Beach Reads Box Set

by Madden-Mills, Ilsa

  They’re just sucking at it.

  Ren stands on the opposite side of the room, amid the circle, a head taller than either guy surrounding him, hands on his hip. He’s staring at me, clearly lost in thought. I tip my head and jerk my chin. Pay attention.

  When Kris drops the ball, Ren finally blinks and breaks away from watching me.

  Rob sighs and scoops up the ball. “Again.”

  “Why?” Tyler says. “We’re losing tonight, at which point the playoffs are over, and you know it.”

  Ren drops his hands, and gestures to Rob. Rob volleys it to him. As Ren chests it, then easily uses his thigh to send it back to Rob, he yells, “Scapegrace!”

  Rob’s eyes narrow as the ball sails his way, but when he heads it toward Lin, a grin lights his face as he hollers, “Rapscallion!”

  Half of the guys’ gazes swivel over their shoulders to me. I studiously focus on my phone, so they don’t feel intruded on. I’m having a hard time focusing my eyes, and out of my peripheral vision, I can see them all passing some kind of inscrutable look between themselves, like they’ve been caught doing something they shouldn’t.

  I cough thickly into my arm as Lin says his word, so I miss it. But when François cracks it toward Andy, his bellowed oath echoes in the room: “Base-court apple-john!”

  Lin snorts. Tyler doubles over in hysterics, and Andy flies toward the ball, saving it from touching the floor. Juggling it, he settles it on his foot, then stares at Kris, deadly serious. “Mewling cut-purse.”

  Laughter erupts in the room, the ball starts flying, not once touching the ground, as shoulders drop and frowns dissolve. I watch the ball travel in a psychedelic blur across the space as stars dance in the corner of my vision. The room’s warmer, my labored breaths a refrain as it tilts and spins beneath me.

  I take a step back and brace myself against the wall, rubbing a hand over my face. My hand comes away damp. I’m sweating. Clearing my throat, I try to take a slow breath, and squint, one-eyed, hoping it clears my vision.

  For a moment, the world seems clear, and I can see how different the atmosphere is in the space, now. As if a switch was flipped, the room’s mood is shades brighter, like the sun bursting over land the moment it escapes a cloud.

  The oaths just keep coming, their laughter swelling in volume and complexity like a swarm of bees. These guys either all picked up on Ren’s cursing creativity over the past three years, or they’ve turned into giant Shakespeare dorks, too. Whatever the explanation, the effect is the same. Morale restored. Spirits lifted.

  God, the brilliance. Ren did what he always has—brought the joy, made people feel better. And this is why he’s instrumental to the team. This is why, as my legs buckle and I sink to the floor, I can only hope he’s too busy to notice that not even his miraculous sunshine can save this little cloud from being swallowed up in the storm.

  * * *

  Without opening my eyes, I already know where I am. I know by the smell, the scratchy sheets, the threat of fluorescents nearby. Maybe a bathroom light left on, the door wedged open.

  The fucking hospital.

  When I take a jagged breath in, my lungs feel less soupy than they did, however long ago that was, when the warehouse went sideways, and my legs turned to goo. I have no concept of time.

  I can feel my hip throbbing like a son-of-a-bitch. I lick my lips and am surprised to feel they aren’t chapped. I feel the warmth of a calloused palm pressed to mine, long fingers wrapped possessively around my hand.

  Ren.

  My eyes blink open, slide right, toward the hand that he holds. I smile involuntarily at the sight of him, sleeping. Slouched low in those wildly uncomfortable hospital recliners, his mouth faintly open, smudges under his eyes.

  I’m weak. I can feel that. My body feels heavy, and I already want to go back to sleep, but I want Ren to know I’m okay even more.

  My nose itches. I scratch it and bump clumsily into an oxygen cannula. My hand aches where the hep-lock is taped on, where the needle sends God-knows-what into my system. Antibiotics. Saline. Steroids. Pain relievers.

