by Maisey Yates
The prospect of taking Rebecca back to bed was much more appealing than walking through this field of emotions that he had a feeling was full of a hell of a lot more burrs than wildflowers.
“At a certain point you’re going to have to start going,” she said, her tone maddeningly matter-of-fact. As if this weren’t a complicated issue.
“No,” he said, “I don’t. I’m not going to stay in town. Nobody wants me to. Come to that, I don’t think I want to.”
“Plenty of people live out of town and still stay in touch with their families. Do you honestly think that coming back for a few months and laying out ultimatums and commands is going to heal a rift? I mean, that’s what you’ve been doing with me. Burst in and tell me how it’s going to be, then expect me to thank you for it.”
“You didn’t mind being told what to do a few minutes ago,” he said.
He couldn’t read her expression in the darkness. But, he had a feeling that it wasn’t a pleasant one. He was comfortable with that, though. Comfortable with her being angry with him. More comfortable with sex than he was with the complicated feelings surrounding his family, and his sister giving birth.
“How old was she when you left?” He hadn’t expected that.
“Six,” he replied.
He remembered her clearly. An impish little girl with wide blue eyes and almost white blond hair. And of course, he’d been a teenager, so he had found her mostly boring. He’d been so wrapped up in his own life, a life that he had been convinced the universe revolved around. What else mattered except for his own comfort? His own happiness?
He had never, not once, considered that his actions might affect other people. He had never particularly cared. The entire world—in his mind—had existed to bring him happiness.
He wished he would have cared about her then. When it would have mattered. It was all a little bit too late now.
“That must be hard,” she said, speaking slowly, as though it were foreign to her to say something comforting.
“Yeah,” he said, bracing himself on the window, staring out into the blackness beyond his front yard. “You could say that.”
“Let’s go.”
“Where?” he asked, turning slightly to face her.
“To the hospital. I’m driving you. No matter what Madison says, if you don’t go, they’re going to hold that over you. Better to go and have them be unfriendly jackasses when you get there.”
“You care whether or not they’re mad at me?”
She shrugged one bare shoulder, then moved across the room, fishing around for her clothes.
“Now suddenly you don’t have a comment?” he asked.
“I don’t know why I care,” she said, straightening, pulling her dress over her head. “Maybe because there’s no chance ever that I’m going to make up with my mom? Maybe because I never even knew my dad, and also maybe because my brother is one of the most important people in the world to me? Maybe it’s just the fact that your family is right there, and you could fix it. But you aren’t.”
“Our situations aren’t that easy to compare,” he said.
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“You have a lot of maybes.”
She growled. “I’m sorry, I’m fresh out of certainty. I just did about the craziest thing I can think of with the last person on earth I ever should have done it with. You want certainty? You should damn well be at the hospital with your little sister. No matter what. Even if she doesn’t want you in the room, even if you end up cooling your heels at reception, you should be there.”
“Why?” he asked, taking a step toward her, pressure building in his chest. “According to you I’m a scourge, so what good could I possibly do there?”
“You’re her brother,” she said, her expression furious. “Maybe that doesn’t matter to you right now. Or you’ve lost touch with what that means, but it’s a big deal.”
Everything in him felt like it exploded then, a devastating thunderclap that toppled defenses, that exposed pain he hadn’t even known existed.
His little sister. His little sister he’d abandoned. It was so clear then. What he’d lost. What he’d missed.
All he could think of was that he had to make it stop. That he needed something, anything. And since Rebecca was the one to rock him like that, he felt like she might be the one to fix it. He advanced on her, only stopping when she shrank back. He closed his eyes, inhaling the scent of her, so close he could reach out and touch her with ease. So close he could just pull her into his arms and kiss her and forget that Sierra was in the hospital. That she’d just given birth.
That his whole damn life was…this. Years wandering in the wilderness, building nothing except a fortune, without a single damn person to call if he had a heart attack or some shit. He had a family. That was his one tie. The only one that couldn’t be severed by distance or negligence. Because it was blood.
Whatever he’d been about to say, whatever he’d been about to do…it all just sort of evaporated. Because there was nothing he could rail at, destroy or run from that would fix this. Distance would only widen the wound, and he’d had enough of that.
There was only one thing to do.
“Take me to the hospital,” he said.
He should take her home. He shouldn’t have her drive anywhere.
“Sure.” Her voice was blank, and what he could see of her face was too.
They didn’t talk as they headed out of the house to the truck. He handed her the keys when they got to the vehicle and she took them, getting inside and starting the truck while she waited for him to get in.
As soon as they were on the main highway, she started to chatter. Which was very un-Rebecca-like.
“You probably don’t know the layout of the new hospital,” she said. “So it’s better if I drive because the birthing center is kind of hard to find. Like it’s in its own little…part of the…” She trailed off.
It suited him to have her manufacture excuses for why she was coming with him. For why he was having her drive. It was true, he didn’t know where the birthing center was, but he had a smartphone so he could figure it out fast enough by using the map app.
