Chapter 13

Stupid people are like glow sticks. I want to bend them in half until they break, and then shake the shit out of them until their light turns on.

-Cobie’s secret thoughts

Cobie

I woke up hurting, but not nearly as bad as I'd been hurting when I got home yesterday. Then again, that had a lot to do with the fact that Dante forced the meds down my throat, whether I was awake or not.

The first time he woke me in the night, I was disoriented. I didn't know where I was. I wasn’t sure who was standing over me, nor what was going on. But, slowly my eyes had focused.

I quickly realized where I was and who exactly was standing over me.

The second time he woke me, it was close to six in the morning and I had a lot more going for me. I not only knew my name, but also where I was and who was in the room with me right away.

Then he told me he was leaving, and I smiled and thanked him for all the help.

Only now that I was fully awake and more with the program, I realized that earlier when I thought I'd known where I was, I was mistaken. I wasn't in my bedroom. I was in a bedroom that looked kind of like mine, but it wasn't actually mine at all. For starters, the door was in the wrong place, and I'd never seen the comforter that was covering me before in my life.

Painfully, I made my way to a semi-seated position—and I only made it to the semi-upright position because I couldn't lift myself up all the way without shooting pains stabbing me in the chest.

Settling for this partially hunched position, I started to make an attempt at standing but paused when I heard footsteps.

I stopped mid-stand and took a seat on the bed, waiting with anticipation for the door to open.

It did open, but the person on the other side wasn’t anyone I’d ever seen before.

“Oh!” the very cute blonde woman exclaimed. “I didn't know you'd be awake yet! Dante said you'd probably sleep for another few hours. I was just bringing you your phone and a bell.”

I must've looked confused because she grinned.

“My name is Hannah.” She waved, smiling brightly. “My husband is Dante’s brother.”

“Hi,” I croaked.

Hannah grinned at me. “I'm a nurse. Or I used to be. Well, I guess that I always will be. My license is still up to date, but I mainly work with my husband as well as Dante now that he's back. I’m so glad he’s back, by the way. When Travis called me this morning to ask me if I’d help, I jumped at the chance. He’s the only brother out of all of them who literally has nothing to do with anyone. It’s sad.”

I blinked at that information overload.

“I'm a nurse, too,” was the only thing I could think of to say.

Hannah laughed. “Sweet! We’re going to get along famously, I just know it!”

Then she walked forward, rubbing her hands together, almost as if she was getting ready to start in on a discussion that would take hours.

I had to stop her.

The urge that woke me in the first place made itself known again, and suddenly I was very glad that Hannah was here and not Dante.

“Not to be rude, but can you point me in the direction of the restroom?”

“The potty is down the hall,” she pointed, then blushed. “I have three young kids. Potty seems to be my go-to word. Sorry.”

I huffed a small laugh and stood, this time all the way up, and started to shuffle forward.

“I'm a fall risk,” I told Hannah. “But I'd like to go to the bathroom by myself if you don't mind.”

Hannah stayed at my side but didn't try to grab hold of me, and I was thankful. Dante helping me felt a lot different than some stranger. And, frankly, I wanted to do it myself. I wanted to feel like myself again.

Yesterday when I'd left, the nurse that gave me my discharge paperwork had told me to keep on top of my pain meds and try to walk as much as I could tolerate.

And thanks to Dante, I'd done very little walking. Not that I was complaining, but I wouldn't have him there forever.

Eventually, I'd have to do these things on my own, and it would probably be sooner rather than later.

Dante didn't strike me as the type who would tolerate me being in his space for too long. He might have been nice to me out of obligation yesterday, but I wouldn't take advantage of his kindness. That just wasn't me.

And I'd survived a lot of stuff on my own. I could do this, too.

Plus, I was fairly sure that his wife wouldn’t appreciate me being here.

Which made me wonder, where was here? And would she be showing up anytime soon?

“This is the bathroom,” Hannah pointed. “Those two doors are locked. I think they're the kids' bedrooms, but I'm not certain. Dante's bedroom is at the end of the hall. That one is Mary's.”

As she pointed out the rooms, I tried to memorize what she was telling me, but I realized rather quickly that I didn't really need to know what rooms were where. As soon as I could get my next dose of pain meds, I was going back home. I couldn't be here. I couldn't be indebted to anyone.

Not even the sweet, sexy man, Dante.

This was my cross to bear, and I'd do it on my own. That much I knew for sure.

Was I thankful for his help yesterday? Hell yeah. Was I going to allow it for any longer? Hell no.

I’d screwed up by not staying ahead of my pain yesterday. But you could bet your ass I wouldn’t be making that same mistake again.

Why, you ask, was I so stubborn?

Because nobody does anything out of the goodness of their heart. Nobody.