  The prescription list is written in scraggly marker on the white board at my feet. I can’t read it for shit. I just know it’s long. Ren shifts in the chair, stays asleep, and I watch him. I’ve watched him sleep before, and maybe that sounds weird. But sometimes I wake up before him and watch dawn paint his face, cast shadows over his cheekbones, his soft lips, that smooth brow, relaxed in sleep. His brow isn’t smoothed now. It’s furrowed. He’s worried.

  I try to squeeze his hand but can barely do it. Clearing my throat, I rasp, “Ren.”

  His eyes snap open, dart my way, then widen. Sitting upright, he stands and bends over me, cupping my face. “Hey,” he says. His voice is unsteady. His eyes red-rimmed.

  “I’m okay,” I whisper.

  He nods. Blinks, eyes wet with unshed tears. I try to lift my arms to wrap around him, offer him comfort, but they’re too heavy.

  My voice feels raw, but I clear my throat and croak out, “Come here, Zenzero.”

  A sound breaks from him as he leans closer, rests his head in the crook of my neck. I turn my head and kiss his temple. His arms slip carefully between me and the mattress. He sighs, slow and heavy. The sound of relief.

  “Frankie.” It’s all he says, but I feel what he means, love and worry braided with my name.

  When he pulls back, he sits and drags the chair closer. After smoothing back my hair, he slides the cannula back where it’s supposed to hook around my ear.

  “How long have I been out?” I whisper.

  He focuses on my hair, his fingers making gentle work of its tangles. I’m sure I look like double-microwaved hell.

  “Forty-eight hours.”

  I lift my eyebrows. “Impressive.” Clearing my throat again, I grope for the button to raise myself up a bit. “How’d the game go?”

  Ren drops his hand from my hair, squeezes my hand. “We lost.”

  “I’m sorry, Ren—”

  “Good morning, sunshine!” Lorena stands, framed in the doorway, reading my thoughts, seeing the frustration, the embarrassment.

  The helplessness.

  Crossing to the other side of the bed, she smacks her lips to my forehead. “I won’t even ask. I can tell you feel like shit.”

  Dropping to the foot of the bed, she starts massaging my legs. I groan because it feels amazing, and I also hate that the people who love me know me this well. I feel weak and needy.

  “I heard you made quite the dramatic exit.” She gives me a saucy grin.

  I glare at her. “Why are you here again?”

  Ren swallows his smile, hiding it behind a fist and clearing his throat.

  “Because you have double-lung pneumonia,” Lo says, “and you’re one of mine. Because I love you, and when we’re healing, we need all the love we can get.”

  Ren brings my hand to his cheek, kisses my palm, then sets it against his beard. Reflexively, I curl my fingers into the soft hairs, scrape my nails along his scruff.

  Lo sighs. “Well, I’ll leave you two lovebirds. I’m gonna go bug your nurse. Boss somebody around.” Standing, she kisses me again on the forehead and pats my leg. “Welcome back, baby.”

  Ren watches her walk out, then gently stands and shuts the door behind her.

  I stare at him as he moves, loving the way simple clothes drape beautifully on his body. Ball cap pulled low. Jeans that are dark and worn, a weathered blue T-shirt that brings out the ice in his eyes and the copper in his hair. When he sits, he strokes my cheek with the back of his knuckles.

  I clear my throat roughly, then lick my lips. Ren reaches reflexively for the hospital tray and sweeps up a lip balm. Uncapping it, he swipes it over my mouth, then pops the cap back on.

  “You did that?” I ask. My voice sounds watery.

  “Pretty much the only thing I could do was make sure you didn’t wake up with cracked lips.” His smile is faint. “Frankie. Why didn’t you tell me how bad y
ou were feeling?”

  I search his eyes. “I knew you’d worry. I didn’t want to pull you away from the game, from the best chance of winning.”

  His eyes tighten at the corners. “So, you decided you’d make that choice for me?”

  Shifting in the bed, I try to buy my hip some relief. “I know you, Ren. This way, you got to play the game, and I got to have the peace of mind that I wasn’t a roadblock. This is what I talked about when we agreed to give a relationship a chance. I don’t want to be a point of resentment. I don’t want my health stuff to prevent you from doing your work and being successful.”

  Ren just stares at me. “Frankie, you’re more important than a hockey game. Unequivocally.”

