her head and little legs that he imagined, because he couldn't see them, covered by a white sheet. Her little head was covered by a thin layer of light hair and her eyes were closed and her mouth was open, with a small, thin cannula under her nose.

TK smiled, unable to take his eyes off the little girl. He had imagined her so many times, had dreamed of her since long before the twins came into the world, but he had never thought she could be such a beautiful creature.

The other crib was not there, but knowing Daniel's problems, he imagined that he was still in the incubator area gaining weight and protected by the mesh that supported his hips and legs so that he could get strong.