This is my first post.....feel like I'm doing an extremely vulnerable thing here....but in all honesty, I want to do this so I can get critical feedback, at the end of the day I just want to improve my writing....so anything you can give me to help is brilliant.

I originally wrote this for a fanfiction, but have changed the names etc, so I don't feel like it's exclusive to any particular audience. Originally it fits into a much longer story, more like a novel I guess you could say, but I feel that this section has potential as an isolated incidence.

I love Ian McEwan, I love the concept of one defining moment changing the courses of people's lives from that point onwards, and I don't know....maybe this is one of them. It's a moment in time, in a couples lives, take what you want from it, flesh it out in your minds however you choose. I haven't included many defining facts that create a wholesome reality of a couple, of a life.

I'm a perfectionist, I'm never, ever happy, I don't feel like this is in anyway complete, or ready as a final piece....and I hope that's where you come in.....please, please, please help me to make it better, I desperately want criticism....so deliver it in bouts.

And, damn I'm waffling....so I'll leave it there! Enjoy!

The bittersweet, tangible reality of morning light wasn’t far away. It had already begun to tug calmly at the edges of the dark night sky, bringing with it the start of a new day. Lying outstretched on the bed he could feel the freshness starting to filter through the drawn curtains in the lonely, silent early hours.

James closed his eyes, ignoring the numb feeling in his left arm, concentrating on not letting anything but trivial surface thoughts permeate his mind. He’d always been unexplainably attracted to this part of the day, the intense silence, the anticipation, the lucidity of thoughts, the beauty of the loneliness. There was something vaguely mischievous he felt pulsing through him when awake in the small hours, something elusive he felt linking him to his childhood; the knowledge that everyone else was asleep, the knowledge that he should be as well.

Far from being able to sleep, however, he’d been lying wide eyed, solemn and filled with the turbulence of his thoughts for a solid, commanding hour now. Ever since he’d been jerked awake by spiralling frightening nightmares that had worryingly lapped at the edges of reality. That face, those distorted images, so familiar and so real had haunted him in the slow minutes since.

James swallowed once again, staring expressionless, unblinkingly into the unresponsive darkness, picking methodically at a loose thread on the bed sheets. Waking up like that had brought the inevitable flood of horrific realisation back, twisting his stomach, blackening his heart and making him wish he’d never closed his eyes in the first place. The loss was still grievously raw and he ached along with the slightest movement, the smallest thought.

The icy draft that seeped through the half open window teased uncomfortably at the bare toes that hung lazily off the edge of the bed and finally caught his wavered attention. Having opened it a few hours previous because of her escalating temperature he now felt the need to close it shut and allow the room to recapture some of that lost warmth. Gently tossing back the covers he’d become entangled in he made to move silently off the bed, shrugging off the sluggishness and numbness of sleep as he eased his body upwards. But suddenly fingers, recently awakened, urgent and slender closed tightly around the material of his half unbuttoned shirt preventing the intended action and urging him to turn back to the bed, to the owner of the insistent, needy fingers, to his wife.

After the first few seconds of realisation he felt the deep thump of his heart running erratically with the surprise of her not being encased in the sleep he thought she was.

“Don’t go.” The raspy whisper caught roughly, dryly in the back of Rachel's throat.

“I was just going to close the window.” He explained gently, now not wanting to go at all, their eyes meeting through a haze of sleep and tiredness and grief.

“Please.”

In this new light he could see her ghostly pale face covered in smudgy tears, her eyes watery, intense and rimmed with a painful red rawness. The unbearable ache which laced throughout her voice persuaded him instantly to lie back down beside her and put his arms round her quivering, feverish, inconsolable body once more.

Silence breathed its way back over the room, the ghosts of everything that lay between them filling the gaps of conversation.

It was like this that she’d originally allowed herself to succumb to sleep, enclosed in his arms after protesting so much. She couldn’t fight the exhaustion from lengthy surgery, the shock to her body from the traumatic events and the relentless agonising sobbing, and soon he’d found her asleep against his chest, clinging onto him like a child whilst he rocked and cradled her similarly.

As he himself had tried to sleep, however, his thoughts had been accompanied by the spectre of her piercing, aching cries of unimaginable grief. Trying to close his eyes, clear his mind they’d pervaded through every resistance and cruelly he could hear the haphazard screeches echoing off the corners of his brain like they had done the walls of the hospital.

Trying to sleep he was only reminded of all their efforts to make her lie still, to not disturb the intricate stitching that kept her together, to control her grief as she attempted to drive them away, push them away, not believe what they were telling her, refuse to listen, writhing on that bed in the sickening way she did. It was all so raw, freshly embedded into his memory, weaving its way tightly up his throat, clinging with a tautness he couldn’t swallow.