  “Maybe one game. But this happens to me, Ren. I catch shit because my immune system hates me, and my meds don’t help. Trust me, it won’t be the last time. Down the line, you’ll be glad that I keep this stuff to myself.”

  He shakes his head, blinking rapidly. “I…I’m… Are you serious?”

  I frown at him. “Absolutely. Tell me how the hell you would have felt if you didn’t play that game, and they lost. If you sat next to me in the hospital, useless, while I slept in a drugged stupor with a perfectly curable issue, and you watched your team struggle and fail without you. In the back of your head you would have been wondering if you should have been there, if, with your help, they would have won, thinking ‘if only Frankie hadn’t gotten sick’—”

  “That’s the last thing I’d think.”

  I laugh bitterly but it’s complicated by a coughing jag. Ren pours a cup of water, plops a straw in it and holds it to my mouth. I drink half of it and drop back on my pillow with a sigh.

  His face is taut, his jaw clenched.

  “Why are you angry?” I ask, confident I’ve read this emotion correctly.

  He whips his head toward me, pinning me with those wintry eyes that feel particularly cold at the moment. “Because what you’re saying is bullshit.” The word snaps in the air. Swearwords really do have more weight when a person uses them rarely.

  He stares at me, unblinking. “I was here with you. I’m the one who had half an eye on you and caught you before you nearly cracked your head on the concrete. I’m the one who knew what to do. I’m the one who wouldn’t let anything come between you and me until I knew that you were okay and that you were going to wake up.”

  I stare at him in disbelief. “You missed the game.”

  “Of course, I missed the game, Frankie!” He sits back and stares at me, stunned. “How could you even—”

  “I told you that’s the last thing I ever wanted!” I yell hoarsely. “I didn’t need you here, Ren.”

  He leans in, a breath away from me. “I needed to be here.”

  “Exactly. This is your trip. And every time you choose my health problems over your own life, it will be your trip, too. Then, when it builds up, when you make these choices, time and again, you’ll resent me for it. If you didn’t act like a lovesick idiot every time I got a cold—”

  “Double. Lung. Pneumonia,” he growls, ripping off his ball cap and slapping it onto the cart. “You were unconscious. Your oxygen saturation level was terrifying. This isn’t a head cold, Francesca.”

  “You shouldn’t have come.” I drag myself up higher in the bed, trying to get some kind of ground over him. “You can’t choose me and my health shit over your career and commitments. Eventually—”

  Ren stands abruptly, sending the chair scraping cross the room. Planting his hands on my hospital bed, he leans in, eyes locked on mine. “I will always choose you. And I will never resent you for it. That’s what we agreed—that I would demonstrate what I just said with my actions. But apparently even that’s impossible to trust. I have to be an asshole who leaves his critically ill girlfriend in the hospital to play a stupid hockey game to prove himself.

  “Guess what, Frankie? I’m not that guy, and I never will be. If you can’t trust me, after all that I’ve entrusted to you, showing you who I am and that I am a man of my word, then that really fucking hurts.”

  “You’re making this about you,” I counter. “You’re letting emotion cloud your judgement. And this is how I will end up getting hurt. In the moment, you didn’t want to feel guilty for not being with me. To avoid that, you stayed. But every time you do that, it’ll feel a little bit less worth it. And every time, you will blame me a little bit more. Even though I’m telling you I don’t need you here.”

  Ren pushes off the bed, pacing the room like a caged animal. Scraping his hands through his hair, he sweeps up his ball cap from the hospital cart and tugs it on, brim pulled low.

  “I can’t believe you’re that cynical, Frankie. I can’t believe you’d say that about me.”

  I stare up at him, as hot tears spill from my eyes. “I’m not cynical. That’s what happens, Ren.”

  “No, that’s what happened. And it was wrong. But that wasn’t me, Frankie. What about me? Don’t I get a say in how this goes?”

  His words land uncomfortably close to my heart.

  Trust him. Believe him.

  He takes one look at whatever face I’m making and sighs in defeat. “Because if not, how do I ever outstrip your past? No matter how much I reassure you that I will never resent you, that I will never consider you and my own happiness at odds, you don’t believe me. I have to act how you think I should. I can’t have my own needs in this relationship.”

