“This is Nurse Addich from UR General,” the voice began. “I see that you are listed as one of the emergency contacts for Mister Jason Presley.”
“Oh… uh, yes. Yes, I am,” I answered, the panic coming back at the word emergency. “Is he… is he okay? Oh, please me he’s not—”
“Ma’am,” the voice somehow managed to remained calm while still asserting enough force to silence my worry. “I am calling to let you know he woke up about ten minutes ago. The doctors are in with him now, but we think he’ll be—”
“Oh thank God!” I groaned as I fell back against a bench on the sidewalk; Mack and all of his bullshit suddenly a gray and distant thought. “Thank you so, so much. I will be there shortly.”
“No problem at all,” Nurse Addich replied. “We will see you this afternoon.”
After hanging up with the nurse, I dialed out to Danny. Deciding that I didn’t want to wait on the bus to get to the hospital. I leaned back against the bench, a wave of happiness flooding me.
Jace was awake.
Things would be okay!
“Mia? Is everything okay?” Danny answered, sounding worried, after only two rings.
“Things are fine!” I smiled. “The hospital called! Jace is awake. Can you pick me up? I could take the bus but I don’t want to wait.”
Danny chuckled. “Told ya he’d wake up. And don’t worry, I’ll be right over. Where are ya?”
Blushing at the question, realizing that I had to come clean about my little adventure, I confessed.
The line was silent for a long moment.
“Danny?” I called out, questioning.
“Yer lucky that Jace loves you so much,” he grumbled back at me. “Damn lucky!”
“Y-yeah,” I said with a nervous chuckle. “Pretty lucky, huh?”
After hanging up, I moved my phone back to my purse and stood. Feeling revitalized from the news of Jace waking up, I decided that I wouldn’t let myself worry any more, at least for the time being, about Mack. Looking at a few more shops, I began to head towards the front entrance where the public parking was. I stopped at a small shop selling cotton candy and decided that I’d buy a bag for Danny for all he’d done. He deserved a small gift after everything he’d been dealing with for me.
****
Though it was, admittedly, a bit of a wait, the amount of time that passed between my call with Danny and the first audible roar of his approaching Harley proved to me just how scenic the bus route I’d taken was.
“Told ya it would only be a matter of time,” he teasingly mocked.
“Oh stop!” I grinned. “How many times do I have to tell you you were right?”
“Gay or not, a guy never gets tired of hearing that he was right. But, I dunno,” he smirked, “how ‘bout one more time?”
“Fine, you were right,” I said.
“Anything go down while you were here?” he asked.
Though I really didn’t like the idea of hiding something from Jace or any of the Crows, I couldn’t help but feel that worrying Danny about my brother would only serve to distract from the real problems. Mack might have been a hurtful bastard, and his time in prison had certainly appeared to turn him into a real creep, but I couldn’t believe that any set of circumstances could have turned my brother into an actual threat. More than likely, I figured I’d never even see him again—a sad thought initially, but one I could see myself getting over pretty quickly. Calling upon all the acting prowess I’d acquired as a whore, I plastered a phony smile for Danny and shook my head.
“Not at all,” I replied. “I just got a gift for Jace…” Then, my smile shifting into a sincere grin as I pulled out the bag with the cotton candy in it, I added, “… and a little something for you!”
“Somethin’ for me?” he asked, his eyes gleaming teasingly.
“Yup!” I smiled, pulling out the clear plastic bag of bright pink cotton candy. “Your favorite color even!” I boasted
“Cotton candy? My favorite!” he grinned. “This is the best! Thanks, girlie!”
“I hope this isn’t the best gift you’ve ever received,” I pouted, remembering a similar conversation Jace and I had had back at Canal Days.
“Well, prolly not,” he confessed, sporting a lecherous smirk as he did. “Anyway, shall we go visit yer Prince Charming, Princess?” Danny changed the subject, offering me a teasing wink.
“Don’t even,” I rolled my eyes, fighting not to laugh.
