“A few. Mostly just rambling and pressing that button before falling asleep. That the good stuff?”
“Morphine. They’ll let me have this for a day or two.”
“Better make good use of it.”
“How long since the surgery?” he asked.
“Ten hours,” Brick answered.
“Awesome. They wanted me up and walking within twelve to fourteen.” He decided to make another attempt at sitting up. It hurt like hell, and he felt like crying, but he didn’t give in, and soon he was sitting up. When he looked up, Brick was studying him. “No fucking sponge baths. They’ll have their fun when they take out the catheter.”
“I’ll make sure of it.”
*
The next day, they lured him to walk by telling him he could go and see Felix if he could get to the wheelchair outside his room by himself. It wasn’t many steps, and he made it with some effort, and Leah pushed him into Felix’s room in the wheelchair.
“Daddy,” Felix said with a big smile, but he looked tired, too. “I have your kidney.”
“Yeah? How’s that working out for you?”
“Pretty damn good, so far,” Billie answered.
“They say I might be able to try chocolate soon,” Felix said. “I’ve always wanted to try chocolate.”
“That sounds awesome.” Tommy rolled his wheelchair up to the bed. “Maybe we can celebrate when we both get out of here.”
Felix nodded eagerly, and then reached for Tommy’s hand. He took it and gave it a kiss. It felt good to finally see him, feel him, to not just hear about he was doing.
“Does it hurt?” Felix asked.
“Yeah, but I’ll live. You?”
“A little, but they say it will be better soon.”
*
By the third day, he could get up and walk to the bathroom to pee by himself. It hurt like fuck, and it took him fucking forever, but he did it. There was no way in hell he’d spend more than a week at the hospital.
oOo
IT WAS THE MIDDLE of the night when I walked through the hallway from Felix’s to Tommy’s room. Brick was sleeping in the chair, and I woke him up.
“You should get home and get some sleep,” I said.
“Just got here,” he said and sat up. “Wanna get a coffee with me?”
“Sure,” I answered after a look at Tommy. “Think he’ll live even if he wakes up alone.”
“He was awake when I got here, so he’ll be out for a while longer.”
Brick directed me to a couch in the waiting room. A few minutes later, he came back with two cups of coffee, a small bag of chips, and a Mounds chocolate bar.
“Chocolate or chips?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter. We can share both.”
He sat down and put the bag on the table after opening it.
“How are you holding up?” he asked.
“Better than I’ve ever done at a hospital stay,” I answered. “This time there’s more of an end to it. Or at least a new beginning.”
I hadn’t talked much to Brick until then. He’d spent a lot of time at the hospital, and I was touched by the gesture.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask,” he smiled.
“I’m… struggling with the family relations in the club. Mitch is your son?”
“Yeah. Mitch and Mac are my sons. Dawg, the guy with all the tattoos up his neck, is married to my wife’s sister, Edie. And Mac, my oldest son, is married to Bear’s daughter, Violet. Those are the only blood relatives, but everyone is family.” He looked at me. “Can I ask you a question?”
“You can ask,” I answered in return, and Brick laughed with a nod.
“Touché. Why didn’t you tell him about Felix?”
I think my normal response would probably have been that it wasn’t any of Brick’s business, but it was either the relief of the surgery having been done, the intimacy of sitting at a hospital in the middle of the night with someone who’d been there almost as much as I had, or just the kind of man Brick was. He was like Dad. Some people you just got the feeling that whatever you told them was in private if they deemed it private. This was private. The only one who could have any interest in it was Tommy, and he already knew. It could simply be that I needed to redeem myself to a man I was starting to respect. Or just to someone, anyone, who didn’t really know me and could give me an honest judgment of my behavior.
“I don’t know how much you know.”
“I know he was your brother’s childhood friend. They served together, and your brother died. After his funeral you had sex, and then you showed up at our clubhouse to talk to him. That’s about it.”
“Sounds like a pretty complete account of what happened,” I said and took a sip of the coffee.
“Maybe, but you can boil down any story into just a few sentences. A beast captures a man. When his daughter comes to save him, the beast says the dad can go if the daughter marries him, so she agrees. It’s an account of the facts, but it leaves out a few important things.”
“Beauty and the Beast?” I had to ask. That was, if not the last story I’d expected, then at least pretty far down the list.
“My daughter’s favorite when she was a kid. Made me watch it a million fucking times. She still watches it when she feels blue, and even if she feels forced to point out the flawed feminism these days, she still cries.”
“You have a daughter, too?”
“Yeah,” he answered with a big, proud smile. “Eliza. She’s just like her mother.”
“So she’s Mel’s, but the boys…?”
“From a previous marriage,” he confirmed. Mel had seemed to be a little young to be Mitch and Mac’s mother. It was probably possible, but it just didn’t seem likely. “Now it’s your turn. You tell me about you.”
“I’m not sure where to start,” I said and looked down into the coffee cup, as if I’d find any answers in there. “I’m from a military family, as I’m sure you’ve discovered by now. I’ve wanted to serve since I was able to form a conscious opinion. Tommy’s dad and my dad served together a few times. We moved around a lot, but we always kept in contact with them. A few years after Tommy’s dad died, he came to live with us.”
