“Amen to that,” Gavin says.
I shake my head, silently telling him he shouldn’t be so quick to respond. His eyes grow wider.
“My suck, is that in about seven and a half months…we’ll be eating our own words.”
The table goes quiet. Even Katie is quiet for a change. Gavin faces forward and rests his elbows on the table, then covers his face with his palms.
I know it’s unexpected, but I was kind of hoping he’d react positively. Which may be why I chose to tell everyone at the same time. We’ve both graduated college. We both have good jobs. I’m not sure how unexpectedly having another baby could be all that bad. Especially since we’ve talked about giving Katie a sibling.
Gavin slowly stands and I’m afraid he’s about to bolt out of the house to have a meltdown. He turns to face me and his arms go out as wide as the grin that appears on his face. “You’re pregnant?!” he yells. He wraps his arms around me and lifts me out of my seat, then steps away from the table and spins me around before setting me back down again.
He grabs my face and forces me to look him in the eyes. “Seriously? We’re having another baby?”
I nod and he laughs. He reaches down and lifts Katie out of her seat. “Katie, did you hear that? Mommy has a baby in her tummy!”
Katie looks at me. “Baby Julia in your tummy?” She looks horrified at the thought.
“No, sweetie,” I tell her. “This is a new baby. This baby doesn’t have a name yet.”
Gavin is beaming. “We get to name the baby ourselves,” he says. “Whatever we want. We’ll let you help us pick the name.”
Katie grins. “Poo poo bird.”
Gavin laughs, then reaches toward me and pulls me in for another hug with the two of them.
*
It’s been three hours since we left Layken and Will’s house with Julia. I finally got her to go to sleep and she’s passed out on my chest. I’m watching reruns of I Love Lucy and Gavin and Katie are passed out together on the other couch.
There’s a soft knock at my living room door, followed by it opening slightly.
“Hello?” Will whispers.
I laugh to myself, thinking they did good to make it three hours without her.
“It’s open,” I say.
Will walks in and sees Julia asleep on my chest. He smiles a bashful smile; like he’s embarrassed that they couldn’t stay away from her for eight hours.
“It’s fine,” I say. “I figured you’d be back for her.”
He laughs and reaches down to lift her up. He pulls her to her chest. “Layken couldn’t sleep without her in the room with us,” he whispers.
I nod and watch him as he lifts her away from his chest and adjusts her into the fold of his arms. “Or maybe Daddy couldn’t sleep without you there,” he whispers to her. He brings her forehead to his mouth and kisses her, then turns and walks toward the front door. When it closes behind him, Gavin wakes up from the noise. He looks at the front door, then looks at me and sees I’m not holding Julia anymore.
“Suckers,” he says, laughing. “I knew they couldn’t do it.”
I smile. “Come here,” I say to him.
He rolls Katie onto her back, then stands up and walks over to the couch I’m sitting on. He lowers himself down and rests his head in my lap. He turns toward my stomach and gives it the perfect kiss, then places his hand on it.
“This is one lucky kid, Eddie.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he says. “He’s gonna have the best big sister in the world and the best mom in the world.”
I smile. “And the best Gabin in the world.”
* * *
Colleen Hoover is the author of five New York Times bestselling novels. Her first series was published in 2012 and includes Slammed, Point of Retreat, and This Girl. Her second series, published in 2013, includes the #1 NYT's bestseller Hopeless and the companion novel, Losing Hope. She has released a free novella, Finding Cinderella, as a thank you to her readers for their continued support. The novella is a companion to her Hopeless series, but can be read as a standalone.
Colleen lives in East Texas with her husband, their three boys, their dog, Pacey, and their zombie, Steve. Colleen loves Diet Pepsi more than all of the things, and is a ninja in her spare time.