****
“I’ll go find parking,” Danny offered as he pulled up to the entrance of the hospital. Despite his words, however, I felt like he was going to be offering me a bit more time than would normally come from simply parking a motorcycle. Looking back at the mostly-empty parking lot, I wondered why he’d even bothered pulling up front when he could have just parked and been done with it. At that moment, once more seeming to read my thoughts, Danny swatted his hand at me, casting me away. “Off with ya!” he demanded.
And off I went, smiling my thanks back at him.
Feeling like I was floating, I headed through the hospital doors, took a deep breath, and continued on, walking slowly, through the halls. The surroundings blurred, and I was distantly aware that I couldn’t even remember talking to the receptionist in the waiting room or passing through the great divide—what separated us from him—and yet, all of a sudden, I was approaching his door. Despite this—despite how quickly and effortlessly it all seemed to be happening—it didn’t seem quick or effortless enough; every step felt like a slow-motion trudge through cold waters.
And then, just like that, I was reaching for the door handle. Feeling so very, very—
“What do you think? That it’s going to be okay? That you’ll just have some happily ever after with your Crow? You’re dreaming. This is the real world…”
I frowned, my hand stilling just over the door to Jace’s room, as Mack’s words returned to haunt me. I tried to ignore them; I had to ignore them
“Damn you, Mack,” I muttered under my breath. “I will not let you ruin this for me!” I clenched my eyes shut, stopping in the hall and leaning against the wall. I fought to not let the tears fall. I was so close to seeing Jace again.
Then, finally, I forced a solid thought of Fuck you, Mack! And forced myself to turn the knob before anything else in my head could try to stop it.
Everything suddenly felt perfect at the sight of Jace’s forest green eyes on mine.
FOUR
~JACE~
“God damn! Nothing should look as good as you look right now,” I said with a smile. Then, working to sit up—working to seem more presentable—and succeeding in tugging the increasingly annoying network of tubes and wires littered across my body, I winced and rolled my eyes. Groaning, I added, “And here I probably look like complete and utter shit.”
Mia’s face twisted in a brief instant of varying micro-expressions. I caught flashes of pity, anger, sadness, and hatred. While there were a few others that I missed, I wasn’t thrilled with the ones I’d seen. I hated having people pity me; I hated seeing Mia angry or sad; and, as for hatred… well, hatred didn’t exist to look good on pretty faces.
Simply put, I hated seeing how hatred was twisting such a gorgeous face.
Not that I was about to tell her so, and I certainly understood. I guessed it was directed either at the entire situation or more specifically on the dead-but-not-dead-enough T-Built. Lord knew I wasn’t done hating T-Built. Hell, I wasn’t done hating just about every beating heart tied to the Carrion Crew. When it came to hatred, I was something of an expert—a connoisseur, if I could be so bold as to think so—and, on many occasions, I’d seen that same twisted snarl on my own mug whenever a reflective surface was available. Granted, I wasn’t nearly as pretty as Mia. Far as I was concerned, nobody was. (Damn, that felt simultaneously glorious and guilt-inducing to think given everything I’d been through.) Needless to say, I knew hatred when I saw it, but that didn’t mean I wanted to see it.
It was
n’t like…
Where the hell was my head?
Growling, I snatched the tubing leading to the morphine drip and yanked it out of my arm, wincing at the exiting needle’s bite and hurrying to hide the growing bead of blood that followed it on its way out.
A small, nervous-sounding bark of worry escaped Mia’s lips, and I caught sight of a bag in her left hand that had been previously angled away from me. Then, hurrying to compose herself, she reangled herself—once again putting the bag out of my sight—and worked a rather convincing mask of apprehension atop a still concerned face.
“I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to leave that in,” she scolded me, taking a bold-yet-awkward step inside. There was a renewed confidence about her that was, admittedly, quite intoxicating to behold, but that bag of hers and her ongoing mission to keep it hidden was clunking up the effect.
That, I thought to myself as I worked to get a glimpse at whatever it was she was trying to conceal, needs to be taken out of the equation.
