Always You: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (ABCs of Love Collection Books 5-8)

by Brenna Jacobs

  “Please, don’t walk away from me again. Can we please finish this?”

  She shook her head, tears spilling from her eyes. Her voice was steady as she said, “You finished this years ago.”

  Pulling away, she swiped at her eyes and stepped up to the desk. “Can you give me any information about Nick Baxter?”

  The nurse said, “Are you family?”

  Hadley shook her head.

  “Sorry,” the nurse answered, as if that were any kind of an answer. Fletcher felt Hadley’s disappointment, and could imagine how frustrated she must feel. He didn’t want to make it worse by implying that he could get information out of the nurses (particularly because he actually could get information out of the nurses), so he stepped away.

  After Hadley began a solitary lap around the waiting room, Fletcher approached the nurses. “Can you get a message to the woman with Nick Baxter? Can you let her know that Hadley is here to check on her? I think she’s got her phone turned off.”

  “Sure,” the nurse said.

  Fletcher pretended not to notice Hadley walk circles around the waiting room. But of course he noticed.

  A few minutes later, Fletcher watched an exhausted and teary Savanna step through the privacy door and into the waiting room.

  He stayed back while Hadley ran and wrapped Savanna in her arms. Watching the women give and receive comfort, he remembered what a gift Hadley had for consolation. She always knew how to make horrible things bearable.

  One of the things he regretted about when his dad died was that he hadn’t had Hadley there with him. She would have known what to say, what to do, and what to avoid. But it would have been impossible. Impossible to ask her there, impossible to feel anything but awkward had she simply shown up.

  Savanna looked over her shoulder and caught Fletcher’s eye. She pointed to the ICU entrance, an invitation in her glance.

  Fletcher nodded and headed to the door, where the nurses buzzed him in. He tried to breathe normally as he approached his friend, but he couldn’t forget how he should have been there to prevent all of this.

  Chapter 18

  Hadley settled Savanna in a hard, plastic chair and let her unload. Savanna spoke of the past several hours of sitting by Nick’s bedside, ducking out of the way of doctors, nurses, orderlies, janitors—everyone in the hospital seemed to need to get into his room and witness his unresponsiveness.

  “It’s awful, Hadley,” Savanna said, her exhaustion overtaking her grief enough that her words came out flat and emotionless. “I can smell fire. I know it’s unreasonable, but I swear, the smell of smoke is clouding up the room. He’s lying there, eyes closed, a tube shoved down his throat, getting poked and prodded and pushed, and there’s nothing of Nick there. He doesn’t even look like himself. No laughing, no silly grins, no eagerness to please. Seeing him like that…it’s scary.”

  “But he’s going to be fine?” Hadley asked, her voice as unsure as she felt.

  “Since I’m not family, they can’t tell me anything. The doctor says things are looking good, for whatever that’s worth. I don’t know what things, or to what extent they’re good. When the nurse told me you were here, I just had to get out of there and see someone who would look me in the eye.”

  Hadley nodded. “What do you need?”

  Savanna let out a sound that might have passed for a laugh under different circumstances. “Coffee? A sandwich?”

  “I just happen to have the residue of the worst family Thanksgiving meal ever. I mean, the food was great. But the family part… Come on. Let’s feed you, and then we can regroup.”

  Savanna allowed herself to be led out into the parking lot. “Do you think it’s unfeeling and callous of me to be hungry right now?”

  Hadley shook her head. “Let’s call it ‘biologically responsible’ and move on.”

  The two women leaned over the open trunk of Hadley’s car, pulling slices of turkey out of the foil-covered dish and eating them with their fingers.

  “You have to eat this pie, though,” Hadley offered. “Hang on.” She went around to the passenger seat and rummaged through the glove box until she found a plastic spoon. “I promise that this is cleaner than it would be if it wasn’t in the glove box,” she said, handing the spoon to Savanna.

  “I’m about ready to attack this pie with my bare hands. Germs and dirt and dog hair mean very little to me right now.” They leaned against the side of the car as Savanna ate bite after bite of Rose’s delicious pie.

  When she slowed down, Hadley had to ask. “So, how much were the doctors and nurses willing to tell you since…”

  Savanna licked a morsel of pie off the corner of her mouth. Swallowing again, she finished Hadley’s thought. “Since Nick and I have been together for approximately fifteen minutes?”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to say it that way. But since you did, yeah. That.” Hadley found Savanna a napkin and tucked the empty pie plate back in the trunk.

  “They tell me nearly nothing, but since the first responders get privileges, the boys get more info than I do. I think they would have shut me out completely, but Fletcher told them I was Nick’s girlfriend. He made it happen.” Savanna shrugged. “Maybe he’s not so bad.”

  Hadley’s laugh felt like the response to getting punched in the stomach. “Maybe he’s exactly what he’s always been.”

  “What do you mean?” Savanna asked.

  Hadley shook her head. “Nothing. Never mind.”

  Savanna put her hands on Hadley’s shoulders. “I know that look,” she said. “What happened?”

