I silently study him. No heat. No judgment. There isn’t room for the past between us.
“She’s this way.” I start down the hallway and Jake follows. I stop at the door, bracing himself before I walk inside, and from the corner of my eyes I catch Jake doing the same.
The room is dark. One light over the bed illuminates Sin lying on her back in the center of the mattress. She looks so tiny and frail. Her normally rich brown skin has a grayish pallor and she’s still, so abnormally still.
Jake takes a step forward, blinking over and over, like he’s trying to force his brain to comprehend the sight in front of me. He stands at the threshold, afraid to move forward.
I walk up to the bed and lean forward until my lips are next to her ear. I whisper, “Jake is here. You know how hard it was for me to let that happen, right? When you wake up, I expect a shot or a bottle of champagne for that accomplishment. I’m gonna go get Dan and Miles, let them know you’re okay. But I’ll be back.” I stand and rub a gentle hand down her cheek before I turn eyes to Jake.
“I was just letting her know I’m going out to give the boys an update, and I have to check on . . .” Seth. I know he’s not in the same boat as Sin, but I need to put eyes on him. Touch him with my hands to make sure he’s okay. “I won’t be that far away.”
“Are you sure they said she was . . . ?” He swallows the rest of those words down. His disbelieving eyes plead with me to confirm that his worst nightmare isn’t true.
“They said she’s expected to make a full recovery.”
I walk just beyond the door, leaving Jake and Sin alone. I watch as he finally approaches the bed. He looks at her with a tenderness I wouldn’t attribute to someone like him. He’s rich, famous, and entitled, but there’s no mistaking the emotion flowing from him. His stare is unbroken. He takes in the rise of her chest and the whiz of air as she exhales. Gingerly, he runs fingertips down her arm and laces her unresponsive fingers with his. At the broken sound of his voice I walk away. And run right into Aiden.
I assume they let him back here as Seth’s emergency contact.
He’s pacing back and forth, prowling around like a bulldog looking for a fight. He has to be worried because this happened on his watch. We hired his company for the sole purpose of protecting Sin. By all accounts they have failed miserably. There isn’t a whole lot that could’ve been done, but there is definitely enough blame for all of us to assume a portion.
Irritated, he pauses, stares at his phone, and I think he might be a minute from chucking it at the wall, but he snaps it back up to his ear and resumes the pacing.
“Hello . . . ? Mrs. Cody? Hello?” He looks at the phone again. I’m assuming to check his bars. He points the phone in my direction. “My coverage is shit back here. All these fucking machines.” He brings the phone back to his ear, and if I’m not mistaken a flush creep up his cheeks.
“No, ma’am. Sorry about that,” he says and has the nerve to look abashed. “I just came from his room. They did have to operate because he broke his femur and a couple of ribs when he jumped off the fucking stage like a lunatic.” He pauses and I can hear the female voice yelling from here.
“Sorry about the language. Yes . . . I would have probably done the same thing, but Ian Foster wasn’t an active shooter looking for any available target. His focus was one person—Sin. Protocol says he should have moved toward Sin. Not jumped off the fucking stage.” I move a little closer trying to strain my ears to hear what she’s saying. But the voice is muffled behind Aiden’s cheek against the speaker.
“You want me to book the flight?” There’s another pause while he listens. “I’ll see you when you get here.” He nods. “Love you too, mom. And I’ll take good care of him until you get here.” I knew Seth and Aiden were close but close enough to call his mother mom? That’s news.
“Seth’s mom,” he says, leaning back against the wall. “Sweetest lady you ever want to meet. When we were in boot camp, she sent care packages for our entire class. And when we graduated, his parents had us all over to their house for a big barbeque.”
“They sound like really good people.”
“They are. The best. But his mom doesn’t like cussing, or processed food, or me letting her crazy-ass son jump thirty feet from a stage toward a man with an assault rifle and getting hurt in the process.” He shakes his head, his affection for Seth’s mom clearly visible even through his frustration.
