Total pages in book: 162
Estimated words: 156796 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 523(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 156796 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 523(@300wpm)
The silence that followed was heavy. Unnatural. Disgusting. It haunted me. The air was thick with death, and the loneliness hit me hard. I had Gage in my arms, but there was no one inside of him. He’d seeped into that air, and I couldn’t hold him anymore.
I continued to rock him, my eyes unseeing like his.
I must’ve really unseen something, because I didn’t see anything else for the longest of times.
Twenty
“Come on, honey, why don’t we go get you showered?” a soft and kind voice asked. “Get that blood off you.”
I looked up robotically, my left arm hanging useless at my side. No one had noticed it yet. But I’d come in with a dead man, screaming and covered in blood, so it was kind of easy to miss.
I saw Lily, sure I did. She was right there, standing in reality. And I was living in reality. I didn’t have the luxury of escaping it. The pain didn’t let me. The demons didn’t. They’d chained me to the horrible, stark, and ugly truth that I was living with.
She flinched when we made eye contact.
I was sure I looked bad.
Dead.
I sure felt it.
“Why should I shower? That’s not getting the blood off me anyway,” I said, my voice flat.
I slowly moved my gaze back to the man in the bed, my good hand clasped around his scarred wrist. I squeezed as tight as I could, digging my nails into his skin. I wasn’t going to tenderly wake him up. That wouldn’t wake him up.
“Pain is how we feel alive, Will.”
The voice was so sure, so loud, I was convinced it was him speaking.
If he didn’t have a tube down his throat and wasn’t currently conversing with the gatekeeper of Hell.
My nails dug in harder.
It wouldn’t be tenderness that brought him back.
It was going to be pain.
“Lauren, it’s been two days,” a less gentle voice than the rest said. “You haven’t eaten. Slept. You’re still covered in freaking blood. That’s just gross.”
Amy was trying, and failing, to soften the sharp edges of the moment.
“This is Gage’s blood,” I replied. Then my brain showed me the explosion of Jade’s skull as a bullet ripped through it. “Some of it,” I corrected. “I’m not cleaning this blood off me until he wakes up and I’m certain he’ll bleed again. Till I’m certain I’m not fucking wearing the last pieces of the man I love.”
She sucked in a harsh and audible breath. “Wow. You’re so fucked up. You guys are perfect for each other.”
“No we weren’t. And that’s the point.”
There was a long pause where Amy didn’t try to offer me support, empty words of reassurance about Gage’s strength. She didn’t tell me to have faith or hope.
She knew such things didn’t exist here.
And she knew that no matter how strong Gage was, there was nothing to guarantee he would get through this. That I would get through this. It didn’t matter that every couple before us merely brushed by death, maybe got a deep graze that would never quite heal.
We were nothing like those other couples.
Death had already sunk its teeth into us; only time would tell whether it would completely and utterly tear us apart.
“Gage is gonna be pissed when he wakes up. That you’ve been sitting here, letting the life waste out of you,” a husky and even voice said.
I didn’t look up. “If he wakes up,” I corrected.
Various nurses and doctors had been moving around, speaking to me, speaking at me, knowing it was futile to say such things as “visiting hours” or “proper procedure” near me anymore. I was a bloodied and unhinged part of the furniture.
They spoke about blood loss, about infection, about “low chance of survival.” I didn’t listen. There was no point in listening. Either he woke up or he didn’t; listening to them wouldn’t change that.
“When he wakes up,” Bex repeated, moving into my eyeline, which was at Gage’s side since he was always in my eyeline. I wanted to be the first to see those eyes when they opened. Or the last to witness his final heartbeat.
I didn’t answer Bex.
She didn’t talk. I saw her look at the fresh, ragged nail marks up Gage’s scarred arms. Most normal people would have something to say about a person scratching the skin away from a person in a coma.
She said nothing.
“Gage saved my life, you know,” she said finally.
I didn’t reply. She knew I knew. Everyone knew about him and the rest of the men rescuing Bex from where she was being held captive. Where she was being brutalized in some of the worst ways imaginable. And even worse ways people couldn’t even imagine.
“He was the one who took me to my first meeting.”
That had my eyes jerking to her. For a fragment of a second, anyway. Then I remembered how important, how vital it was for me to keep my gaze on Gage. So I moved it back, loudly exhaling when I saw his heart was still beating.