“Gotta take it out,” I said matter-of-factly. “Otherwise I’m going to have to walk out of here still wearing it in my arm.” I gave her a coy smirk and a playful shrug. “Sort of muddies up the effort of sneaking out if your clanging around with medical equipment all tagged-up in your veins.” Then, nodding towards the bag she’d been working so hard to keep hidden, I asked, “What’s that?”
Another micro-expression, this one showing embarrassment, passed across her stern-yet-concerned face. The blush held, but the embarrassment was gone quickly enough to have me convinced it had never been there. She twisted herself, angling her right hip more in my direction in an ongoing effort to further conceal the bag. It thumped against her thigh, crinkled audibly—earning a flinch from her in the process—and she rolled her eyes.
“They said you could go then?” she asked, ignoring my question and the painfully obvious elephant that she, herself, had carried in with her.
“I said I could go,” I said passively, already beginning to unplug more of the diodes scattered across my chest. “So what’cha got there?” I pressed further, ignoring the whine of a nearby machine as my vitals were suddenly robbed from its scans.
Mia’s eyes drifted to the angered machine, and then they rolled again. She seemed pleased to have something other than the bag to roll her eyes at. I grinned playfully at this, yanking another wire—this one all-but glued to my left temple—and giving her another excuse to roll her eyes. She did, but just as playfully.
Struggling to maintain her “mother said no cookies”-demeanor, she said, “I don’t think it works that way.”
“Probably not,” I admitted, ripping the last batch of wires free from my body—suddenly feeling a lot like Pinocchio ridding himself of all those pesky puppet strings—“but I don’t exactly like playing by the rules.” Still holding my mischievous child grin (it seemed to go well with “mother said no cookies”), I quipped, “Thought you would’ve figured that out by now,” before returning to the matter at hand: “So what’s in the bag?”
Mia rolled her eyes once more, groaned in defeat, and finally succumbed to a smile, which just as quickly turned into a giggle. Shaking her head, she closed the distance between us, planted a kiss on my lips—heaven; pure heaven—and set the bag gently on my lap.
It was an unmarked paper bag. Fancy, but not emblazoned with any brand name or logo. A pair of woven, cream-colored drawstrings looped up from either end of the widest lengths of the opening, and, peeking out just over the edges—the contents just slightly longer than the bag was tall—was a ruler-straight length of black plastic. It took me a moment to realize that what I was looking at was the outer edge of a frame. Squinting at this, confused, I took this by either corner and began to pull out whatever it was.
“The frame is a cheap piece of shit,” Mia injected before I had it all the way out, “but I figured we could find something nicer to put it in after you got out of here.”
I smiled at that, deciding to add that mission to the day’s plans.
Admittedly, that was not a long list.
I hadn’t decided that I was leaving until the moment I’d seen Mia walk through the door. I mused on that, finding it funny how such a bold and brash decision could be made in such a split-second, spur-of-the-moment instant. In my defense, though, having that woman step into your life was a surefire way to motivate such brashness. It certainly made sense how a face like that—and, yes, a body like that, too—could do well to separate men from their money. I had never been confused about why the Carrion Crew wanted her on the streets as one of their whores, and I couldn’t even be mad about it in the long run. If prostitution was the oldest human occupation, then women like Mia represented the best the business had to offer. A batting of those eyes, a pursing of those lips, and—sweet fucking hell, I’m horny!—a swagger of those hips and, yeah, the male mind was putty. Rendered stupid and desperate, she could get a guy to make a brash, split-second, and spur-of-the-moment decision. Even when she didn’t mean to. On the streets, as an “employee” of the Carrion Crew, that might have translated into getting into a guy’s wallet in exchange for letting him into her pants. Here, in a hospital room, however, it translated to “I’m getting the fuck out of here!”
And, again, in my defense: I was horny.
Then, finishing with the extraction process of the “cheap piece of shit” frame, I felt a great deal of that horniness leave me. Awe sauntered in side-by-side with pure love for this woman to replace it.
