Redemption

by Robin Covington

  But this change, this chance, is scary and unknown and out of my control. If I have the surgery, I will have a long lifetime of shit to think about and plan and do. A life that can include so many things I’d pushed off my menu because I was never going to get the chance to order.

  Now I have an all-you-can-eat-buffet spread out in front of me and instead of falling on the table and gobbling it all up I’ve lost my appetite. I’m numb because of something burning in my chest that feels a lot like hope and a yearning for one person.

  And it scares the shit out of me because the first person I thought of when my mom broke the news was Mateo. If I have the surgery, I could have more time with him. We could be something beyond friendly fuck buddies.

  I can stick around... for him.

  This is too much for my brain to process. Full blown panic leaves the taste of acid in my mouth and I know I cannot stay here right now. I slide off the stool and stumble for my purse but simply dump the contents on the counter when the tremor in my hands prevents my fingers from working properly. I spy what I’m looking for and manage to get the Molly out of the envelope, washing it down with what is left of my root beer.

  I toss my wallet, my keys and my phone back into the bag and head for the door. Tonight I want to be with a crowd of strangers and not think for a while.

  Luckily, I know just the place to go.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Mateo

  My phone rings and I pick it up on the third or fourth ring.

  I look at the display. Zane. He’s got a show tonight at Toot’s, a big semi-dive place in town that caters to a rougher crowd who like good music, hard liquor and a really good time. It also has frequents nights where a brawl breaks out and the cops have to come out and sort through the drunks and assholes. I really hope tonight isn’t one of those nights because I don’t want to make a trip to the police station tonight.

  “What the fuck, Zane?” I growl into the phone. “I don’t have any money for bail.”

  “Mateo listen up, all I’ve got is a few minutes in between sets.” He’s shouting a little over the noise in the background but I hear him loud and clear. “Your girl is here and she’s pretty fucked up.”

  I want to remind him that she’s not my girl. Being my girl would require her to pick up my phone calls or answer my texts. Carlisle Queen has been radio silent since I dropped her off at her house and she didn’t invite me up.

  But Zane sounds spooked and suddenly the Facebook status of our relationship is all background noise.

  “I’m on my way.”

  I dress and jump in my car, breaking several moving violations to get to Toot’s as quickly as possible. I pull my car into the gravel lot and park with a move that would make Bo and Luke Duke proud and I run to the building.

  I get to the door and pay the cover charge and begin the process of elbowing my way through a pretty big crowd of drunk people. The bar smells of booze, sweat, too much perfume, and the desperation of people who realize it’s about an hour from last call.

  It isn't easy to push through and I get more than one nasty look but I’m on a mission to find Carlisle before she does something dumb. Or something dumber than coming to Toot’s by herself.

  I make my way to the stage and Zane is front and center, belting out a cover of a popular song and wailing on his guitar. I move forward and get as close as I can to the stage with the Zane groupies all lined up on the edge and trying to get his attention with their “pick me, pick me” boob displays. I start to wave to get his attention but he’s got an eye out for me and he points towards the left side of the room, never breaking stride on the lyrics or the chords.

  I twist around and I see her, the red hair is like a beacon even in the dark haze of the room. I also have her location hard-wired into my body like it’s GPS. She’s dancing on the floor by herself, which is good, but she’s got an audience of three or four huge guys who could easily get work as extras on “Sons of Anarchy”. Fuck me.

  I shove my way through the crowds pretty quickly, only allowing myself to breathe when I have my hands on her.

  “Carlisle!” I shout over the music while I do a quick once-over of her body. She looks fine but she’s not dressed for a night out. Jeans and t-shirt with her red and white chucks are not pick-me-up-and-take-me-home clothes and I let go of the pit in the bottom of my stomach. “Carlisle, we’ve got to go.”

  “Mateo!” Her smile is bright, her pupils blown and she is swaying in time with music from another bar because it doesn’t even remotely match the beat of Zane’s song. She’s hopped up on something and I’m guessing it’s her favorite party friend, Molly. Jesus.

  “Babe, we’ve got to get you out of here.” She nods happily and I send up a prayer that her drug of choice makes her very agreeable because I don’t have time to deal with her and the three big biker guys who have moved in our direction. They look like a group of dogs who are seriously pissed that I just took away their favorite chew toy.

  “Hey,” the big guy in the middle shouts at me. “We were here first.”

  Fuck me. I’m going to kick her ass when she sobers up tomorrow. I swear to God.

  I’m not crazy enough to take on three guys at once. I might do stupid stuff but I don't have a death wish. What I do have is years of experience on what can turn a guy off as fast as he got turned on in the first place. I use the first thing that comes to mind.

  “She’s underage!” I yell and then I put a cherry on that banana-bullshit-split. “Her dad’s a cop and he’ll kill me if he knows she was here.”

  I guess their prison experience wasn’t something they want to repeat because they back off pretty quickly and I start moving Carlisle out of this place before the last call stampede begins. Even with her being so compliant, it’s difficult to maneuver her through the crowd and when I see her wince in pain when she’s jostled by a group of happy drunks, I do what I have to do.