“Why?”
“That’s not my story,” I answered. I was prepared to tell Brick my secrets, but if Tommy hadn’t told Brick about his parents, it wasn’t something I should tell his friends.
“Fair enough.”
“I signed up with the Navy when I was eighteen. I loved boot camp. I didn’t think it was very hard work or demanding, but Dad had drill exercises with us in the back yard, and he’s known as a tough son of a bitch.”
“You don’t say,” Brick chuckled. “I would’ve never guessed.”
“I ended up on an aircraft carrier—”
“As a yellow shirt.”
And I was almost flattered he remembered, but then I realized that Brick probably remembered most things he heard about the people around the club.
“It wasn’t that simple. I had to work my ass off to get that yellow shirt.”
I wasn’t the first woman who’d earned the yellow shirt, but there weren’t many before me. As much as the Navy encouraged women to apply for positions, there was still the part where you had to prove to your fellow soldiers that you’d earned that position, and that acceptance was a little harder to get when you were a woman. But I’d managed that, too. I’d fit in with the team, and we’d had a working, efficient relationship when we were on duty. And a good relationship off duty, too. We’d had a lot of fun.
“Then my rotation put me on shore tour. The rotation means I have a certain time on a ship, followed by a shore tour, so I moved and had a new officer. He flirted with me, but I didn’t think much about it. Then it got worse, and he happened to show up everywhere I was and…” That was when I had started to feel uncomfortable. I’d felt chased, hunted almost. “He… raped one of the other girls. We soon found out that there had been rumo
rs about him before.”
“Did she report him?”
“Yes. It didn’t help, but the other guys were great. They couldn’t actually do anything without getting into shitloads of trouble themselves, but… they were great. They did what little they could.”
“I guess that just beating the guy up wasn’t an option?”
“No. I contemplated a few things, though.”
That wasn’t something I’d thought about until after he’d raped me, though. Flight deck is considered the most dangerous work place in the world, and the shore tour environment wasn’t that much better. It would’ve been perfectly possible to cause an accident and watch him die, but I didn’t. I wanted to, good lord I wanted to, but I didn’t want to risk anyone else’s life in the process.
“So what did they do?”
“They tried to watch over me and the other women he was showing an… interest in.”
I was still in contact with a few of those guys, and despite what happened, I felt that I owed them. They’d been great, and even more great afterwards. They’d been there for me however they could. I had blamed a lot of people and institutions for what had happened, but not them.
“It didn’t help, did it?” Brick asked.
“No. He caught me while I was sleeping. He’d been out drinking with his buddies and apparently wanted to get some before he went to bed.”
“Did you report him?”
I shook my head, and I couldn’t look at him. “No, I didn’t.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“Because he was my senior officer, which meant that I was supposed to report him to himself. The step up the ladder, which was my next option, was his drinking buddies and… you get the picture. The woman he raped before me was charged with conduct unbecoming, since he was married.”
“You’re shitting me?”
“No. And the process until that was less than… painless. But I still should have. I think… I tried to tell myself that it hadn’t happened. Then Zach died. I was waiting for him to come home, so I could talk to someone, and he died before I could.”
“And Tommy was the next best thing?”
“He was one of few men I trusted fully there for a while—maybe still is. I don’t know. I don’t think I had a good reason, but I trusted him. When I found out I was pregnant, I was terrified that it would be my officer’s. I didn’t really think it was, I’d had… my period after the rape, but I managed to give myself panic more than a few times. And I was also relieved because pregnancy is a reason for an honorable discharge.”
“It gave you an out?”
“Yeah.”
“None of this explains why you didn’t tell him.”
“No, it doesn’t. I didn’t tell my parents who Felix’s dad was until he was two and we found out he was sick. I didn’t tell anyone. I called Dwayne before Felix was born, but he told me to leave Tommy the fuck alone, that I’d done enough. If I’d told him the truth, he would’ve let me talk to him, but…”
“You didn’t.”
“No. I think he was more of a mess than I was, and for a while I didn’t know if telling him would make it better or worse. Or it was at least what I was telling myself.”
“Does he know this?”
“Yes.” I smiled at Brick. “You have that ‘you can trust’ me face, but I wouldn’t tell you something he didn’t know. Or something I didn’t want him to know.”
“Why?” he asked with a smile.
“Because you’d tell him what you think he needs to know.”
“Smart girl.”
“Then we found out that Felix was sick, and I don’t think I gave a shit about anything but him.”
“Understandable. I’ve thought about it more than once the past few months, how fucking lucky I am to have had three healthy kids. Given everything that can go wrong, I think it makes me lucky as fuck.”
“It does.”
“I’m gonna ask you something, and I’m good at spotting liars, and it’s going to sound rude to you. Are you leading him on just so he’d give Felix a kidney?”
“The first time we met, when I told him about Felix, he said he’d give him his kidney without even hesitating. The next sentence was basically that we’d be civil to each other in front of Felix, but that I otherwise should stay the fuck away from him.” I looked at Brick. “And I don’t blame him.”