Everyone has a price. Everyone has a reason for doing what they do. And I had a feeling that Dante's reason was because he felt guilty and sorry for me.

I was nobody's problem but my own.

Hannah pushed open the door to the bathroom, then gestured me inside.

“Do I happen to have any clothes?”

Hannah nodded her head. “Your bag is downstairs. Do you want it?”

I refrained from saying something smart like, I wouldn’t have asked if I hadn’t wanted it.

Instead, I tilted my head once. “Yes, please.”

She was gone a few moments later, and I waited for her to come back up with my clothes before I started anything.

She was back within moments, setting the bag on the counter. “I can help you get ready when you get done using the bathroom.”

Yeah, right.

I smiled, but didn't disagree nor agree with her. I didn't lie. Lies had a way of getting you caught up in stuff you wouldn't normally have been involved in. So, I tried not to go that route if possible. It was just as easy to smile and stay silent as it was to say a lie anyway.

She was gone before I could say anything more, and I was grateful that she didn’t try to linger. The urge to pee was almost unbearable now that I was within seeing distance of the toilet.

Heading to the commode using small, shuffling steps, I did my business. Long minutes later—because nothing was easy, even using the bathroom—I was back up, this time standing in front of the mirror.

Time to face the music.

Letting Dante's shirt fall from my body, which took a hell of a lot longer than I would’ve wanted, I stared at the gauze.

It was innocent, really. Until you thought about what it was concealing. Only then did my heart start to slam. To literally pound in my chest.

I swallowed and started to unravel it.

The minute I saw what remained of my chest, a little squeak of air left me.

I closed my eyes and started to cry.

***

Dante

“Ummm, Dante?”

“Yeah?”

“Is there a way into the bathroom that doesn’t involve me breaking the door down?”

I paused with my sandwich halfway to my mouth, and said, “Why?”

“Because your friend went in there over an hour ago and hasn’t come back out. When I call her name, she doesn’t say a thing except for ‘be out in a minute. She’s said ‘be out in a minute’ at least fifteen times to me. It’s time for her pain meds, but I can’t get her to open the door.”

I looked over at Mary, who was asleep in the playpen that was set up in the corner of the room, and then down at my sandwich.

Figuring I could finish it on my way, I said, “I’ll be there in a minute.”

Then I hung up before she could say anything else.

After taking one more look at Mary, I walked out of my office, and into my brother’s. “Will you watch Mary for a half hour? I have a problem at my house.”

Travis held up his thumb but didn’t verbally answer. “No, our company doesn’t like doing those kinds of pickups because they’re dangerous.”

I rolled my eyes.

I was glad that I’d been on the phone, otherwise Travis would’ve let me answer it, like he’d been doing lately.

Apparently, he was ‘all answered out’ as he liked to say. Though, I didn’t blame him. It’d been entirely way too long since I’d answered a single phone call. I could see why he would want a break.

Which was also why I didn’t complain. Not one single bit.

I owed him quite a lot, and an apology was definitely among the things I owed him. Yet I couldn’t seem to get the words out.

Like this morning, when I’d called to ask him if Hannah would be willing to spend the day at my place helping Cobie, I could’ve offered him that apology then, but I didn’t.

Couldn’t, really.

I was a coward.

“Thanks.”

Then I walked out the office door, down into the forecourt of Hail Auto Recovery, waved at my brother, Baylor, who was pulling up with his own truck, and kept right on going.

Baylor hollered my name, but I waved at him and said, “I’ll be right back.”

Baylor nodded and shut the truck off, his eyes watchful.

He didn’t believe me.

Hell, all of them watched me with a look of uncertainty, as if they didn’t know if I was going to be there from one minute to the next. Then again, I couldn’t say that I blamed them. I spent two fuckin’ years in my own head, and for one of those years, I hadn’t spoken to them at all.

The other year, I’d only surfaced if one of them was hurt, which made me a pretty shitty brother if you asked me.

Their calls had been among the ones that I’d ignored, multiple times. Hell, multiple wasn’t even an accurate description to cover how many times I’d ducked one of their calls. If I had to guess, it was hundreds, maybe even thousands, of calls that had gone unanswered by me. Ninety-nine percent of them had been from my brothers.

As I drove to my house, the one that I’d once shared with Lily, I contemplated what I’d do once I got there.

I had a way into the bathroom, but that way required me to climb up the back side of the house and enter through the window. A window that was locked, but I knew how to jiggle it just right to get it open—something I’d found out after Lily and I had locked ourselves out of the house one too many times.

First, I’d try to get her to open the door the normal way, and if that didn’t work, then I’d do the climb and hope I didn’t die trying.

But after knocking on the bathroom door for a few minutes without a reply while Hannah looked on worriedly, I chose option two. Partly because I didn’t want to mess up the door. It was an antique that Lily had lovingly restored. It was tattered from years of abuse before we’d gotten it, and she brought it back to life. I couldn’t break it down—I just didn’t have it in me.