  “Hang on to my neck,” I shout in her ear and I bend down and pick her up in my arms.

  I look like Richard Gere in “An Officer and a Gentleman” when he takes Debra Winger away from her crappy factory job and I feel ridiculous. But it parts the crowds before us and I walk us out the front door of Toot’s and get her in my car without incident. I slide behind the wheel and send a quick thank you text to Zane and tell him that I’ll be at Carlisle’s place.

  I glance over at the passenger seat and she’s out cold, snoring softly as if this is something that happens to her every day. I worry that this is a state she is in every day but since the last time I brought it up I got my ass handed to me, I’ll keep it to myself.

  The crowd is starting to grow in the parking lot and I don’t want to be here when all the drunks try to leave at one time. I start the car and drive back to her apartment, glancing over at her often to make sure she’s okay.

  Traffic is light and it takes no time to get to her place and when I can’t wake her up I have to execute the same move I did in the club to get her inside. It would be way easier to place her in a fireman’s hold but with her back injury, I worry that I will hurt her. So I navigate the steps and the old elevator and finally get to her door.

  I dig her keys out of her purse and get us inside and take her straight to bed. I pull off her chucks, leave on everything else and pull the covers over her. I sit beside her on the bed and brush her hair back from her face, letting the red gold satin caress the back of my hand. I watch her sleep and wonder just what the hell is going on in her head.

  Carlisle Queen is beautiful and sexy and funny and seriously fucked up. I should leave her alone but I can’t. Somewhere in the middle of the sex and the drugs and the things that neither of us like to talk about, I started falling for her.

  I stand and kick off my shoes and climb into bed beside her, tugging her over until her cheek rests against my chest and I can feel the steady rise and fall of her breathing, the warmth of her length pressed against mine.

  I know better than anyone that I’m not
the guy she’s going to need. My track record for sticking when things go to shit is phenomenally bad. I couldn’t do it for my sister. I don’t know if I can do it for Carlisle.

  But the truth is that when she needs me, even if she doesn’t ask for it, I answer the bat signal. Every. Damn. Time.

  And that has to mean something.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Carlisle

  “I know we call you Ariel but right now you look a lot like Sleeping Beauty.”

  I blink at the morning light streaming through my bedroom window and curl into the warm body pressed against me in my bed. I don’t need to look up at his face to know that it’s Teo. His smell, the muscles underneath his clothes, the way he holds me under the reassuring weight of his arm are well known to me, branded into my muscle memory.

  I just don’t know how he got here.

  “How did you get here?” I ask, moving to the side as he stretches beside me. His dark hair is messed up in that sexy way I like and his stubble is dark on his jaw and makes his blue eyes stand out.

  “Zane called me and told me that you were at Toot’s having too much fun so I brought you home.”

  Last night is a blur of music and dancing and forgetting all about the phone call from my mom. I headed straight to Toot’s. I knew Zane was playing so I was guaranteed a good show to provide a few hours of distraction. The crowd there is always a bit rough but friendly enough. I had a good time. Mission accomplished.

  “Too much fun? No such thing.” I wave him off, avoiding eye contact as I gingerly make my way out of the bed. I test the leg cooperation this morning and besides the stiffness that always is around in the morning I feel pretty good. I also feel Mateo’s eyes on me and I stand, escaping to the shield of my bathroom.

  He’s not supposed to be here. I’m avoiding him for a very good reason and now I really don’t need to drag him into all this mess. I need to get him out of my apartment.

  I grab my toothbrush and squeeze out a generous dollop and begin the process of removing the nasty scum from my teeth. My reflection is nothing much to look at; my hair is in a tangled snarl, and the mascara smudged below my eyes makes me look like a deranged raccoon. Mateo appears in my side view, leaning against the doorframe, his sexy, lanky length tempting me to give him the slow once-over or to drag him back to bed and get all those clothes off of him.

  He quirks an eyebrow at me as if he knows what I’m thinking and it pisses me off. I bend over, turn on the water and spit in the sink. I try to move past him but he stops me with an arm across the opening.

  “Extra toothbrush?”

  I lean back, pull open a drawer and locate a spare toothbrush my dentist gave me at my last appointment and hand it over. He takes it with the hand stretched across the door and we stare at each other for a few moments before he finally lowers his arm and lets me pass.

  “I take it back,” he calls after me. “You’re more like the princess and the pea. In a shitty ass mood after sleeping on a boulder all night.”

  I ignore him and head to the kitchen where I put on a pot of coffee and stare at it while it begins to brew. I know Mateo isn’t going to cooperate and just leave without talking about why I was at Toot’s last night. If I talk about last night then everything will come out and I just can’t handle it all if he knows. I care about what he thinks. I care about hurting him. I care about him.

  He strides into the room and walks over to the coffee pot, pours a mug and settles back against the counter and stares at me. I can feel his eyes shoot laser beams into the back of my head and I resist the urge to actually flinch. I am so aware of him when he is in the room that it feels like a palpable touch. One more data point to prove that Mateo means too much to me.

  “I get that we’re done. You don’t want me to call, you don’t want me in your bed anymore. Fine. But you need to tell me why you were at Toot’s last night. Alone. High,” he demands, his voice low but angry.

