Free Love Resisted (The Real Love Series) by Melanie Codina

control it. Just the comfort she was feeling from the body contact was lifesaving. She latched onto it and hung on tightly. Wrapping her hand around the arm that was pressed against the front of her body, she searched out her nephew in the people surrounding them. She was thankful to notice that nobody seemed to be paying her any attention. Thank God.
    Finding Jonathan, she tuned out everything else but the feel of Mike’s body against hers, and the profile of her nephew. He smiled as he watched whatever it was that came across the screen and it struck her once again, how much he looked like her brother. She had always wondered what her son would look like, if she had ever had one. Between her family’s genes, and Marc’s, he would’ve been a beautiful young man, too. A small tear formed and escaped her eye at the thought of what she would never have. Lost in that thought, she barely felt Mike squeeze her knee, as she watched a big smile spread across Jonathan’s face. He turned to look at her, and all she could do was smile back at him.
    Marc and Jonathan were close; she knew he looked up to him, and they did a lot of stuff together. For a second, she wondered what picture of Marc it was that had put the smile on her nephew’s face. She refrained from looking, only because she knew she was teetering on the edge and couldn’t risk losing it. Over the course of the next few minutes, Allie kept her gaze trained on Jonathan, then Madison, and any other child she loved. They made her stronger and kept her distracted. There was an occasional knee squeeze from Mike, signaling another picture of Marc. With each squeeze, she felt terrible guilt over avoiding them. When the song was close to ending, she felt that she was strong enough to look and focused her attention on the slideshow. Putting her hand over Mike’s, she gave it a squeeze and he looked over at her.
    From the corner of her eye, she could make out his smile before he turned his hand over and gripped hers. There were only a few pics of Marc left to see, and she was glad she got to see them. Especially when one of her favorite ones came up, which she knew was also one of Jonathan’s. There he was, her big beautiful man, smiling back at her. Allie was on his back, and Jonathan was on her back. The original intent had been to dog pile on top of Marc, but the two of them couldn’t keep him down. By the time the picture was taken, he was fully standing, with both of them mounted on his back, laughing like lunatics. Even though another tear rolled down her cheek, she was smiling by the time the slideshow finished.
    She saw Gillian off to the side with her arm wrapped around Jake, her other hand holding Logan’s as they finished watching it, too. Allie’s tears were nothing compared to Gillian’s, and she was momentarily thankful that tears for this kind of thing weren’t uncommon. Looking around, you could see all the women were affected by the sweetness of what they watched. And she was comfortable knowing that nobody saw her lose it. Nobody except Mike. Turning to look at him, she realized he had moved his arm and shifted slightly over to give her appropriate space. Allie had to fight the urge to shift closer to get that contact back. Glancing down at the space then back up at him, he gave an apologetic look. “Sorry. I knew you needed something …”
    He looked worried , a little embarrassed maybe, so she stopped him with a hand to his arm and blurted out, “Thank you.” Mike’s shoulders relaxed when she said that and some of the tension left his face. She felt bad that he was worried about her reaction to his contact, when what he did was clearly for her benefit. There was silence for few moments, and she really needed to get up, move around. Move onto new conversations, maybe steal the baby back. So she stood up, prepared to do just that. Looking down at him, she felt that her verbal thank you just wasn’t enough. Leaning over, she placed her hand on