  There was not a good way to tell this and keep her pride, so Hadley just ran with it. “It’s possible that I confessed that I’d never gotten over him, and he denied leaving me.”

  Savanna shook her head, and Hadley felt a rush of relief that her friend was on her side, unable to believe what a pig Fletcher Gates was. It had been a common thread in many of their discussions lately. But when Savanna spoke, she did not say what Hadley imagined she would.

  “I’m pretty sure you did the leaving, Had.”

  Words wouldn’t come. Hadley shook her head, mouth open, and stared at her tired, haggard friend. She couldn’t even tell her she had pie on the corner of her mouth. There simply were no words.

  “Honey?” Savanna reached over and put her hand on Hadley’s shoulder. “You told him to go.”

  “I did no such thing. And how would you even know that?” She didn’t mean for the words to come out quite so stabby. “Sorry. But how,” she asked, more softly this time, “would you even know that?”

  Savanna shrugged. “Nick told me.”

  “Okay, now that’s just nonsense.” Hadley collected all her righteous anger. “You and Nick have been together for like, twelve seconds. How in the world would my seven-years-dead relationship with Fletcher Gates even come up?”

  Savanna leaned against the car again. “Let’s call it a preliminary search for information. Nick wanted to know how I felt about certain aspects of a relationship with a fireman. He knows a guy who had a pretty serious heartbreak, so we talked about it.”

  Hadley shook her head. “I don’t get it.”

  “Fletcher told Nick that you guys broke up because your independence was incompatible with Fletcher’s hero complex.” Savanna started to say more, but Hadley stopped her with an inarticulate noise of disbelief.

  Holding her hand in front of Savanna to keep her from talking, Hadley closed her eyes and replayed that sentence over again. And again.

  Your independence was incompatible with Fletcher’s hero complex.

  After what was probably too long for politeness, Hadley dropped her hand and opened her eyes.

  “Wow.”

  Other words, even some complete sentences, now entered Hadley’s mind, but none of them felt terribly ladylike. Her words, when they came out, sounded harsh to her ears. But she didn’t care all that much. “Did you two have any other epiphanies about my psyche while you were discussing my dead love li
fe?”

  Savanna shook her head. “Don’t be like that. I’m too tired to fight. It’s a reasonable thing for him to ask me about. He wanted to know if I felt the same way.”

  “The same way as what? The way you imagined that Nick imagined that Fletcher imagined that I might have felt seven years ago?” Hadley heard her voice getting louder and higher, but she couldn’t seem to stop it. “Was anyone planning to ask me if I actually had any of the feelings you all have assigned to me?”

  Savanna, rubbing her hand over her hair, said, “He wanted to know if I need him.”

  Shaking her head in disbelief, Hadley asked, “Need him to what?”

  “Not to anything. Just need him.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Savanna glanced back at the door. “What it sounds like, I imagine. He said we could look at you and Fletcher as a failed experiment.”

  Opening and closing her mouth several times did not bring any words to Hadley’s lips. A wave of annoyance slipped across the back of her neck.

  “I don’t understand you.”

  Savanna raised an obviously tired arm and pointed at Hadley. “You got it. That’s exactly the point. Ready to go back inside?”

  “Wait.” Hadley recognized that her tone may have been construed as impatient or even aggravated. Probably because she was impatient and aggravated. She rubbed her hand across her freezing nose and tried again. Forcing a tone of kindliness into her voice, she put a cheery smile on her face and said, “Savanna, friend, whatever do you mean by that?”

  “Can we maybe get into the car to have this conversation? My face is freezing off.”

  Hadley thought about refusing, just so Savanna would hurry up and explain the whole stupid thing to her, but Savanna had already experienced a pretty rough day. They all had. She clicked the key fob button and the doors unlocked with a chirp.

  Savanna opened the passenger door, took one look inside, and closed it again. “Gross. This seat is a disgusting pile of fur.”

  “I object to your use of ‘disgusting,’ but otherwise I agree. Switch me.”

  Hadley let herself into the passenger seat and watched Savanna settle in behind the wheel.

  “Look,” Savanna said, and Hadley knew that tone.

  “You aren’t going to offend me,” Hadley said. Then she thought for a second and amended. “I mean, it’s always possible. You have a gift. But don’t worry about that.”

  Savanna raised her eyebrows as if to ask if Hadley was sure.

  Hadley nodded. “Say it.”

  “Do you really not understand why Fletcher left?” Savanna asked.

  “Because he didn’t want to be with me anymore.” Hadley couldn’t believe how much it hurt to say those words aloud, even all these years later.

  Savanna shook her head.

  “Because he wanted an adventure?” Hadley tried again. But that didn’t ring true, because together, every day, they had been experiencing an epic adventure of their own making.

  Savanna might have let her go on guessing all night, but she reached over and put her hand on Hadley’s shoulder. “Because he knew you would be just fine without him.”

  Hadley’s pshht sound of contempt was as natural as breathing. “Of course I would.”

  Savanna said nothing, but she kept their eyes locked together as what Hadley had said circulated through the cold air of the car.