So, with no other choice, I walked around the back of the house and looked up at the window on the second floor.

This hadn’t been easy the other times I’d done it, but with a bit of elbow grease and some determination, I was able to hoist myself up and over the ledge of the house.

I managed to get all the way to the top before I looked down, and doing that made me wince, which had to be why I didn’t bother actually looking into the bathroom through the window until I had already jimmied it open and was shoving my body through the way-too-small window.

And when I finally did look up at her, I completely froze in my tracks.

I sat on the window ledge, eyes glued to the woman standing in front of the mirror. Tears were streaming down her face and trailing all the way down her naked torso, over her belly and soaking her panty line.

“Do you think,” she whispered. “That it would be inappropriate for me to go topless at the beach?”

I thought about the question before I shrugged. “Probably not inappropriate, no. But I do believe that people will stare. If you don’t want them to stare, then I’d cover it up.”

I hopped down from the window, trying my level best to not look at her body, but…I failed. I also didn’t know what the protocol was when it came to staring at a mostly naked woman who had just undergone a double mastectomy.

Should I avert my eyes? Should I stare at her and act like I wasn’t doing anything wrong? Pretend that there wasn’t anything missing?

I don’t know what the damn protocol is for this kind of stuff.

“It looks and feels weird,” she whispered, lifting her hand and pointing at what I was trying valiantly not to look at. “I was a thirty-six C before. I didn’t have big boobs, but they weren’t small, either. They were normal boobs, but now, they’re just…not there anymore.”

I stared at her breasts, or what was left of them, anyway. And there wasn’t much. Not really. Mainly just the painful looking scars where her breasts used to be.

The drains that were coming out of each side of her chest wall were drawing more of my attention, and I couldn’t help walking up to her side and reaching for the drain that was well on its way to half full.

I’d never actually done anything like this before. The only medical-type things I had ever done had been while I was in the military, and they had been more trauma related. Lately—just last week in fact—I’d had to put a Band-Aid on Mary’s newly skinned knee.

She didn’t move a muscle as she watched me perform my newly acquired skills, and I kept glancing up at her face, wondering if she was going to say anything.

She didn’t disappoint me, only it wasn’t what I expected to hear her say.

I thought she might’ve come out and said that this was incredibly awkward, which it was. Or maybe that she was hurting, which I could tell was happening beneath her carefully void exterior.

But what she said instead was, “I’m going to go home today, and I don’t want you to feel bad when I do.”

I blinked.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you going home?” I asked. “You didn’t ask me to bring you here. I decided to bring you here on my own. If I had a problem with you being here, I would’ve left you at your place, and called in a few favors to get people to check on you.”

She looked away from my face and down to her scars again.

“Nobody does something for nothing.”

Her murmured words had my brows raising.

“No,” I agreed. “Not usually. And in this case, you’d probably be right. But I don’t feel right about leaving you all alone at your place when I have nobody here in mine and the ability to take care of you.”

“I don’t want to be anyone’s burden.” She kept speaking in such a low, broken tone that it nearly hurt to hear. “I’m tired of being that person.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but I felt her words in my soul.

“My family died in a car accident,” I told her. “My wife, two children, and my sister were in the car. My sister was driving, and she was high on pain pills at the time. She was the only one who survived. I had to listen to them die while I was on the phone with them.”

Her eyes widened in shock.

Mine did, too.

I couldn’t believe I’d told her. I couldn’t believe that I was able to get the words out.

Normally, they got stuck in my throat. I would try to get the words out, to voice the devastating truth, but it was almost as if my body would physically stop me from talking about it. As if I didn’t say it, then maybe it wouldn’t be true.

It’d been years, and it still felt like it had happened yesterday.

The wound from losing my family was still fresh, and it would forever be a gaping one. It still bled. It felt like I was still in shock most days, and I sometimes wondered if it was really as bad as it sounded.

But this reality of mine was really that bad.

Each morning I’d pray that it was all a bad dream.

Each morning I woke up, and my wife and kids weren’t there.

They didn’t run to me when I emerged from my bedroom, and my cycle in this living hell would start all over again.

God, it fucking hurt.

It hurt so goddamned bad sometimes that I could barely draw a breath.

But then Mary happened.

She saved me.

Every day that she was there since she’d been put into my care by her mother was a day that was a bit less bleak than the day before it.

I wouldn’t say that the life I lived was a good one. I was basically just surviving on the hope that someday it might not hurt as much as it did now. Maybe one day, just the thought of my kids no longer being here to come running into my room and bounce on my chest each morning wouldn’t hurt this much. But that day wasn’t anywhere in sight for me yet, and I had doubts that it ever would be.

“I’m sorry.”

I looked up to find her eyes on me.

