HAPTER 16
Judging by the sky beyond my bedroom windows, it was early evening when I came-to. Although for all I knew at the time, it could have been morning of the next day. But I just felt like it was evening.
This wasn’t all I felt. I also felt like someone had filled my head with sand and then smashed it with a rock.
Moaning feebly, I turned my face to the side, seeing Mira, the community’s doctor, sitting in a chair by my bedside with a book.
Immediately, she dropped it right onto the floor, already rising from her chair. “Just don’t try to move, Ellie, sweetie. Just let me check your eyes again.”
With my head feeling as heavy as a boulder, I didn’t think I could have moved to save my life, other than to shift the back of my head back onto what felt like a tall stack of pillows.
Soon, using some kind of little physician’s pen light, Mira was examining my eyes, muttering to herself, saying things like, “Good, good,” and “Yup, looking good.”
After shutting off her little light, she sat back in her chair with a deep exhale and a smile. “You’re going to be just fine, Ellie. I think you have only a very mild concussion. From the way Tom described you flying off his back, I’m not even sure how that’s possible, but it is. You apparently hit your head just hard enough to knock you out cold for a while, but not hard enough to cause any real damage. I bet you probably have one heck of a headache, though.”
I moved my head in a fraction of a nod, this tiny movement making my head absolutely throb. “Painkillers, please, Mira. Lots of them.”
She immediately complied with my request, giving me something that she called “the special stuff,” which was only for “very special patients.”
About a half-hour later, when Eric entered the dimly-lit room, I was feeling pretty special. With my head not hurting at all anymore, I was feeling downright high, even, having spent a few minutes pretty much just laughing to myself, overjoyed because Mira had told me that Eric had survived the battle against the Creepers completely unscathed.
“Or, at least completely unscathed once his rapid shifter-healing process kicked in. Same with his men too. All okay. I can’t say the same for the Creepers, though. There’s a pile of bodies about twenty feet high outside the wall.”
I wasn’t exactly sure why all this good news should strike me as particularly funny, but it just did at the time. For some reason, my extreme relief just seemed intent on manifesting in the form of giggling.
However, once Eric and Mira had had a brief, hushed conversation over by the doorway, Mira then left the room, and Eric came over to the bed and knelt down beside me. And for whatever reason, my mirth suddenly evaporated and I promptly burst into tears.
“I just really love you, Eric.”
With his handsome face radiating concern, compassion, and maybe just the slightest trace of amusement, he began smoothing my hair with a feather-light touch, probably not wanting to hurt my mildly-concussed head. “I really love you, too, Ellie…more than any woman I’ve ever loved in my life.”
“Then, just get into bed with me, please. I just want to feel your arms around me.”
After making sure that my head didn’t hurt anymore and he wouldn’t be causing me any pain, he went around to the other side of the bed and climbed in beside me, gently taking me in his arms.
Wanting to look at him, I slowly rolled over, making the entire room seem to spin. “Whoa. I guess I’m just a little dizzy. I wasn’t when I first woke up.”
Eric said that Mira had told him that extreme dizziness might be a side effect of the medication she’d given me. “So, until it wears off, I’m going to stay right here with you, just holding you. I’m not going anywhere.”
With fresh tears suddenly welling in my eyes, I winced. “I don’t ever want you to go anywhere. I just want you and only you. I don’t want Ryan anymore. I don’t ever want to see him again.”
Smoothing my hair again, Eric didn’t speak right away. “You won’t ever have to see Ryan again, sweetheart. He’s gone now.”
Crying harder, I tried to nod, although without much success, being that the side of my face was pressed into a pillow. “I’m glad he’s gone now. He wasn’t who I thought he was, and when I saw him, I just hated him for it and what he tried to do to you. That’s why I hit him with my orbs.”
Eric said he knew. “You stunned him badly enough that it wasn’t hard for me to take him out when Tom directed me to him. Kurt, Don, and Malcolm came later. And now, we can be happy together without worrying about any more traitors around here.”
Still crying, I tried to nod again. “That’s all I want. Just for you and me to be happy together. Do you know that before everything happened, I was even on my way to talk to Ryan to tell him that I only wanted to be with you? I’d been fighting it for weeks, but I finally just came to the realization that I loved you more and that I only wanted to be with you.”