But he just wanted her with him. Whatever the fuck that meant, he wasn’t in the mood to figure it out.
“I bet when you left there were hardly any shops open on the main street,” she said as they drove through town. “So this must be very different.”
She sounded nervous. Nothing like she normally did. He didn’t like it. He would rather have her going after him with verbal knives than acting like she was nervous. He didn’t want her nervous. Pissed and profane, or panting beneath him, sure. But not nervous.
“Yeah, it’s pretty different,” he said.
Main Street had been white noise to him when he’d been in high school. Something he’d driven by every day of his life. He’d stopped looking at it. He’d stopped looking at much of anything except for what benefitted him, what gave him a rush of adrenaline.
He’d been the heir apparent to the town in his mind, and he’d felt like it all existed for him. That was what he remembered now as they drove on the dark, rain-drenched streets. The world’s quietest homecoming parade. Just him riding shotgun in his own truck as Rebecca filled the silence with talk about what business was where and for how long.
While he thought about that night he’d driven through town then sped off north. His friends were messing around. Passing on double lines, and it was his turn to pass and take the lead so, even though it wasn’t safe, he did. And then he saw headlights coming his direction.
He gritted his teeth, keeping his eyes on the road. On the headlights firmly in the correct lane.
Finally they arrived at the hospital. The tiny parking lot at the birthing center was packed full, and there was only one available space. Rebecca turned into it sharply and killed the engine, then got out without waiting for him.
She scurried quickly to the automatic glass doors, dodging raindrops as they started to fall.
He walked slower, not caring when the icy drops hit his bare skin, slid inside the collar of his shirt and down his back. He’d forgotten his hat. Which seemed about right since his whole world had been pitched just slightly to the left and he wasn’t sure what the hell he was going to do about it.
He wasn’t sure what the hell he was going to do next.
They walked into the waiting area, a small space with double doors on the opposite side of it, guarded by a man sitting at a desk positioned out front.
“Who are you here to see?” he asked.
“Sierra West.” Then he remembered that wasn’t her name anymore. “I mean Sierra Thompson. Sorry. I can’t quite get used to that.”
The man looked at the registry book in front of him, offering Gage an understanding smile as he did. “Takes a while for a name change to stick.” He took two name tags and dated them, then passed them over to Gage and Rebecca to add their names. “If she’s not taking visitors the nurse will stop you. She’s in room three.”
He nodded, missing his hat again and feeling a little like an ass.
“Come on,” Rebecca said as the man at the desk pressed a button and opened the security doors.
She didn’t touch him, but he still felt connected to her by some invisible thread. But that was low on his list of things to worry about. Especially when he saw Colton, his wife, Lydia—who Gage had yet to formally meet—and Maddy sitting in the waiting room.
They all stood when he walked in. Colton wrapped his arm around Lydia and drew her close. Maddy crossed her arms, holding herself close and putting obvious distance between her and himself.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” he said, his lame joke doing nothing to defuse the tension in the room.
“Then, maybe don’t make a habit out of showing up only when someone is hospitalized?” This came from Maddy.
“How is she?”
“Great,” Colton said. “Resting.”
“Everything is good with the baby?”
“Everything’s fine. It’s a girl,” Maddy added. “If she wasn’t okay, I would have told you.”
“Yeah, I figured.” He actually had. Madison was straight up, that much he had gathered in their limited interaction.
“You can go,” Colton said.
Lydia put a hand on her husband’s shoulder. “I don’t think he wants to go, Colton.”
“No,” Gage said, “he doesn’t.”
“She didn’t ask for you,” Colton said. “Why would she? For seventeen years you haven’t been around. There would be no point in her asking for you. Why would she ask for you now?”
“I know. I’m not going to stand here and try to justify myself. Not now. That’s a conversation for a different time. And it’s going to take a lot more than one conversation, frankly. But right now, I want to see her. Or, I at least want her to know that I was here.”
Colton frowned, looking past Gage, his eyes landing on Rebecca. “Are you with him, Rebecca?” he asked.
Gage looked down at Rebecca. Her golden cheeks darkened, pink flushing up beneath her skin. “I drove him,” she said, her voice monotone.
Colton looked like he wanted to launch into an inquisition, but he refrained. “I can check and see if she wants to see you.”
“I will,” Maddy said, treating him to a look that would have scorched a lesser man before she walked toward the patient rooms, disappearing into one of them.
A heavy, uncomfortable silence descended over them.
“Were you all here the whole time?”
Colton nodded, and so did Lydia. “That’s what we do,” Colton said. “That’s what I do. It’s what I’ve done ever since you left.”
“I need coffee,” Lydia said, her tone firm, giving every indication that she had no need of coffee, she only wanted to remove herself from the conversation. “Rebecca, why don’t you come with me?” She smiled pleasantly at Rebecca, making it very clear that it wasn’t optional.
Rebecca didn’t look at him. Instead, she turned and went with Lydia without giving them another glance. Probably for the best. He didn’t exactly want to play up his connection with her. Both because he didn’t want Colton to know about the accident just yet, and because he really didn’t want his brother to know about the fact that he had slept with Rebecca.