“I remembered your story about visiting there,” she said, smiling at what I could only imagine was a look of shock plastered across my face as I took in the familiar sight of a photograph of a scenic, sea-front view of a Roman town I’d gone to during a family vacation as a boy. We’d stumbled across that print during one of our dates, and it suddenly occurred to me that something I’d thought to be so passive and forgettable at the time had motivated her to track it down for me.
If there were any guilty feelings about ditching the hospital to spend the day with her, they were gone in that instant.
“You… you went back to the canal to get this?” I asked, hoping my voice wasn’t breaking as badly as it felt like it was.
Mia shrugged and tried to look casual as she said, “I was in the area.”
I tore my eyes from the photograph—no easy task, I might add—to give her a face. I remembered the ride we’d taken to get there, remembered how great it felt to have her sitting behind me on my chopper as we sped through the winding streets that left the city and wound dizzily towards the small town during its annual Canal Days festival. I hadn’t resented a moment of that ride—hadn’t resented a moment of that entire night, to be fair—but it was no quick trip. And it was most certainly not the sort of place that Mia had just accidently found herself in, no matter how beautiful and fun it might be.
“Oh? And what were you doing in the area?” I challenged.
Smirking, realizing she’d been caught, she said, “Tracking down that photograph.”
I stared at her, feeling myself fall in love with her all over again, and finally reached out to her, pulling her down to kiss her again. This time, I kissed her properly. None of that “glad you didn’t die”-pecking or “hey! Look at you awake and not comatose”-smooching. No, sir. Our lips needed to be properly reacquainted, and you can bet your ass that’s just what I did.
Because Jason Presley handles his business.
And, speaking of which…
Parting from the kiss, I carefully worked Mia’s gift back into its bag and hoisted myself from the hospital bed. I’d caught sight of some fresh clothes earlier, a pair of faded jeans with a tri-folded sheet of paper that read “SO WE DON’T HAVE TO STARE AT THAT BARE ASS OF YOURS, BOSS!” and my leather jacket, still encased in a plastic dry cleaner’s bag with a small gift tag looped around the top. Though it was pink and frilly, this tag’s message—“only a faggot knows how to get death and meth out of leather!”—was anything but fluffy and cute. It
was also all the evidence I needed to know that Danny, that tough-as-nails and fruitier-than-a-bag-of-Skittles godsend of a man had managed to pull through. Being one of my best friends and the closest thing I had to a father, it had been enough to make me laugh and cry at the same time upon seeing it.
Meth lab explosion? Multiple gunshot wounds? Burns? Lacerations? Smoke inhalation? Bah! Why should any of that go and spoil his fun, right? I’d thought, practically hearing him say “I ain’t dyin’ on Pride Month, ya dumb motherfucker!” in my mind.
Now, working my way across the room on still-shaky legs, I found myself glad for the generous offers for a whole new set of reasons. Knowing Danny was alive and well—and still catty as hell—was nice and all, but I was pretty sure that the clothes I’d been brought in wearing, all scorched and likely reeking of smoke and poisonous fumes, were long-gone. While nothing—goddam NOTHING!—was about to keep me from leaving that place with Mia, I was equally sure that a man escorting a pretty woman down the street with his butt crack hanging out from behind a hospital johnny was a good way to get dragged to a different sort of hospital, one with a snugly-fitted “hug myself” jacket, a drool bib, and a private room with walls made out of pillows.
Not that I probably wasn’t overdue for a psych eval…
But I’d definitely have to be crazy to stick around there any longer when I could be out and about with—
“You’re really doing this?” Mia said with a startled giggle.
“Damn right!” I told her, tearing off the johnny and beginning to reach for the pants gifted to me by some random (and soon to be handsomely rewarded) member of the Crows. “And nothing in the world’s gonna stop—”
“Mister Presley!”
I spun at the stunned and outraged call of my name and spotted the nurse from before glaring back at me from the doorway. The room fell into an awkward silence—enough to let the lazy THWAP of my whipped-about penis slapping against my inner thigh resound in three sets of ears—and I became aggressively aware of a number of incriminating facts:
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