“So, he’s okay? I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but I heard you say he broke his femur.”
He nods. “Yeah. His femur and a couple of ribs. He’s scraped up pretty good but nothing too crazy.”
For the second time in so many hours relief inundates my veins, pumping through my body with every beat of my heart, leeching away the adrenaline that has kept me awake and rooted to this hospital.
“That’s . . .” I let out a breath I hadn’t even been aware of holding. “Really good,” I mutter. Aiden eyes me warily and I might be eyeing him the same way, I don’t know. There is a six-ton elephant between us; how did this happen?
“Look,” he says at the same time I say, “Hey.”
We both let out a laugh that has little to do with humor. “You go.” I lift my chin at him.
The smile dies on his face in increments until all traces of humor are gone and nothing remains but the guilt carried by us, the survivors, accented with his serious eyes and tight lips.
“So, here’s the thing. This shit happened on my watch. Concerts are always hard. We can’t vet a crowd of hundreds. The person that bough the ticket may not be the person attending. There are a million variations. But I swear I’ll get to the bottom of this shit. I have a contact with Metro Police, I’ll touch base with him, but early reports are saying it was an inside job. The detectives discovered Ian Foster actually got a job working in the arena and was able to bring one piece of the gun in at a time and hide the parts in multiple restrooms inside the facility. So, all he had to do tonight was collect all the parts.”
He runs a hand over the closely cropped hair on the back of his head, squeezing at the top of his neck. “Every night we check the location, and the people coming in. We had to miss something though.”
He says that last part more to himself than to me. I can hear the gears in his head churning as he mentally searches for an answer to this puzzle, which at this point has too many Xs and not enough numbers. In all honesty I’m not looking to place blame. Besides, if the blame belongs anywhere, it’s with me. Sin was mine to protect long before security came into the picture.
The only thing keeping me sane right now is that Sin and Seth are alive. All the other shit is just noise.
“I’m just happy they’ll both be okay, you know.”
“True that. Seth has been my partner in crime since boot camp. And I know you and Sin have been good since the crib.”
“Not that long . . .” I try to laugh but the sound that comes out is closer to tears. I’m quickly losing my shit; time to wrap this thing up. “I’m going to go . . . talk to Dan and Miles and . . .”
“They went home about twenty minutes ago,” he says.
“Oh, I thought they’d want to see . . .”
“Dan knew one of the nurses, something about meeting her when his grandmother was in the hospital for surgery on her broken hip.”
“He always knows someone.”
“Right? But in this case his connection was able to get them back to see her. You must have been out of the room.”
I shake my head because the way this night is going there are huge gaps of time that I can’t seem to account for, so maybe it was when I took a shower.
“I’m gonna head back to Sin . . .”
“You not trying to see Seth at all?” He studies me. He knows about me and Seth. I clamp down on my tongue to the point that the metallic taste of blood fills my mouth.
He tilts his head, his dark blond brows pulling down into a perplexed frown.
I wait for him to say some
thing. For the offensive insults to start. But they don’t. He knows and he doesn’t care.
Well shit.
“If it’s cool with you, I really want to see him,” I say.
“Good deal.”
He points me toward Seth’s room.
Unlike Sin, Seth is only hooked up to one machine. His skin is a better shade than Sin’s is. I step closer, drawn to him, all moth to flame, and when I touch him with shaking fingers, he opens those pretty brown eyes and smiles up at me the way he has a hundred other times.
“Hey, baby,” he says in a voice weighted down by the grogginess of anesthesia and sleep.
“Hey,” I whisper.
“I’m tired.”
“Go to sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
“Kiss me good night,” he says, closing his eyes, already halfway back to dreamland, but I lean over and brush my lips across his.
“Ay Dios mio, look at my baby.”
My eyes snap open to find a petite woman in a sweat suit with matching tennis shoes on the other side of the bed. She’s flanked by a large man with skin the color of caramelized brown sugar, who in his younger years was probably a heartbreaker. She looks at me with her familiar chocolate brown eyes, even though I just met her, and I know without knowing that I’m looking at Seth’s parents.