  “That’s not fair.” My throat hurts from talking. I reach for the cup of water and Ren strides forward, helping me when I can’t even hold up my arm long enough to get it.

  I suck on the straw and peer up at him as my eyes fill with fresh tears. Will he really always look at me like this, when I’m at my worst? Like he loves me, like my pain is as real to him as it is to me?

  Like there’s nowhere else that he’d rather be?

  “How is that not fair?” he says quietly, setting down the cup.

  “Ren, I’m just trying to say there’s a compromise here. When I feel like this, you can take care of me in reasonable ways, but don’t put your life on hold.”

  He shakes his head. “No. That’s literally saying my love for you has to have conditions. I’m not okay with that. That’s you trying to find a loophole so that you don’t have to trust me all the way.”

  I glare at him. “You’re being so fucking condescending right now!”

  “Frankie.” Scrubbing his face, he sighs. “I understood becoming a couple to mean that, among other things, when either of us was hurting, we were no longer alone in that. So, I have a relationship to your pain. It’s not mine, and I don’t get to tell you what to do with it, but I get to choose to love you through it. And if and when you need care and comfort—which, like it or not, the past forty-eight hours, you did—I get to be the person who gives it to you. That’s basically the point of a relationship. Isn’t it?”

  My jaw’s tight. I feel pushed and cornered and talked down to, tired and sick and infuriatingly defeated. “Well, then we probably would have been better served discussing this philosophy of yours rather than middle names and numbers of kids over dinner. Because I’m not sure I agree with that.”

  His eyes narrow as he tips his head. “I was here because I love you. Partners who love each other are there for each other. You don’t agree with that?”

  Stubbornness draws the arrow. Wounded pride aims. Anger fires, fatally accurate. “I never said I loved you.”

  Ren opens his mouth, then freezes. Slowly he straightens and stares down at me. I can see his gears turning. It’s playing with semantics. We both know I’ve meant it, even though I have yet to say those exact words.

  His jaw tics. His eyes glisten as he stares at me. “What are you saying?”

  It hurts like hell, looking at him. Knowing that I’m pushing away the best person I’ve ever had in my life, but that’s the problem. I don’t belong with someone as good as Ren. He’s not detached enough, not selfish enough. His boundaries are too lax,
his impulse for intimacy too quick.

  The truth is there, like it’s always been. Sunshine and storms share the sky, but never together. They brush, tangential, fleeting moments of breathtaking beauty—the burning, life-giving sun piercing through a blackened sky—until it’s over so quick, it makes you wonder if it ever happened at all.

  “I’m saying you should leave, Ren.”

  He rears back like I’ve struck him. Blinking, he glances away, then down to the ground. “You don’t mean that, Frankie. You’re angry. And while I disagree with you, you’re allowed to be angry with me. But I’m not leaving.”

  I shut my eyes, press my back into the bed, and swallow my tears. “Yes, you are.”

  “Frankie—”

  “Get out.”

  It’s silent for a long moment. Nothing but ambient noises—doors open and shut, the beep of a machine. I keep my eyes closed, hold my breath, and pray for the torturous moment to end.

  Suddenly his voice is near my ear. “I’ll give you time. But I’m not walking away from this, not for good. You deserve better than that. And I do, too.”

  I bite my tongue, tears slipping down my cheeks. Finally, I feel his heat, that clean, spicy scent drift away. Long strides fade from the room before the door clicks shut.

  And then I fall apart.

  Not a minute later, Lo reenters my room and looks straight from my tear-stained face to Ren’s empty chair. “Okay. What level of self-sabotage did we just activate?”

  I dab my eyes with one hand, and with the other, lift a sparkly painted middle finger.

  “Grumpy meets glitter,” she says. “I like that.”

  “It’s been that way forever.”

  “Just like your piss-poor attitude.”

  I slam a fist into the bed and glare at her. “I sent him packing. I can send you, too.”

  “Ooh.” She fakes a shiver. “I’m scared.”

  I clench my jaw and shut my eyes again. Closing the door behind her, Lo takes her time walking over to me.