“Are you kidding? I’m coming!”
She hung up before he could argue any further. She didn’t care what Mick had told him. They didn’t even know how bad it was, and wouldn’t until they got the scan results. She wasn’t going to just sit at home waiting for the bad news.
She slid into a pair of sandals, remembered to grab a sweater along with her purse and headed out the door.
* * *
WHY WERE HOSPITALS always so white?
She hadn’t had the need to walk into a hospital too many times in her life—once as a kid when she’d sprained her ankle falling off her bike, again in Paris when she’d burned her hand on an oven, the last time to visit a friend who’d been in a mountain bike accident. And of course in high school they had all rushed to the hospital the night Brandon died, everyone huddled together in these same sterile, garishly lit hallways. She got the chills just thinking about that awful night.
But this was where Mick was, and she had to see him. See if he was okay. She didn’t think she could stand it if he wasn’t.
Her jaw clenched as she walked into the emergency room and up to the desk.
“I’m here to see Mick Reid. He was brought in tonight.”
“Are you his wife?” the woman at the desk asked.
“I’m his . . .” But what was she? “Are you going to let me in if I’m not?”
“I’ll have to check.”
She blew out a breath. If he hadn’t wanted Jamie to call, he certainly wasn’t going to invite her back there to see him.
She leaned over the desk and said quietly, “Look. Mick is my boyfriend, for lack of a more grown-up term. He’s been injured. I need to see him. Please. Or find our friend—he called me to come down here.” A small lie, but she didn’t care.
The woman was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Okay. You can go back. He’s in . . .” She tapped a few keys on her computer. “He’s in number four.”
“Thank you.”
She gripped her sweater in her hands as she moved through the heavy automatic doors.
She passed an open curtain, caught a glimpse of an empty gurney. Her stomach knotted.
Papa being taken away on the big metal bed, his face covered. Why did they have to cover his face? He couldn’t breathe right if they covered his face.
Except he hadn’t needed to breathe.
Her heart hammered, a fast, staccato beat. She walked faster, found curtain number four. She took a breath, pulled it aside and stepped through.
Mick lay on the hospital bed, his eyes closed, his face white as a sheet except for the dark bruise forming on his temple.
God, please no . . .
Papa being loaded onto the white bed on wheels, his head bruised where it must have hit the piano when he’d . . .
Mick opened his eyes.
“Allie? What are you doing here?”
She shook her head, unable to speak as fear and love and anger suffused her, forming a cold, nearly incomprehensible ball of emotion.
“What am I doing here? What are you doing here?”
“I guess . . . you can probably guess.”
“How badly are you hurt?” she asked.
“It’s just an MTBI.”
“A what?”
“A concussion. The scan looked fine. No blood clots or anything. I’ll be fine. It’s fine.”
“Jesus, Mick. This is not fine! What happened?”
“Someone got the better of me. I was . . . distracted. It’s bound to happen once in a while.”
“This happened because you were fighting. On purpose.”
He didn’t even have the decency to look ashamed. The anger boiled over.
“It’s only bound to happen when you put yourself in stupid situations. Illegal fights. Come on, Mick—this isn’t Fight Club.”
He blinked, seemed to be thinking for several moments. “Except that it is. That’s why I do it. It’s what I need.”
“That’s what you need?” she demanded. “What about me, Mick? What about what I need, huh? How about I need a man who doesn’t think punching something or getting the shit kicked out of him is the way to solve a problem? A man who doesn’t lie to me and push me away after showing me how amazing we could be together? A man who isn’t going to die on me.”
Tears made her throat tight. She used the rage simmering in her system to swallow them down.
“Seriously, Allie? I’m not going to—”
“You might! You’re the one determined to keep punishing yourself for every kitten you didn’t rescue from a tree instead of seeing what you have right in front of you. You’re the one fighting without gloves, without rules, without letting anyone know where you are in case something happens to you, for God’s sake. How fucking stupid do you have to be?”
His face went even paler, his lips tightening into a thin line, and she knew instantly she’d said the absolutely wrong thing. But she couldn’t stop now.
“Mick . . .” The damn tears again. She blinked hard, but they welled in her eyes. “I can’t watch you do this to yourself. I can’t watch you do this to me. If something happened to you . . . and it will if you won’t stop doing this.”
“You don’t understand.”
“You’re right. I don’t. I’m never going to. You could have died, Mick. Just like my dad.”
“Allie. Baby. He died of an aneurism.”
“So could you if you keep taking hits to the head. There were no blood clots this time, but what about the next time? Or the time after that?”
“Come on, Allie. That’s not going to happen. We can talk about this when I get out of here.”
She stared at him, her vision being swallowed up by the bruise. By the cold expanding in her chest.
“We could talk about it—the fighting, the emotional masochism—but you’d have to actually want to listen.” She shook her head again, taking a step back. “I can’t. I can’t do this, Mick. I just . . . can’t.”
She turned and hurried away, pushed her way through the big doors—and ran into Jamie. The paper cup of coffee he’d been carrying splashed to the floor.
“Fuck. Jamie, I’m sorry.”
“Where are you going? You okay?”
“No. I’m not okay. I have to go.”
“Allie, wait.”
But she was already moving past him, walking as fast as she dared until she got out to the parking lot. She ran the rest of the way to her car, dug in her purse for her keys.
“Come on, damn it,” she muttered.
She finally found them, unlocked the car, yanked open the door and got in. She started the engine and put it in reverse just as a sob surged into her throat, choking her on its way out.
She clamped a hand over her mouth, but another one came, then another. Blindly, she put the car back into park, leaned her head on the wheel and gave herself over to the tears.
There was no conscious thought in her mind as she cried—just emotions too big to name. Too long held to make sense any longer. Tears she’d been holding since she was ten years old. Since she was sixteen. Since she was twenty. All the old pain, the tears she’d refused to cry since then, thinking she’d just get over it—all the events that had left her feeling devastated. But she never had. She never had.
She knew she never could if something happened to Mick. Better to stay away from him, the way she had for most of her life. If he wasn’t right in front of her, he couldn’t hurt her. If she didn’t love him . . .
Except she did.
God, she loved him.
Another sob broke through but she caught it halfway, swallowed it down, the hard edge of the steering wheel digging into her hands.
“No. No more.”
She pulled in a deep breath, blew it out. Shifted the car and drove away, hoping to leave some of the pain behind in the white, white hospital that spoke to her of death.
* * *
“JAMIE, WHAT THE fuck?”
Mick was trying to sit up, but his friend held him down on the bed.
“You have to stay put until they release you.”