You can follow Colleen on Instagram if you want to watch her pointless, random videos, or on Twitter, but she rarely tweets anything worth following. You can also find her on her blog or on her very active Facebook page where she loves to give away free stuff when her husband isn't looking.
http://colleenhoover.com
*
Death Kiss
George Wier
The Loser had the kind of face that made tougher guys want to use it as a punching bag, and his face bore the evidence that a series of such men had been unable to resist the temptation to do so in the past. His acne scars didn't help matters, either.
He leaned with his backside against the chalk table and held an arm extended parallel with the plank floor of the place to grasp the cue stick held at perpendicular such that he could have been doing an audition for the part of Pharoah in some local theatre troupe, except for the fact ‘loser’ was practically written on his face. One corner of his mouth turned up to give him a know-it-all, sardonic, self-satisfied grin.
Erica saw him standing there like that, surveying the lay of the billiard balls before him, and was instantly drawn to him. That was Erica all over again ― always going for the losers.
Erica didn’t learn his name until after she’d completed her first treatment and after the FBI had finished grilling her there in the hospital. But that was later, after she’d made a complete ass of herself by throwing herself at the guy.
His name was Lonnie Wayne Smith, although she didn’t know his name at that point. Still, she recognized him instantly for the kind of guy who would make her father want to stomp him into the dirt, and after that she couldn’t help herself.
Her friends, Lori, Matt and Kyle, thought she’d gone off the deep end. She was supposed to be there with Kyle, Lori’s selection of a match for Erica, but Erica and Kyle had taken an instant disdain for one another in the couples department, and so on the pretext of needing to use the restroom, Erica had left the bar up front and gone wandering through the place, back towards the pool tables. She had thought that maybe there was a rear exit back there somewhere which let out onto Fifth Street. This night, Sixth Street was beyond boring and there had to be something, somewhere for her.
And then there was The Loser. He was hers.
She saw that he was drinking a beer and went to the bar and got him another one. When she approached him and put it in his hand, his eyes met hers and he smiled. She then slipped under The Loser's arm holding the pool cue and pulled it arm down around her waist. The Loser seemed to like it, as she knew he would. Erica wasn’t sure just when she started calling him The Loser in her mind, but that was also part of the whole enchilada.
Erica smelled something then, something either on The Loser or about him, underneath the sharp tang of beer and cigarettes. She didn’t know what it was, but it called to her mind... something. She couldn’t recollect quite what, but it was there and images of raw force and power pervaded her vision and made the tableau of the pool game and the bar seem like a fake picture, a bright patina, possibly, painted over some older, deeper and darker yet unknown masterwork. The Loser was a force of nature, this she knew instinctively.
Lori entered the room first, followed by Matt, then Kyle. The three of them stood looking at her. The Loser had his forearm pressed hard against one of her breasts.
“You’re up, Lonnie,” one of pool players said. He was just another loser, but much less of a loser than Lonnie, who was The Loser.
The arm came from around her and The Loser did what he did best: he acted the part of the infinitely bored as he ran the last four balls on the table, walking each ball into a pocket as though doing so was as inevitable as the summer sun
.
Lori came over to her.
“Just what the hell are you doing? Kyle likes you!”
“No he doesn’t,” Erica said. “Besides, I think I found someone.”
“Yeah. I know,” Lori said. “I don’t like the looks of that guy.” Lori’s eyes turned to watch him strut around the pool table to grab a cube of chalk and flick-flick-flick it against the tip of his cue stick, as if aligning the molecules of blue chalk there just right. Her upper lip twitched spasmodically. No, Lori didn’t like The Loser one tiny bit.
“But I like him,” Erica said. “So do me a favor and fuck-off for awhile. I’ll catch up with you later.”
“No,” Lori said. “We’re you’re friends. And that guy ― he looks like a serial killer or something.”
“I like him.”
“Your screwed-up hormones like him,” Lori said. She turned and then over her shoulder said: “We’ll be in the bar a few more minutes. If you're not back by the time we're done, we're coming for you.”