I scramble from the chair, coming to my feet to stand in front of them.
“Are you Seth’s boyfriend?” she asks with curious eyes.
“I’m . . . ah . . . we . . . I . . .” I stumble and trip over my words. unable to articulate a thought.
“He told us he was seeing someone, but I haven’t seen any pictures. With you being here I just assumed,” she says smoothly. “I’m Lucia and this . . .” She runs a hand over the man’s stomach. “This is my husband, Kyle. We’re Seth’s parents.”
I knew they were his parents but, fuck, his parents. Really?
“Really nice to meet you,” I say, extending my hand.
His mother ignores the hand and pulls me into a tight hug. “Thank you for being here with my boy,” she whispers in my ear and kisses my cheek. She pulls back, searching my face but her eyes drift past my shoulder and from the bright smile that bursts across her features I know Seth is awake.
“Hola, Mamá. No tenías que venir.” His voice rasps over the words, but they flow easily off his tongue. I didn’t even know he spoke Spanish.
“¿No venga visitar a mi hijo al hospital? ¿En qué mundo pasaria eso?” she answers in an exasperated rush.
I turn toward Seth, overwhelming relief and joy warming in my chest because he’s awake and talking to his mother, and I seriously believe that given time all will be well in my world. But when our eyes meet, that hope withers; the brown eyes that normally warm me like a fire on cold desert nights are cold, like the frozen bark of a tree and maybe just as impermeable.
“Sé que acabas de llegar, pero necesito un segundo,” he says, turning his eyes to his mother.
“Son? We’re here if you need . . .” his dad starts, but Seth shakes his head.
“I need a minute. Please.”
His parents look between me and Seth with questions and obvious concern, but after a couple of seconds his mother says, “We’ll go get some breakfast. Give you two a minute.”
They walk out the door and I wait until their steps no longer echo in the hallway before I turn my body completely toward Seth.
Seth
“Why are you here?” I ask Adam in a hoarse whisper. The pained expression that crosses his face is almost enough to make me renege. But I’m getting whiplash from the back and forth bullshit and I’m done.
“Where else would I be?” he says, his eyes roving my body. Pulling the only chair up to the edge of the bed, he all but collapses on the thin cushions. He’s supposed to be with Sin. He’s supposed to pretend like I’m nothing. The silence stretches between us, suspended by our brief history and the what could be that lives at the edges of every interaction. “I was so fucking sure I’d lost both of you. Sin went down and there was so much blood, and then when everyone else was running away, you ran toward the gunfire and you went down too. It would’ve . . .” He clears his throat and looks up to the ceiling to blink back tears.
I want to get out of this bed and wrap this beautiful man in my arms. I want to hold him until that tormented look leaves his eyes. I want to promise him it’ll all be okay. But I don’t make promises that I can’t keep.
What I know for sure is that Sin is safe and that the crazy motherfucker who’s been stalking her for years is down for the fucking count. This thing between Adam and me? I can’t call it. Not anymore.
“Maybe you should go home. It’s been a hellified night for everyone—”
His eyes drop down to mine, a torrent of emotion pouring from their depths. “Don’t do that. Don’t make light of this or pretend like you don’t care that I’m here.”
“I care,” I say in a rush. His shoulders sag and his eyes flutter closed. He nods, accepting my statement like a soothing balm to his frazzled nerves. “But here’s the thing.”
He cracks his lids open, studying me. His body tensing for the verbal blow.
I pull a sharp inhale through my nose before I start. “I’m in love with you.”
His lids flutter again but his gaze doesn’t falter, and he doesn’t say it back. Even in a moment like this he can’t utter the words. His words back are the only ones that could begin to heal this rift between us. That rejection at a moment like this is more than I can bear.