  “I wanted to go out.”

  “To that place? Alone?”

  “I wanted to see Zane play and I’ve been to Toot’s before. It was just another night out.”

  He lets out a frustrated sigh that tells me he’s reaching the end of his patience with me. “Carlisle, you need to start talking because you’re not stupid and you’re not foolish so I don’t understand why I found you in that bar high as a fucking kite.”

  I walk out of the kitchen and into my living room, taking a seat on the sofa. Mateo follows me, seating himself directly in my line of sight. He’s gritting his teeth, pissed off and not even trying to hide it.

  “I’m not trying to be a dick but I almost got my ass kicked last night by three very big guys who have likely done prison time. I get that something happened and you are done with me but I care about you and I need you to answer my question.” He slams down his coffee and it splashes all over the table and his hand. It’s still molten hot but he doesn’t even flinch. “Do you have a death wish or something I don’t know about?”

  I freeze at his question, my blood and skin tingling with how close he’s come to tapping into my brain. I am too slow to hide my reaction but I can see his clearly. I never understood it when books said that the blood drained from someone’s face with shock but I do now.

  “Carlisle.” He swallows hard, his speech stilted as he chooses his words carefully. “Do you want to kill yourself?”

  And then I realize that if I care about him at all, I need to tell him the truth.

  “I need to explain—” I try to answer him but he cuts me off.

  “What is there to explain? I cannot understand this at all.” I put my coffee down on the table and move to sit closer to him. I reach out to touch him but he pulls away and I feel like I’m losing something vital. Elemental. “Don’t touch me.”

  “Okay.” I deserve his rejection and the venom in his voice and even though it kills me to see the pain and confusion in his eyes, I maintain eye contact. “You know that I have shrapnel in my back that surgeons could not remove. What you don’t know is that if I leave it in my body it will paralyze or kill me.”

  “Jesus,” he says, his shoulders slumping with the weight of my words. A burden I never wanted to give him.

  “There is one guy in the whole world who can do the surgery that gets it all out and not kill me on the table but he refused to do it…until yesterday.” Mateo’s expression immediately lightens and the hope in his eyes makes my heart hurt. I can’t let him think this is a viable option. “I don’t want to have the surgery.”

  “What? Why?”

  “If he does the surgery I will have some level of limited mobility. I could walk with crutches or I could be paralyzed from the waist down and be confined to a wheelchair.”

  “But if you don’t have the surgery you could die,” Mateo counters and I know the exact moment he understands what I have planned to do. Horror, stark and ugly, mixed with disbelief twists his lips into a grimace. He stands, his entire body shaking with his outrage. “You’d rather die?”

  “I’d rather live…just not in a wheelchair.”

  “That’s so selfish,” he accuses. “What about your parents? Livvy?” He lifts his hand and pounds it against his chest, each hard thump punctuating his words. “What about me?”

  I break eye contact with him but he’s having none of it. Mateo drops to kneel in front of me and lifts my face to meet his gaze. He’s in pain. I can feel it rolling off him in waves and I have to reach out and touch him, caressing his face with my open palm. He nuzzles into me and my breath catches, my heart squeezing painfully.

  “Don’t ask me that Mateo.”

  “You knew you were going to do this and you got involved with me anyway?”

  “I didn’t mean to. I kept thinking we were keeping it light or I was the only one getting in too deep.” I lean my forehead against his and close my eyes. He leans into the touch like he always does, rubbing our noses together, lips brushing with the lightness of a butterfly. “I didn’t know it would ha
ppen so fast and when I heard about Mari, I knew it had to end. I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you.”

  We sit like that for several long moments and I memorize his strength, his warmth, the pure pleasure of his touch.

  “Mateo, I went too far. I was not fair to you when I began this or when I kept it going. And I want to tell myself to have the surgery so that we could have this for longer and see what it could be. It is enticing and you are the dream I didn’t even know I wanted anymore. But I can’t make this decision for you or my parents or my friends. It needs to be a decision I can live with no matter what happens in the end.”

  He pulls away from me and I have to sit on my hands to resist the urge to pull him back and wrap myself around him. I can’t ask him to do this for me when I can’t return the favor.

  “Well, then you’ll understand I can’t sit around and watch you choose to die,” his voice is wet with his emotion and it sparks the tears spilling down over my cheeks. “I did it before and I just can’t do it again. I’m sorry Carlisle.”

  I watch as he walks to the door, opens it, and leaves.

  He doesn’t look back.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Carlisle

  “Dr. Shrieve, you have to tell me what to do.”

  “Carlisle, that’s not how it works and you know it,” she says from her usual chair. She’s not dressed in her usual psychiatrist outfit but wearing jeans and a t-shirt from the last Miranda Lambert tour. I guess she doesn’t bother to worry about her clothes when her patient calls after hours for an emergency appointment.

  “I’m paying you double your rate and you’re going to play shrink head games with me?”

  “Carlisle, I can't make this decision for you. Nobody can.” She puts down the notebooks and leans her arms on her elbows. “It is your body and your future and you are the one who has to live with the consequences. I’m here to help you make the decision for yourself.”