She looked over Lori's shoulders at Kyle and Matt, and both of them slowly shook their heads at her in unison. The two could have been twins.
“Fine,” Erica said.
*
After the game Lonnie The Loser crowded Erica between the dark hulk of the defunct Ms. Pacman machine and the overly loud, partially blown-speaker Blasteroids game, and spent a bit of time French-kissing her and feeling her up. She had one brief orgasm there, his fingers doing the walking, which ended abruptly when he tried to stick his tongue so far down her ear that he almost contacted her eardrum.
“Come on,” Lonnie The Loser said. “You’re coming over to my place.”
Erica nodded.
But that never happened. The instant Lonnie turned around, Kyle was there. He punched Lonnie The Loser in the face. Lonnie collapsed to the floor, grasped at his nose with both hands and bleated like a sheep mid-slaughter.
“Erica!” Lori yelled. “We’re getting out of here. Now!”
Lori grabbed Erica’s arm in a vise-like grip and pulled her from between the two game machines. Matt came from the other side and lifted Erica up over a writhing Lonnie The Loser, threw her one-ten pounds of weight over his football-player shoulders and the four of them made their way quickly out of the bar. Erica wouldn’t remember until much later — about the time she was having to tell the whole tale from start to finish for the FBI guys ― that she had screamed bloody murder the entire length of the bar and halfway to their car.
*
All that occurred Saturday night. By Monday morning there was something decidedly wrong with Erica’s face. Besides the tender puffiness, her skin was rapidly streaking with strange marks. Her lips swelled up like little purplish cocktail sausages. She was also losing hearing in one of her ears. And Erica itched — badly.
Lori took her to the Emergency Room at Brackenridge Hospital, again not taking no for an answer.
Lori stayed with her there in the ER for ten hours after the ER doc took skin samples. Meanwhile Erica’s face and head got worse. She itched and burned and she wanted to scratch her face off, but Lori kept holding her hands down. Lori wore latex gloves the whole time. That alone should have tipped Erica off.
Erica was sure they were going to give her some topical ointment, some sedatives ― hopefully Vicodin, which she would be able to sell to one of her friends ― and then let her go. But that idea, like many another of Erica’s ideas, was shelved when she was told she was being admitted.
About the moment she asked “Why?” in abject frustration ― and it came out sounding more like “Aye?” because of the way her lips and tongue were swollen ― in walked a man wearing a blue dinner jacket flanked by another man in a police uniform. The fellow in the blue dinner introduced himself as an FBI agent, and she instantly forgot his name. But it was the uniformed officer who would stick in her mind for the rest of her life.
“Before we get your signed consent and knock you out, Ms. DeWare,” the ER doctor said, “because we do have to get you to surgery right away ― you need to tell the whole story to these gentlemen.”
“What story?” she asked, only it came out “‘Ott ‘owey?”
The uniformed officer introduced himself Ralph Bigham. “About the guy in the bar who was kissing you,” he said.
*
Ralph Bigham was with the Office of the Travis County Medical Examiner. Although he was no doctor he was, nonetheless, a forensics expert. Ralph mostly handled the cold cases, those files still open but that were, officially, at a dead end.
Ralph had moved to Austin a couple of years back after a stint as a Sheriff’s Deputy in Brazos County. He’d left not long after he’d loaned his sidearm to a convicted felon who was intent on solving a murder case that the local powers-that-be wanted closed. Even though Charles Lyman, the felon, had solved the case, took down one of the two killers and helped send the other one to prison, Ralph had seen the writing on the wall. Ralph was no longer welcome in the Brazos County law enforcement community.
The next step up was Austin. He had packed his bags on a Friday afternoon, drove to Austin on Saturday morning, and by Saturday night had gotten a job with the Coroner ― a job that few others would have accepted for any amount of money, much less actively sought.
Now, two years later, there was a chance that the little red-haired University of Texas sophomore, Erica DeWare, was going to help him put most of a shelf of cold case files to bed. And it was the shelf that had bothered him the most since arriving, as three of the cases had occurred during his brief watch.