“That was subtle,” he said.
Colton lifted a shoulder. “That’s Lydia. She’s a politician. She gets things done one way or another, but not necessarily with subtlety.”
“I’m not going to hurt her,” he said, speaking of Sierra.
“I don’t believe you.”
He deserved that. He knew he did. But hurting Sierra was the last thing he wanted and he’d be damned if he let the accusation stand.
“Do you think that I came back to help handle Dad’s affairs and cause more damage? That doesn’t make any sense. I can’t fix what happened in the past if fixing it means making the last seventeen years completely different. The only thing I can do is change what I’m doing now.”
“And then you’re going to leave.”
He gritted his teeth. “Plenty of people maintain a relationship with their families while they live in different towns,” he said, echoing what Rebecca had said earlier.
“Yeah, but even you have to admit your track record on that is pretty bad.”
“I’m not going to deny it.” Tension stretched between himself and his brother. Tension and so many years of silence bringing them to this moment. “There were things that I couldn’t talk about. Things I still don’t want to talk about. But I was young, and I was stupid. I did the easy thing,” he said, nearly choking on the words because there hadn’t been anything easy about leaving his family. “But I’m thirty-five years old, I’m not eighteen. I’m not going to handle things the same way now that I did then. It was easy for me to think that time stopped here while I was gone. That Sierra was still a little girl, that you were still a skinny kid. But now, I’m thinking I’m not the only one that’s guilty of that. You think that I went away and did nothing, that I learned nothing, that I suffered nothing. I had a life. Seventeen years of it. I’m not the same person I was when I left.”
Colton eyed him warily. “Sure, I hear you. But I’m not sure that I can trust the person standing in front of me any more than I could trust the person you were.”
“Let’s meet tomorrow. I want to talk to you about the financial situation. The best I can do is be transparent with you about this stuff. The best we can do is start, right?”
“I guess so.”
Maddy reappeared then, her expression just as guarded as Colton’s. “She said you can come in.”
His heart dropped slightly, and he realized then that he hadn’t really imagined she would let him visit her. He had expected to get turned away at the door. The fact that Colton, Maddy and Sierra were accepting him in any capacity was more than he had expected.
He had imagined resistance. Outright refusal. It was strange to wrap his head around something different.
He nodded, following Maddy to the door and stopping her just as she started to push it open. “Thank you for calling me,” he said.
“I told you not to come.”
“I know. But would you have listened if our situations were reversed?”
A reluctant smile tugged at her lips, and she quickly forced it back down. “No. But also, I haven’t been out of Sierra’s life all this time so I would punch you because you would have no right to tell me to stay away.”
“You’re protective of her and I get it. I respect it. But I don’t want to hurt her, I promise you. I think you’re right. I think we are alike. Which means I know, and I trust, that if I mess this up you’ll come after me with a knife.”
“I will eviscerate you with the confidence and skill of a woman who is no stranger to self-defense. On that you can trust me.”
“I do.”
“Good,” she said, pushing the door open and indicating that he should go in without her. “Oh, and, G
age?”
He looked at her again. “What?”
“Don’t hurt me either.”
That small moment of vulnerability from prickly Maddy made his chest tighten. “I won’t,” he said, his voice gravel. And he prayed to God right then that he could keep that promise.
It had been a long damn time since anyone had asked anything of him. Since anyone had expected anything of him. Maddy made him want to try.
She gestured for him to go on, and he did, walking into the darkened room, a curtain that separated the entry from the main part of the room blocking his vision.
“Sierra?” he asked.
“Come in.” He heard his sister’s weary voice.
He came around the curtain and his throat tightened, so suddenly, so swiftly, that he could hardly catch his breath.
Sierra was hooked up to IVs and wires, different monitors with various displays that were representative of his sister’s life, shrunk down to a pair of green lines. Her blond hair was disheveled, her hospital gown tied crooked, circles beneath her eyes were visible even in the near darkness.
Her husband, Ace, was standing at the head of the bed, his expression one of pure exhaustion and awe. There was a little bundle in Sierra’s arms.
“This is Lily Jane Thompson,” Sierra said, beaming as she angled the baby in her arms so that Gage could see her tiny, perfect face.
His gaze flicked to his brother-in-law who was beaming with pride even in his sleep-deprived state. He put a protective hand on Sierra’s shoulder, sliding it over to the other, rubbing her gently.
Gage felt like he was having an out-of-body experience. He could see Sierra perfectly as she’d been when he left. A little blonde girl with tousled curls. And here she was, her hair just as messy as it had been back then, holding her own little girl. And she had a husband by her side. A man who was going to take care of her.
She really didn’t need him. Hadn’t for a long time. And when she had, he hadn’t been around. Like all of them. Like everyone he’d left behind.
“Do you want to hold her?” Sierra asked, looking up at him with bright blue eyes. He had a feeling she didn’t actually want to relinquish the baby, which was fine by him since the idea of holding something that tiny and fragile scared him shitless.
