He had to get out of this place.
When he pulled the door open to leave, he came face-to-face with the very reason he was losing his mind, and he swallowed the sudden sour bile that was in his mouth.
“Hi.” She was just stepping onto his porch, and she looked nervous.
“What do you want?” His tone said, Get lost, and her gaze flitted away for a moment.
She cleared her throat, and when she looked at him again, she licked her lips. “I don’t want you to leave.”
“I have a shift at the hospital.” He brushed past her, running down the porch stairs to his car. She’d conveniently parked her bike behind his car. “See you didn’t get your license back.” His voice was an irritated mutter. She mistook the statement for an invitation to converse.
“Revoked for the time being. It’ll be reviewing in a couple years, depending on my parole status, and—”
“I don’t care. Just move it. You’re blocking me in.” He turned from her as her words still hung in the air as much as her mouth still hung open. She didn’t respond, and he looked back to her slowly.
She was staring at his feet, fighting the tears, swallowing over and over as she tried to rein in the emotion. She finally looked at him again. “I don’t want you to leave Savoy.”
He didn’t know why he suddenly couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t swallow, and his throat felt like sandpaper. And as he forced his face muscles to relax and his eyes to release the wide-eyed terror, his hands fisted at his side. He had to get away from her . . . but he wasn’t at all sure he could leave if she asked him to stay.
Chapter Twelve
Six Years Before
A person hears a lot of things in the hospital, and only a small amount of it is actually meant to be heard. It was the longest and most agonizing eight hours of his life, waiting for his parents to arrive. He already knew his sister was dead, and they did too, but there were no planes to catch in Savoy, and so they had to suffer hours in the car until they could make it to Little Rock to catch a flight south.
She was brain dead. They’d explained it to him, and even if they hadn’t, he knew perfectly well what she was. The ambulance had been close to the scene, close enough in fact to make it there in time to keep her alive. Alive long enough to get her to the hospital before her heart was quiet too long, her lungs still for too long. Long enough for the organ transplant team to catch wind of the gold mine his sister had become. It was what she’d want. Another thing he didn’t need to be told but that the transplant coordinator felt the need to say anyway.
He sat by her side, listening to the machines keep her alive. He cried, he sat in a dead stupor, and he eventually stood and walked to the hallway. He was tired of looking at her. She looked too . . . alive. So incredibly alive. Head injury. Her head had slammed into the side of the passenger door as his car rolled three times before coming to settle on a rocky patch of beach. He couldn’t stand to see her like this, and so he left. He’d already heard that Bailey was going to be fine, so he needed to stay close to Jess. He sank into a bank of chairs in a small side hallway near her room, and he stared at the industrial tile floor.
The next time he looked up, it was to see a doctor standing at the counter with a man in a suit. The man had a badge on his belt, and they were looking at him. The man, a detective if Darren was guessing, was just watching him. He looked away. The detective couldn’t bring his little sister back to life, so Darren didn’t give a shit about the man.
He sat for hours. Different doctors walked in and out of Jess’ room. Darren knew some of them were transplant doctors. They were waiting for Darren’s parents to arrive, like vultures ready to pounce on the spoils. It was what Jess would want. Yes, it was, and some day he would wrap his head around the fact that these doctors intended to leave her body a hollow shell—her body that was still so alive, and yet was just a vegetable. Why vegetable? Why not a loaf of bread? A cut of spoiled meat? Vegetable just didn’t make sense.
People stared at him when they walked by, and after a while the detective returned. He was staying close. He was as much a vulture as any of them, but he stayed away from Darren. He left Darren in peace, but his focus kept shifting to Darren as though there was something to say, but he wasn’t ready to speak. The doctor walked out of the room a bit farther down the hall, and he handed the detective a slip of paper. His eyes scanned the slip before he glanced up at Darren and then back down the hall toward the door the doctor had come from.
Was it Bailey’s room? He wanted to see her; he needed her the way he always needed her when life fell apart, but she’d been driving his car, and he couldn’t figure out how to feel about that. It hurt to think she might have done something wrong to make this happen. It hurt to think she might be responsible. Not his Bailey. This couldn’t be her fault.
In any other situation, she would be the one he would think of first, the one he would want to reach out to, the one he would crave. He needed her support, her gentle sympathy. He’d had it before, and he still thought of it whenever he was crumbling.
Darren had lost his high school best friend, Scott, to suicide his third year of college. He’d been too busy to maintain the friendship the way he should have, and once Scott was gone, Darren was able to think of little else but the many times he let Scott’s calls go to voice mail, the times he’d turned Scott down when he’d called wanting to go out, every last rejection he gave his best friend that said loud and clear that there were other things in life more important to him. It had happened just before winter break, and he was fortunately home a month, otherwise he wasn’t sure he’d have made it through the pain.
Bailey had been the one he needed, and one night, two weeks after Scott’s death, she’d given him exactly what he’d craved. They’d ended up in bed together, curled up with her face nuzzled into his neck. His parents had been traveling, and Bailey was spending the night with Jess. Jess had fallen asleep while they’d watched a movie, and the moment he stood, Bailey’s eyes found him, and he reached for her hand. She’d said nothing when he led her down the hallway to his bedroom, and it was silent when she’d climbed in bed with him. She stroked his back in the dark, and he stared into the black, keeping his body close to hers and feeling the first measure of relief he’d experienced since finding out his friend was gone. They had done nothing wrong, nothing inappropriate at all, but neither of them had ever spoken about that night since then. It was never spoken about to anyone in fact, and he knew without even asking that she’d never told anyone, either. She was just his rock, the one he desired when nothing else could give him peace.
He craved her even now, wanting to feel her close to him, wanting to feel her fingers stroking his back, and her warm breath inhaling and exhaling calmly against his neck. He needed that relief more than anything in the world right now, and he knew she needed him too; how could she not? She was alone. Her parents must be on their way too, but she was alone, and she had to be afraid. But he couldn’t go to her. He was terrified to see her, terrified he might have to acknowledge that she’d done something to cause this, and he wasn’t sure he could deal with his rock being tarnished.
The detective walked up to the room he thought was likely Bailey’s room, peeking in and then slowly meandering back down to the nurses’ station. The detective kept looking into her room, and then eventually he disappeared inside, and two nurses exited. They walked slowly, not paying much attention to anything. They leaned up against the side of the desk, and he listened.