Ralph sat on the edge of her Erica’s bed and smiled at the girl.
“You suffer from a flesh-eating bacteria,” he said.
When he saw that Erica was going to get hysterical, Ralph said “tut-tut-tut. They’ve caught it in time to save your face and your hearing. You’ll be fine. Just fine. But it will take up to a four-week stay here in the hospital for you to fully heal. Now, you have to listen to me carefully.”
Erica nodded.
“You have a bacteria called Necrotizing fasciitis. There is only one place to find such this particular strain of the bacteria. Are you following me?”
She nodded again, and Ralph Bigham could see that he had Erica’s full and complete attention.
And then he told her.
*
They came for Lonnie Wayne Smith in the middle of the night and quietly surrounded his home. Two dozen men and women were in the team, eleven Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, a five-man crew from the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms Division of the Department of Justice, four from the Austin Police Department Hostage Crisis and Sniper Unit, two Travis County Sheriff’s deputies, and Ralph Bigham and a bookish little woman ― Ralph’s assistant ― Delores Rogers. Delores gripped her twelve-gauge riot gun in a white-knuckle grip.
On a pre-arranged signal Ralph and another man wearing black over bulging kevlar gripped a miniature battering ram between them, counted to three in a whisper as they swung it back, swung it back, and then slammed it into the wooden panel next to the doorknob.
The door slammed open and seven black shapes poured into the house.
When they entered his bedroom, Lonnie Wayne Smith was just getting out of his bed. He was in his George Foreman underwear.
“What?” Smith asked. But then the dark shapes poured into his room and tackled him, rolling him off the backside of his bed and into the wall.
“We got him!” a voice said into a tiny microphone and was picked up by forty different sets of ears — the men and women both in the house and outside, and the backup team around the block.
“What? What? What? What?” Smith yelled and continued to long after he was cuffed.
“Lonnie Wayne Smith,” Ralph Bigham stated. “You have the right to remain silent...” Ralph continued the Miranda warning and at end of it, after one of the ATF guys had turned on the bedroom light and they all lifted their night-vision goggles to rest perched atop their foreheads, he continued with t
he rest of it.
“Additionally,” Ralph said, “this is a search warrant signed by a District Court Judge, duly empowering me to search this premises for certain evidence.”
“What? What evidence?” Smith stated. Smith looked a sight. His hair was disheveled and his face was purplish and swollen, no doubt from where Kyle Anders had punched him the face in the bar on Sixth Street on Saturday night. But, then again, Lonnie Wayne Smith did have a face that looked terribly punch-able.
“Well,” Ralph said. “This warrant is not general at all. It says here very specifically,” and Ralph pointed at the line of fine handwriting. “We’re to search for human remains.” Ralph Bigham keyed the microphone below his lips.
“Parchman, bring in the dogs.”
*
“There is only one place to find such a bacteria. Are you following me?” Ralph Bigham said, there behind the billowing curtains in the Brackenridge Hopital ER that Monday night.
And Erica nodded.
“Good,” he said. “Dead people, Ms. DeWare. The rotting flesh of dead people. Your Lonnie is the serial killer we’ve been looking for these last five years.”
And at that moment, although there was zero for contents in Erica DeWare’s stomach, she began yarking up every bit of fluid to be found there. Ralph Bigham hopped up and grabbed a towel for her. Her friend Lori grabbed the plastic tray beneath the rolling dinner tray by the bed, but they were both too late.
*
Another day going down. Ralph Bigham breathed in the air over Ladybird Lake, locally referred to as Town Lake. All those health-conscious people down there running the long jogging trail around the lake. So many of them.
Ralph lit his cigarette and inhaled deeply. He had taken to smoking after moving to Austin, mostly because several of his favorite co-workers were smokers.
The Kiss: An Anthology About Love and Other Close Encounters Page 7
