Mind the Gap

Chapter 3

Walking through King’s Arm Gate to Kensington Gardens, I start to relax. This is one of my favorite places in London. It’s not because there’s a palace here, although that is freaking amazing, but because there is so much openness. Space. The park is so massive that even with a few thousand people here, I always feel like I can find a little nook under a tree that is all mine.

Passing by groups of mothers with strollers and guys kicking soccer balls around, I find the grouping of trees that gives me the perfect view of the Round Pond to my right and Kensington Palace to my left. Sitting between two large roots sticking out of the ground, I lean back against the trunk of the tree and close my eyes. Taking deep breaths like I was taught, I decompress.

When our mother left, my father quickly found a therapist for Sebastian and me. He was dealing with his own issues over our mother and raising two kids. He may have recognized that he wasn’t in a place to give us what we needed or to even understand fully what we were dealing with, but at least he got us help….or so he thought.

Sebastian never bore the brunt of our mother’s rage…I did. She blamed me for the scars she had on her abdomen as a result of an emergency C-section. I stole my father’s attention away. In her mind, I ruined everything. She terrified me by the way she acted and the things she said. Sebastian saw a lot of what she did when she was forced to take me along on a visitation, but he also held a certain resentment towards me when the fun weekends he had with our mother were cut short, to one day, when I was forced along.

I started having panic attacks when I knew I was going to have to spend time with her. Withdrew into myself. And began hating myself because my own mother did.

After the last visit from my mother, when things really started spiraling out of control, my therapist began teaching me ways to decompress. Breathing techniques, imagery, things that would take me out of my trigger and off to some place a little better. While not many things trigger a panic attack these days, I still feel the need to decompress. Sitting here at Kensington Gardens is one of my favorite places to go. The National Portrait Gallery is another. In New York it was Bryant Park, sitting on a bench near the Carousel. Home in Chicago, it was always the little hideaway under the basement staircase that my dad made for me.

Breathing in and out, I listen to the sounds here in the gardens, the laughter of the children playing, the murmured conversations of the groups surrounding me and feel the slight breeze blowing through the trees. As the breeze ruffles my hair, I feel the stress blowing away and a peacefulness settling in. After one last breathe, I open my eyes and pull my e-reader out of my purse and scroll through the icons in my carousel until I get to the book I was reading. Tapping it, I head back off to Regency era London.

I’m not sure how long I read, but I was entirely engrossed in the story of a Naval Commander and a runaway princess, so I didn’t notice the soccer game that had picked up in the field next to me. When I did notice, it was a little too late.

“Watch it,” the shouts came just before the soccer ball crashed into my e-reader. It hit with such force that my e-reader went flying, sailing off across the lawn. Startled, I stood up, thinking only of my e-reader, but the soccer ball wasn’t done disturbing my peace. It slammed into my left cheek then went upwards. I could hear it hitting the tree bark above me, but I was too daze to think about moving when it came back down on the top of my head. Dazed, I stood up and took a step forward, forgetting where I was, and tripped over the roots I was sitting between. Normally I would have been a little more together to stop myself from falling, but the soccer ball’s attack had thrown me off and I went down, hard, with my right wrist taking the brunt of the fall.

“Argh,” I yelled as I rolled over holding onto my arm.

“f*****g hell!” A deep, velvety voice bellowed from above me. “This is why the f*****g American should not be allowed to play.”

The owner of the voice knelt in front of me but all I could do was sit there stunned.

“Miss, are you alright? Can you tell me what hurts?” The voice of this guy was, under different circumstances, one I might call panty melting. It was a deep, rich, baritone but had a scratchiness to it that made me think that if I wasn’t in such pain, I’d probably have other areas of my body calling out for attention.

“Hey,” a decidedly American voice whined. “Maybe a f*****g Brit should be paying attention to the ball instead of checking out the injured woman’s legs.”

At that comment I looked up into the face of the man crouching in front of me. With dark, short cropped hair, except for the top, which was messy with unruly curls, he had the face a sculptor would love. High cheekbones. A nose so straight and perfectly sized to his face you’d almost think it wasn’t real. Light stubble was framing lips that were exquisite. And then there were those eyes. Dark, with a roguish glint to them, they were eyes I knew could break a lesser man and having women line up to let him have his way with them.

“I’m sorry,” he said sympathetically. “Ignore them. Nothing but a bunch of tossers, the lot of them. Seriously though, where are you hurt? The ball must have hit you three or four times.”

I couldn’t help but laugh, because the freaking thing had hit me a few times. “This s**t can only happen to me,” I said still giggling. “I think the worst of it’s my wrist, but I’m sure my cheek would argue over what was hurting more.”

“I’m Marcus,” Sexiest Man Alive said as he gently took my hand in his. “Mind if I have a look?”

I shrug my shoulders and try not to wince too many times as he presses around the top and side of my hand. When he tried moving my wrist back and forth, it was all I could do not to scream out and yank my hand away. His mere touch sent a sharp pain up my arm.

“Sorry,” he whispered as he continued on. “Stevens, go get a taxi.”

“s**t, really?”

“A taxi?” I asked looking between both men.

“Miss…”

“Amelia,” I don’t think I could stand hearing him call me ‘Miss’ one more time.

“Amelia, we need to get you to hospital. I’m fairly confident your wrist needs to be looked at.”

“Fuck.” I mutter under my breath. The last thing I freaking need. “s**t. Alright. Let me, uh, just get my stuff. My e-reader went flying somewhere.”

Looking around my immediate area, I still don’t see it. But that doesn’t mean much since I can tell my left cheek is swelling and interfering with my vision. I awkwardly stand up, grateful my skirt was long enough that I didn’t flash everyone.

A guy with red hair, who was wearing the worst clothing combination of a red tank top and lime green running shorts, walks back towards our group from the grove of much taller trees that line the main path to Round Pond.

“I’d say this has seen its last day, yeah?”

Looking at my e-reader, with its glass shattered, was pretty much the perfect ending to shitty day.

“Right, then,” Marcus said as he gingerly grasped my elbow and kept my injured hand elevated. “Let’s get you to the taxi and then we’ll deal with your device.” Looking over his shoulder at his friends, he gave direction like a drill sergeant and then we were off. He called his friend, Stevens, and then directed me onto the walkway to Palace Gate.