My eyes are squeezed shut, but I can feel her nod against the side of my face, the wetness of her tears against my skin. Her body is wracked with sobs, and I pull her closer, wrapping both of my arms around her back, even though every inch of me hurts. I want to wrap myself around her and her around me, and just get lost in her existence. I hear my mother come up behind me. I recognize the sound of her voice, but I can’t make out what she’s saying. All I can hear is Star as she cries, as her breathing slowly calms down enough for her to speak.
All I hear is Star.
“I love you, too, Ash,” she whispers, and I squeeze her close and just breathe her in. “I love you, too.”
Chapter 20
Star
“Now are you sure that you both don’t want to stay with us,” Ash’s mother asks for the hundredth time since she first suggested it. “We have plenty of room.”
“That’s okay, Mrs. Winthrope,” I say, and try to suppress a grin as Ash rolls his eyes and leans against my shoulder. “We’ll be fine at the house.”
“It’s just that you’re both still healing, dear,” she says. “And I don’t like the thought— Roger! Roger, turn here! I don’t like the thought of the two of you being on your own at a time like this.” She’s turned around in her seat now, looking over her shoulder at us, her eyes soft as she catches a glimpse of Ash’s arm around my shoulders, her son cuddled close to me. I wonder if she’d look so happy if she knew the things Ash has been muttering to me the entire ride over, low enough so she can’t hear them.
He doesn’t mean them, though. I can see how happy he is to have his parents around again. So I’m not going to blow his cover. “Really, Mrs. Winthrope,” I say. “We’ll be just fine.”
“Well, if you’re sure,” she says. “And really, dear, call me Nadine.”
“Okay,” I say, and smile at her, even though I have absolutely no intention of doing any such thing. Just because Ash and I are together doesn’t mean I’m ready to get all chummy with his mother. Not when I wasn’t even that close to my own.
Maybe Brick was right. Maybe I do built up walls around me. But sometimes people manage to get inside them with me. Like Ash did. I smile and lean over and press my lips against his cheek. “Your mom is going to make me crazy,” I whisper in his ear as Mrs. Winthrope argues with her husband over which is the best route to get to my mother’s house. Well, she argues. He just kind of nods and phases her out.
“Join the fucking club,” Ash murmurs back, a little too loudly, and I poke at him with my good hand, trying to shut him up before his mother catches us. Or before she catches onto the fact that he’s faking sleep. One or the other.
“You keep quiet,” I say. “We’ll be alone soon enough.”
I can feel his smile against my skin.
“I like the sound of that.”
All told, we were in the hospital for just over two weeks, but it had only taken hours after we’d been reunited for us to find out what had happened.
It was Preston. Lacey’s boyfriend. It was his car that hit us. An accident, they said. Both cars were totaled, my mother’s old station wagon completely destroyed. And even though his buddy who’d been in the car with him had messed his back up real bad, my injuries and Ash’s had been far worse. The doctor had come in while Ash’s mother was explaining what happened, and he’d confirmed what I’d known to be true. The pinkie finger on my left hand was gone. Amputated. Too destroyed to even try saving. On top of that I had some bruised ribs and a black eye to end all black eyes. Ash had made out only slightly better. Broken wrist, deep puncture in his thigh and another in his lung that they’d managed to get to before it got too bad. That wasn’t even counting the innumerable bumps and bruises between the two of us.
All things considered, though, I figure we made out okay.
And Preston? That bastard had walked away without a scratch.
“Gonna beat that guy’s ass into the ground if I ever see him again,” Ash had muttered into my skin, snuggling closer to me on the hospital bed. Despite what the doctors and his parents had said, he’d refused to be budged, and for the past two weeks, we’ve barely been out of each other’s sight.
To be honest, I’m kind of starting to get used to it.
It’s . . . nice.
“Now,” his mother says, turning around in her seat to look at me as the car pulls into the driveway. “Are you sure that you and Ashley will be all right here? It’s perfectly all right if you want to stay with us.” She turns around in her seat again, and orders her husband to move the car up farther in the driveway. “No, farther! There. Was that so difficult?”
“She says that now,” Ash mutters against my shoulder. “But the second she catches us doing more than holding hands, her brain will explode.”
“Shut up,” I murmur in his ear, but I’m smiling as I do it. “Ashley.” I get a poke in my side in response, but it’s in one of my—very few—uninjured spots, so it doesn’t bother me all that much. I turn back to face his mother. “Honestly, Mrs. Winthrope—Nadine,” I correct myself before she can do it for me. “We’ll be fine here. We’ll just clear a couple extra paths and—” and take it easy, I’m about to say, but as I turn and look out the car window, the words catch in my throat. There, on the front porch, is Autumn. And Roth. And as I watch, Maisie and York and about half a dozen other people I’ve seen around town but have never actually met begin filing out the front door to stand with them. What on earth?
My heart is slamming in my chest as I shake Ash into sitting up, and I can feel the second he sees it by the way his body jerks against mine. Slowly, I turn back to look at Ash’s mother, and I’m blinking through tears to see that she’s smiling at me.
“We wanted it to be a surprise,” she says. And that’s when I really start crying.
They cleaned it. Autumn and Roth and York and Maisie. Ash’s parents. Them and a handful of people they’d recruited, they’d cleaned out the whole house.
Ash and I walk through the house in a daze, leaning on each other for support. It’s not perfect, not by a long shot. There’s still work to be done, walls to be painted, boxes of things they deemed important to go through. But those are stacked up neatly in the corners of the rooms, and the color of the walls was never my problem. My mother’s hoard was. And it’s gone.
I’m crying again, and I’ve shed so many tears lately that my face actually aches from it. But Ash is gripping my hand like a lifeline, and every time I turn to him, he’s smiling at me.
“I can’t believe it,” he says. “I’m thinking maybe I’m still in the hospital, and they’ve got me on the really, really good drugs.”
I laugh and sniffle, reaching up with my injured hand to wipe away what I can from my wet face. “Then how do you explain the fact that I can see it, too?” I ask. He smiles and leans over to press a kiss to my temple.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m pretty sure it’s real. And if not, then it just means I’m sharing the good drugs. Win-win.”
My laugh comes out like a sob, and I feel a gentle hand land on my elbow. I turn and see Autumn and Roth, and I drop Ash’s hand briefly so that I can reach out and wrap my arms around them both. “I can’t believe you did this,” I whisper.