Eric said he’d been thinking that things were going that way. “I’ve been able to see it in your eyes for the past two weeks. You just weren’t looking at Ryan in the same way anymore, and you were starting to look at me in a whole new way. I wrestled with the idea of trying to talk to you about things…but, in the end, I figured that it was probably best to let you come to me or Ryan when you were ready.
I never dreamed that he’d be cooking up some nefarious plot in the meantime. I knew he was dangerous, but not quite as dangerous as he eventually turned out to be in the end. I wish I’d just listened to my instincts in the first place and never offered to share the title of alpha. Obviously, that almost turned out to be a fatal mistake.”
“And thank God it wasn’t.”
Gently cradling my head in his hand, Eric leaned in and pressed a tender kiss against my forehead. “Thank God it wasn’t.”
Feeling increasingly dizzy and tired from the painkiller, I was soon out like a light again. I woke up again after a while, asking Eric to help me to the bathroom. Once he had, he helped me back into bed, and I was suddenly crying again, saying that the sheets smelled like Ryan.
“And it’s not like I’m sad that he’s dead or anything, but….” Still extremely dizzy, I sniffled, struggling to think of just what exactly I was trying to say. “I’m just sad for the person that I thought he was at one point, and I’m just sad for that man that I loved…but I know that that wasn’t really Ryan. That was just Ryan being a fake, and I just don’t ever want to smell his smell again.”
Eric said he’d strip the sheets off the bed and wash them right then, but I told him no.
“Please burn them.”
Over the next week or so, I completely recovered from my mild concussion, and life slowly got back to normal, only now with Eric as my one and only man, and the one and only alpha of Silverfield. With all thoughts of Ryan soon fading from my mind, I quickly became the happiest I’d ever been in my life.
I became even happier on Christmas day that winter, when Eric presented me with a large diamond ring, asking me to marry him. Overjoyed, I said yes without any hesitation.
That April, on a sunny Saturday, we were married in the greenspace with everyone in the community looking on. With his lower lip trembling with emotion all the while, Norm walked me down the aisle and gave me away. With him having lost his unmarried, twenty-nine-year-old daughter to leukemia several years before the Chaos, and with her being his only child, he’d told me before the ceremony that he never thought he’d get the chance to walk a daughter down the aisle. That was how he saw me now, as he also told me. As his second daughter. Becoming a bit emotional myself, I’d told him that I’d be honored to start thinking of him as my second dad.
After the ceremony, the greenspace was turned into an outdoor party venue with music, a makeshift dance floor, several buffet tables full of food, and no fewer than fifty-something tables of all different sizes. Some people had even lugged over their dining room tables from home.
All these tables were now needed because after doing some thinking a month earlier, Eric had talked to Norm, and they’d decided to move everyone at Towering Pines to Silverfield a few days before the wedding. Things would just be easier this way, Eric told me, as far as sharing supplies and keeping everyone safe and secure. I agreed, glad that everyone I cared about would now be living behind not one but two security walls that now encircled Silverfield.
At the wedding reception, Alicia danced with Mark and also with Mason, who Eric had promoted to a position of leadership within the wolfpack as a result of his honesty about Ryan’s devious plot. Stunningly, not long after the post-plot battle, Mark and Alicia had started spending a lot of time with Mason, and then had invited him to join their union on a trial basis. Because Alicia had always seemed so sure that she could never have a relationship with two men at the same time, I asked her what on earth had made her change her mind.
“Well…I guess just a very high libido and a strong desire to experience some of my fantasies in real life,” she’d said, looking more than a little uncomfortable. So far, things between her and her two men seemed to be going extremely well after several months, if a frequent smile on Alicia’s face and an equally frequent rosy glow in her cheeks were any indications.
When the sun went down on our wedding day, Eric and I took to the makeshift cobblestone dance floor in the middle of the greenspace for about the tenth time during the reception.
Smiling, I told him that I could never get sick of dancing with him. “Just you, and you alone.”
With his beautiful gray eyes twinkling in the dim light, he pulled me close. “Never? You’ll never get sick of dancing with just me?”
Smiling, I shook my head. “No, never. You’re the only man I want to dance with for the rest of my life.”
Wrapping my arms around his strong shoulders, I knew deep in my heart that this would always be true.
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