Free Unavoidable Chance by Annalisa Nicole Page A

were you tonight?” Quinn’s voice asks. I swallow the mouthful of beer hard and remove the bottle from my lips.
    “Shit, Quinn, you scared the living hell out of me! Why are you sitting in the kitchen in the dark?” I ask, and flip on the kitchen lights, then wipe the dribble of beer off my chin.
    “You didn’t answer my question. And by the look on your face, my unanswered question pisses me right the fuck off. I called the restaurant looking for you. I texted you and I called several times. Sky needed you.”
    My smile ends in an eighth of a second thinking my daughter needed me, and I was off doing, well I know what I was off doing.
    “What’s wrong with Sky?” I ask concerned, setting the beer on the counter. I head in the direction of her room, but Quinn stops me.
    “She’s fine now. She had a stomachache and she wanted her daddy. But her daddy was… nowhere to be found. Parker said you tore out of there after some woman.”
    Parker and I will have words later about telling my sister shit like that. But for now, I’m concerned about Sky. She gets a lot of stomachaches and I usually attribute them to her poor eating habits. She likes to eat a lot of junk and it usually results in a stomachache. I’ve taken her to the doctor more times than I care to admit. Messing around with abdominal pains doesn’t fly with me. I’m sure it has more to do with the way Scarlett died than anything, but each stomachache Sky has sends me on high alert.
    “So, where were you?” Quinn asks again, this time in a tone that didn’t deserve an answer. And really, I don’t have to answer to my sister in my own God damned house.
    I give her a stern look and make my way to Sky’s room. I open the cracked door and see her sleeping peacefully. I sit on the edge of her bed and pull her hair out of her face. I smile at my little princess; I bring her covers up to her shoulders, lean in, give her a kiss on the forehead, then head down the hall to my own room.
    I take one step into my room, and I’m instantly hit with the cold and emptiness. It’s empty of love, and it’s filled with my dreams from a time in my past that I’d like to forget. It’s filled with thoughts of a life short lived when I crawl into bed, and dreams of pain and sights of what war does to mankind in my subconscious when I drift off to sleep. It’s suffocating.
    When I remove my foot from the room and place it back in the hallway, the weight on my chest lifts instantly. I hang my head in the doorway and wish I could crawl in bed at the end of a long day like most normal people, and have that feeling of relaxation and drift off in a peaceful sleep. I’m thankful I can survive on very little sleep, because otherwise I’d be a train wreck.
    I head down to the basement to my home gym, drop and do pushups until sweat pools on the floor under my face, and until the burning in my muscles overtakes the fire in my brain. Lifting weights, or punching a punching bag, always clears my thoughts and leaves me exhausted. I jump in the downstairs shower, hang my head in the pouring water, and let it wash away my thoughts, but Ava enters my mind. A small smile forms on my face as water pours down my head. I can still feel her soft warm body on mine, so willing and eager to obey my every command. Every time I look into her eyes, I can see her thoughts scatter in a million different directions, thinking and processing her every move, every thought, and every action. She’s calculated and precise. But for me she opened up and let it all go and just lived in the moment.
    I stay in the shower until it runs ice cold. My muscles scream as I climb each step upstairs. My hand lightly trails across each of the girls’ bedroom doors before I reach my own. Too tired to allow any thoughts in my brain, I climb into bed and almost instantly fall asleep.
    The next morning I wake up early and head down to the kitchen to make the girls breakfast before I head into the restaurant. As I