“I’m pretty sure it happened that first time.” I don’t need to clarify that I mean the first time we made love because we both know. Even laid up in a hospital bed, my dick twitches at the prefect memory of his body finally taking mine.
He knows.
“But every time you’ve shrank away from my touch, every time you’ve hidden me in plain sight, every single time you limited your words and emotions because we weren’t in the right place, around the right people, it killed a little piece of that love.”
“Please don’t do this,” Adam whispers, surging to his feet. His face coming to loom over mine. “Please.” I squeeze my eyes shut, blocking out his turbulent gaze, and the muscles in my arms go rigid under the tentative exploration of his hands.
“We can deal with . . . us when you’re out of here. For right now let me take care of—”
“I’m not one of the members of your band.” I force my eyes open, my stare hard and unyielding. “I don’t need you to take care of me. I’m a little banged up but no worse for the wear. My shoulder got dislocated and I broke a couple of ribs. This shit could’ve happened playing football or getting in a car accident. On the grand scale of things, it’s no biggie.”
“You can lie,” he says. His long, elegant finger lightly caresses the bruises that mottle the skin of my face. “But I know you’re not fine. None of us is fine. I just want to make sure that you’re—”
I reach up with my good arm, capturing his hand at my face. “I’m okay, baby.” The endearment slips out. When we’re close like this, it’s hard to remember the reasons we don’t work.
“I’ll get you set up at home.”
I shake my head, pulling his hand from my face. “I’m going to my parents’ house in Cali.”
“For how long?”
“Until this busted leg is healed, and I can breathe around the broken ribs.”
“But you’ll be back.” He says that as a statement of fact.
“I don’t know.” Those words land with a hard finality. “However this thing plays out it’ll be fine. After a couple of weeks, you won’t even realize I’m not around.”
His laugh is a brittle, broken sound coated in frustration. “I’d notice.”
“What do you want me to do?” I ask in a small voice.
“Stay,” he says immediately. He leans forward, his soft lips gently touching mine. “Stay. With. Me,” he says between kisses.
Fuck. “I want to say yes.
But we both know why I can’t.”
“You can come home, and it’ll be like it was in the beginning. Maybe we can go on a vacation—”
“What are you going to tell Tori when she wonders why I’m sleeping in your bed? You just gonna sleep on the couch for months and never explain who I am to you? What we are to each other? You’ve made it a point to keep Tori and me separate. You really think the best time to integrate is after this?” He waves a hand over his bandaged chest.
His forehead drops to mine, and his long lashes touch mine each time he blinks. “I’m trying, Seth.”
“I know, baby, and one day I might regret walking away. I’ll probably talk about the one who got away and keep pictures of us locked on my phone. But right now? I need some space because loving you is breaking my heart, and I can’t stand it anymore.”
I feel tears hot against my skin, and I’m not sure if they are mine or Adam’s. I place a hand on the back of his neck, and leaning up the slightest bit, I kiss him. My tongue delves in, finding him open and melting.
My lips on his say, I need you.
My hands on the back of his neck pulling him closer say, I adore you.
These tears salting this kiss with dejected acquiescence say, I love you.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.” I hear my mother’s voice from the doorway. I expect Adam to jerk away but he doesn’t. He lingers in the kiss, only to come away slowly when I pull back a fraction of an inch.
“I’m gonna get outta here,” he whispers, standing at his full height.
“Okay.”
“Am I going to see you before you . . . before you head home?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh. Okay.” His words catch on his breath, and he wipes a hand down his face before he turns to my mother. She doesn’t say a word, just opens her arms and pulls him into a hug. He drops his head on her shoulder. Watching my mother comfort this man I love enough to let go is its own kind of torture. At one point, I pictured a world where my family becomes our family.
“Shh, sweetie. He’s okay.” She pats Adam’s back but looks at me over his shoulder. “I’ll take real good care of him.” He shakes his head, placing a chaste kiss on her cheek before walking out the door.
Exquisitely Hidden: A Sin City Tale Page 19