She didn’t even notice as he’d neared the bed, after entering the room, and for a moment he’d been glad knowing that if she had looked up, for the slightest of seconds, she’d of seen the fear woven deep into him. He’d remembered the way her hands had pushed the surrounding medics away with a grappling force, her eyes blinded by the surge of tears, her screams, hoarse and discordant crippling her body, stalling every breath. He’d been surprised that he’d managed to stay upright as the nausea washed over him in weakening waves. For he knew she knew. And it was strange, knowing there was finally someone among all the suffocating reams of people who felt the way he did.

James had climbed gently onto the bed, allowing everyone else’s watchful stares to fade into the background as he resisted her flailing arms, her shaking body and clasped her tightly in his own. And he too began to cry as he saw her innocent realisation of who it was melt her features, as her protests finally lamented, subsiding into a softer, shared grief.

A grief that had gradually slipped silently into the realms of sleep.

‘How long have you been awake?’ His voice, sounding awkward in the silence of the room, was reduced to a mere whisper directed close to her ear as he laid a gentle kiss in her hair.

‘A little while.’

They lapsed into silence, both unable to think of anything more substantial to say.

‘Maybe you should try to get back to sleep.’

‘I thought perhaps, that when I woke up I’d feel better…’ the open sentence was left lingering from trembling parted lips.

James closed his eyes, and clenched his jaw, preparing himself for everything that had to inevitably come.

Unexpectedly he felt her hand alight briefly on his shoulder sliding downwards in a comforting motion to rest on his bare forearm. It made him tear his eyes away from the dimmed pattern of the wallpaper and hold her gaze amidst the darkness. The whites of her eyes were elusively luminous in the soft but sharp light of the moon as she stared at him.

“James…” her gaze shifted to a corner of the room. The new, wholly unpleasant grief was constricting her voice. He felt it flare his nostrils. Instinctively he allowed the tips of his fingers to exert a gentle massaging pressure on the small of her back, comforting but not imperious.

After a while tentative needy fingers tugged gently at one of the small gaps between the buttons on his shirt and his skin reacted to the brush of her nails and the hard fidgety tips of her fingers as they weaved among the fine dark hairs and looped their way around the material. Hooking herself onto him.

“How will I ever be able to stop thinking about her?”

It was impossible to stop the shaky sigh that filtered through his quivering lips and sent chills tumbling awkwardly down his spine. What was he supposed to say? What did she want him to say?

The question rippled angrily, abruptly through the air like a thousand insensate accusations, surrounding them as he battled with himself to produce the correct answer.

“No -” He swallowed the words back ineptly, hearing the curses fly round his mind as his inadequacies surfaced, “No one’s…” It wasn’t the right thing to say and his face twisted into the darkness with the inappropriateness of it all, “No one’s, asking you…too.” It was too late to quell, ineptly materialising with a wince. Idiot.

He tried to find something meaningful to make up for the clumsiness of it all, the damn ambiguity, the lack of comfort.

But nothing came.

And he wondered when this damned awkwardness had arisen between them like tiny cawing hands tugging at everything they’d unremittingly built. He couldn’t remember the last time that he’d found it an effort to talk to her, to laugh with her, to console her.

There weren’t even any appropriate words to say, the regularities of a well meant ‘sorry’ a shallow, misplaced, ‘it will be alright,’ he knew, were too formal for the intimacy of their relationship. Would be emptily received, falling on deaf ears; she didn’t want any form of sympathies, especially not from him. The reams of apologetic looks, words that were undoubtedly looming from the numerous faces she didn’t want to look at were purposefully saved for people who meant little to her. He couldn’t possibly stumble over those false words that would only inevitably remind her of how far away their feelings were from hers.

Instead as he held her he toyed with what to say next, now the raw first words were turning stale in the air between them. Words formed in his head countless times, only to recoil back in uncertainty once his lips began to embrace the shape of what was to be said.

Nothing could be said he realised as he rearranged his lips on her forehead and felt her own brush against the sensitive skin in the depths of his lower neck. Trembling, cracked with dryness, and plump with the sadness that she too wanted to delegate onto him.

Eyelashes, damp and long fluttered under his chin and his heart thumped and his stomach twisted as he wondered whether actually talking fully about their lost child, the last and only option would be the right thing to do.

“I can still feel her.”