“Good. I just wanted to make sure,” he said with a nod. “I care about my guys, and I don’t like women who fuck with their heads.”
“Sounds sensible,” I said. He gave me a curious look, and I answered before he’d had the chance to ask. “Told you, I’m an army brat, my dad is an officer, I know how it works.”
“You think I’m running an army?”
“I think you’re running an organization, and you need it to function. The cliché about the weakest link is a cliché for a reason. But I do think you care about him, too.”
“What makes you say that? Maybe I’m just trying to keep my organization functioning.”
“Because you’re here. You didn’t send someone to keep him company, you’re here yourself, despite the discomfort.”
“Discomfort?”
“You look like shit.”
He laughed, and he had a great laugh. It was honest, from deep down in his chest, and it reminded me of my dad’s. It was the laugh of a man who didn’t give a flying fuck about what others thought about him.
“That makes two of us, Shooter. And we still have a long way to go.”
“Yeah. Long way to go.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Short For Cockroach
oOo
IT HAD BEEN FOUR weeks since the transplant, and I was still on edge. I checked Felix’s temperature a lot more than I should. A fever could be a sign of infection, and an infection could be the body rejecting the kidney. So far there were no signs of it at all. Everything was going well, and his growth spurt was already starting. Basically, his body was adapting to being healthy and was trying to gain what it had lost due to his sickness.
He was thriving.
Another reason for his perkiness was that he loved Tommy and me together as a couple. When he was released from the hospital, Mel and Mom had ganged up on Tommy to tell him that there was no way they’d let him go home to his shithole of an apartment. He had to choose: our place or Brick’s place. He chose our place—in my bed.
I wasn’t convinced the doctor had really said that two weeks was long enough to wait for sex, but he’d said it while he was fingering me, so I’d agreed that if we were careful, and he promised that he’d stop if it hurt, we could have some careful sex.
I was very relieved when he came back from his next checkup and said everything was okay.
He’d gone back to work after two weeks, but he wasn’t actually working. He was just hanging out. Sitting at home was driving him nuts. He’d never been the kind of guy who could just take it easy. When he lived with us, his response to Zach reading a book was to start beating on the punching bag in the basement. That was how he’d started teaching me, actually. We’d kept training together until he and Zach enlisted.
We still kept a gym with a punching bag in the basement, and Felix loved watching me beat on it, which was what he was doing one afternoon when Tommy was at the clubhouse. He did it while flipping through The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He hardly went anywhere without the book, and he still talked about it a lot. It had somehow become a link to the past, and he asked a lot of questions about me, Tommy, and Zach as kids while looking in it.
“You said Daddy called you Munchkin already when you were a kid,” Felix said.
“Yes, both him and Uncle Zach.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure,” I said between punches with my right hand. “Probably because it annoyed me.”
“They did it to tease you?”
“I think so.”
“Hmm,” he hummed. I knew that hum.
I switched and started punching wit
h just my left hand. “What was that hmm?”
“Just that Daddy said that wasn’t why he called you that now.”
“Really?” I laughed. “So why does he call me that now?”
He went quiet and started flipping through the book again, but I could see that he was smiling. He was dying to tell me.
“Come on, little guy. Tell me.”
“He said it was because he was like the Tin Woodman, and you’re the beautiful Munchkin girl he loves with all his heart.”
I halted and looked at Felix, but he was still looking at the pictures in the book. He could read a little, we’d been practicing with him, but he still preferred it when we read to him. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz would have been too much anyway, but by now he most likely knew it by heart.
“Is that what he said?” I asked with a chuckle and sat down next to Felix. “That’s nice of him. Think I’ll like it better now.”
“Good. Does that mean you’ll marry him when he has enough money to buy a house? Like the Munchkin girl promised the Tin Man.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Do you want us to get married?”
“I think so,” he whispered.
“Isn’t the most important thing that we love each other?”
He nodded, and then he finally looked at me with a smile. “He told me why they call you Sparks, too.”
That was something Dad had started with, and it was because I could get Zach to explode, I was the spark that set the dynamite off, and I was the only one who could. That was why I’d liked it. Even if it wasn’t an altogether positive thing, it was something that singled me out when it came to Zach. Something that marked me as unique in his life.
“You’ve had quite the chat, haven’t you? Not sure I like it if he tells you all my secrets.”
“He only tells nice things about you. Daddy said you were the only one who could piss Uncle Zach off. And Daddy said you did it often.”
He said that often, ‘Daddy said,’ and he sounded so proud and happy when he did. Like it was a relief that he was able to say it, and it made me regret what I’d done even more. In my defense, the way Tommy was now wasn’t how he’d been when he was younger. Back then he was a completely different person. War and loss did that to people. It changed them. There was never any way of knowing beforehand if they would change for the better or for the worse; in Tommy’s case it was definitely for the better. He was still him, with his humor and his charm, but it was a more mature, careful, and responsible version of him.
Resonance (Marauders #4) Page 21