“There’s nobody here that’ll complain about you being here. I’m trying to get back into the swing of working, and a lot of shit has piled up during the years that I hid my head in the sand. I’m needed at work, and Travis, my brother, deserves the break. The house is big. It’s empty, and it’s quiet. Honestly, you’ll be doing me a favor by staying.”

She looked torn. “You don’t even know me.”

I shrugged. “You don’t know me, either.”

A little smile kicked up at the corner of her lip. “True.”

With nothing else to do but hope that she would come to the decision to stay on her own, I offered my shower to her.

“You want to shower?” I questioned.

“I can’t,” she hesitated. “They said not to get the incision wet until they take the drains out at the one-week follow-up.”

I nodded my head. “That doesn’t mean we can’t do the bottom half.”

My phone rang before I could do anything more, and I held up a finger and said, “Give me a sec.”

She nodded her head and slumped even more forward, causing me to worry.

I answered it at the same time that I walked to the door.

“Yeah?”

“We got problems,” Travis said.

My heart started to slam inside my chest, and every possible horrible scenario started to play through my brain. My hand froze on the doorknob, and it took everything I had not to drop to my suddenly shaking knees.

“What?” I croaked.

Travis cursed. “It’s nothing bad. Not with Mary, anyway.”

Relief poured through me, and my vision went momentarily white.

“Fuck.”

“God, I’m sorry,” Travis said. “She’s still sleeping in your office. I just went and checked on her. But I got a call out, and I have to take it because everyone else is otherwise occupied. Drake’s truck broke down right outside of town, and I need to go get him. Mom’s here, and she wants to take Mary home with her.”

I opened my mouth to immediately deny it, but the denial stuck in my throat.

“She says she’ll even take her to your house.”

Then the words that he’d said before pierced through my freak-out fog. “What is Drake doing in town?”

Travis grunted. “I don’t know. Reed called me to tell me that he needed assistance. Since I’m a nice big brother, I said I’d do this one favor for him.”

Thoughts started to flit around in my brain, and I cleared my throat. “I have to talk to you about something later. Can you come over when you’re done?”

“Yeah,” Travis said hesitantly. “What do you want me to tell Mom?”

“Tell Mom to take Mary to her house,” I answered. “And I’ll come get her later. I still have some work to do, but I’m going to help Cobie get cleaned up and then hand her back over to Hannah.”

Travis grunted something. “You want me to meet you at the office or at your place?”

“Office,” I answered.

I needed to talk to Rafe, and I needed to talk to Reed to figure out why Drake was here. It didn’t seem like a coincidence that I took Cobie out of her home, away from him, and now he was here. Coincidences were never really coincidences when they came to men like Drake.

I just needed to know how he’d figured out that she was gone and how he knew that she’d gone with me.

But I didn’t want to alarm Cobie while I did that.

“10-4,” he grunted. “I’ll tell Mom. I think you might’ve just made her day.”

Then he hung up, leaving me with a sick feeling in the bottom of my stomach. One that was a combination of worry, anger, and sorrow.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I grunted, then opened the door.

When I did, I found Hannah on her butt across the hallway as she played on her phone. Upon me opening the door, she stood up and smiled hesitantly. “Everything okay?”

I nodded. “Can you go grab her pills for me?”

Hannah rushed off to do that, and I made a mental note to thank her later. She didn’t know me all that well, but she hadn’t hesitated at all when I asked her to come up here and take care of Cobie.

I appreciated that greatly.

I turned around and gestured to the shower. “There’s a seat in there you can use. Just sit down on it, and I’ll get Hannah to help you wash. Is that okay?”

Cobie nodded her head hesitantly.

“Are you okay with me leaving to go back to work again?”

She nodded again.

“Hannah’s getting your pain pill. It was due about twenty minutes ago, so I have a feeling that you’re going to start hurting any minute now. While you still can, I’d suggest getting in there and doing your thing. Do you like tacos?”

Cobie flicked her head and then nodded once.

“Good,” I started to laugh. “Because other than gas station chicken, that’s all there is here. I’ll pick up some tacos on the way home. If you can think of anything else you need, let me know, okay?”

She swallowed.

“You’ll be here when I get back?”

“Yes.”

There was no hesitation in her voice, and something inside my chest that I hadn’t realized was tight loosened. “Good.”

Then I was gone, passing Hannah in the hallway. “Get her cleaned up if you can. She said she can’t get the incision wet, but she’d enjoy a bath if you can figure out a way to do that without her getting those wet.”

Hannah smiled. “I think we can manage.”

Then she was gone, leaving me in my hallway, staring at two women interact in my bathroom. In Lily’s favorite room of the house.

“I miss you, Lil,” I said to the open air.

Nothing happened. Nobody responded.

And that pit at the bottom of my belly grew another inch.