It seemed though that Rachel had made a decision for the both of them. And as she did he thought his heart had stopped for a fleeting second as her words, unmelodic and muffled against his body, registered. The detached whisper hit his neck in a series of aching sighs and along with the severe honesty it left him having to twist his lip in between his teeth to stop him from crying out loud.

“If I close my eyes, just forget….she’s still there, still part of me,” their eyes met intensely once again and she laced her fingers further into the folds of his half un-tucked shirt, “She’s not due for another eight weeks, I want to go back to that.”

“Oh Rachel….”

A smile which she didn’t mean, which held no depth alighted her lips, “You wanted a girl.”

“I wanted a baby,” he corrected with urgency, not wanting to let his thoughts alight fully on the daughter he’d craved lying motionless down the corridor. With a shaky sigh, he continued after pausing to regard whether to say what he was thinking was wise, “…one that lived.”

Her lips were ripe with the sob she refused to release, “Did she look like, like…an Anna, or…”

“Just like an Anna. Just like an Anna,’ he clutched her head softly in his hands and engaged her wavering eyes. “Accompanied by the Greenwoods chubby cheeks,” he emitted a short, emotion fuelled laugh as she released a more meaningful laden sob, “But it was your nose,” he laced a hand further into her hair, “your lips,” ran a gentle thumb over her earlobe, “Tom’s sticky-out ears,” he paused as a wave of grief washed over his weak insides….“And I envisioned her having green eyes, your eyes -”

“Your eyes,” she interjected softly with an unyielding nod and creased, heavy features, permeating through the heavy air of their intermingled, laden breath,

“She would have had your eyes, I wanted her to have your eyes. I see her with your eyes.”

He was unable to speak as silence weaved through their wavering gazes and steady tears.

It was a while until she spoke again, when they were settled back down into the tossed covers of the bed, bodies hot and wearily soft, breaths laborious and slumberous, “Was there a moment when…”

Gritting his teeth the angry struggle in the bottom of his stomach flared up as fierce as ever.

“Was there a moment, when,” she repeated this time every falter to her voice beating him with increasing intensity, “When it was either me or the baby?”

He remained perfectly still, closing his eyes and trying not to release the sigh that hung uncomfortably off his lungs. “Was there a point when you had to make a decision?”

“Rachel…” his plea for her to cease was useless as her fingers pulled at his shirt harder than before as if to drag the answer out, so he continued with a sigh, “I honestly don’t know.” He stopped for a minute trying to recollect the previous day that already felt like years away. “I was never asked…anything. Just told.”

“If I close my eyes then, I can just pretend that my little girl is still alive and that I died instead.”

He felt the silence claw its way through the room and wrap all its strength around his throat and chest as he desperately fought for breath.

“Rachel please….” After a few moments some sort of voice was regained, throaty and pleading.

But his tightening hands, sincere stare were doing nothing to calm her and he could feel the agitation rise painfully, relentlessly in her like small sharp, writhing stabs.

“It feels like my baby’s been ripped out of me James.” She fought angrily against the swelling rawness of grief as it shattered her voice. James found himself fighting the same battle as her words permeated into the soft cocoon they’d created.

“And it feels like I had no say in it….l-like someone just reached in and wrapped their hands tightly around her little….mouth…and tiny untouched nose and dragged her out as she tried to cling to me, as she tried to scream….to warn me.”

He was shaking his head furiously as his hands wrapped around the sides of her head using his thumbs to stem the tears that flowed thickly, warm and damp against his skin.

“That’s what it feels like James,” he tried to stop her delivering the awkward little whispers, to muffle the harsh, uncomfortable sounds against his own face, “That’s exactly what it feels like.”

There was now the necessity to wipe away the tears that flowed steady and hot down his own cheeks. Looking into her eyes they looked frightened, wide with the unknown as he rubbed the skin underneath with a needed pressure.

“And all I could do…”

And he tried to quieten her, stop the piercing, accusatory words, but it was lost on the grief that was woven deep into her feverish body as he felt her flat palms pressing agitatedly against his chest in resistance of his comfort.

“It’s alright…Rachel…please…just…”

“All I could do was lie there and let them take my baby.”

The shout, scream, sob almost didn’t sound like it had come from her, the noise sudden and dreadfully loud, bursting the solemnity that had encased the room and shattering the resolve that had so far until now kept raw emotions mainly intact.

He couldn’t bear to be crying the way he was, the way they both were, clinging to each other as he felt every sob and lamenting protest between them. This pain, this feeling of grief of drowning of aching numbness couldn’t continue. He couldn’t bear it. Just like he couldn’t bear hers.

Carrying both heavy hearts was already proving to be impossible.