  Hadley listened to the echo of her immediate response and knew that while it was true, it wasn’t right, not really. Of course she was “just fine,” but once, her life, her experiences, and her heart had been different. They had been more than fine. Who wanted to be “just fine,” anyway? When she’d been with Fletcher, every day had bubbled over with fun and excitement and it was all so much better than fine.

  These past few weeks, she’d had a reminder of how that had felt.

  And today, when she’d tried to tell him that she missed him, he’d blown her off and said that she was the one who’d done the leaving.

  Could he be right? Maybe she had left.

  Maybe it had been her fault all this time.

  She looked at Savanna, who waited—uncharacteristically silently—beside her.

  Maybe all of this missing and needing were tied up together. Maybe there were ways that she needed Fletcher, even if she didn’t actually need things from him. Maybe she needed to learn to give and take—to accept his chivalry and to be someone who could make him a sandwich now and then, even though he was perfectly capable of making his own sandwich. Maybe it was all bigger than sandwiches and opening doors and filling up each other’s empty spaces.

  It wasn’t impossible to consider.

  Maybe she was wrong about him.

  Maybe she’d been wrong about everything that mattered.

  Hadley cleared her throat softly. “I think I finally see it. All those years ago when I thought Fletcher abandoned me, was it me that left him? What if I really was the one who ended it?” Hadley’s voice splintered with emotion. As her eyes filled with tears, she felt Savanna’s hand reach out and come to rest on her arm.

  As she looked down at her friend’s fingers, nails bitten down with the worries of the afternoon, she understood that while she didn’t need Savanna’s comforting touch, life was so much better when it was there.

  And so, even if she could technically live without Fletcher Gates and his sometimes (often) unnecessary protector/rescuer complex, couldn’t every single part of her world improve if he was part of it?

  This idea floated around in her head and her heart for a few minutes as she watched Savanna’s fingers stroke the sleeve of her sweater. With a deep inhale, Hadley said, “I think it’s time you demanded to be let back into Nick’s room.”

  Savanna practically threw the driver’s door open. “Come on,” she said. “Someone’s going to have to keep Fletcher busy in the waiting room when I kick him out.” She tugged Hadley’s hand to get her to hurry. “That’s your job.”

  Chapter 19

  Fletcher sat in the chair near Nick’s head, his hand on Nick’s arm. Tubes and wires threaded around them, and the steady beeping of monitors covered the sounds of Fletcher’s words.

  “Come on, man. Come back to us. It’s time for you to push through this. If you can wake up now, it means that you got a mean bump on your head, but you’re fine. You’ve had a few hours to nap it off, buddy, and you’re ready now. Come on. Wake up.”

  He shifted in the seat, leaning his elbows into the mattress. In a whisper, he said, “I’m sorry. I should have been there for you. I should have come up the stairs first, and I could have seen that beam coming down. You would have been mad if I’d knocked you to the floor, but it wouldn’t have taken,” he looked at the clock on the wall, “six hours for you to get over it.”

  It had been like this for what felt like a long time—longer than he’d imagined Savanna would stay away. He’d give Nick reasons to open his eyes, and then he’d apologize. Then he’d start again.

  Fletcher knew he was following orders when he didn’t go up the stairs of that house with Nick. And he knew that, while all the guys on his crew felt like brothers, the bosses were careful when they sent friends inside to cover each other.

  They described it like this: if a firefighter went into a scene following his brother, or his wife, or his best friend, and there was a moment when he had to make a choice between saving his person and doing the hard thing that was best for the structure, he’d lose the big-picture perspective. He’d do what was best for that one person instead of the whole operation.

  And Fletcher knew that was true, but he hated that he hadn’t been there anyway.

  Resuming his whispered monologue, he said, “All right, Nick. Here’s the deal. Savanna has been here, looking red-eyed and,” here he looked around and cleared his throat, “loyal, since the minute they brought you here. If I ever said anything to you about how I was, you know, scared of her? I want you to forget it. We agree that I don’t bring out the best in her, but
dude, she brings out the best in you. If you open your eyes, you’ll get to see a very pretty woman who is eager, no, thrilled to see you.”

  The door swished open and Savanna put her head in. “Tag,” she said with a half-smile. She stepped inside the room and set down her purse. “I’m it.”

  Fletcher nodded and stood up. Leaning over Nick and putting his hand on Nick’s forehead, Fletcher said, “I’m pretty sure there’s a pumpkin pie around here, too.” He slid his hand to Nick’s hand and pressed his fingers. Standing opposite Fletcher, Savanna laced her fingers through Nick’s other hand.

  At that moment, Fletcher on one side of the hospital bed and Savanna on the other, Nick began to stir.

  Fletcher watched Nick’s face as his muscles twitched, his eyes blinked open, and he looked from Fletcher to Savanna, squeezed each of their hands, smiled at them, and closed his eyes again.

  Fletcher felt his breath escape him and then rush back in, as if his body’s reflexes kicked in because he’d forgotten to breathe. He looked from Nick’s face to Savanna to make sure he hadn’t imagined it.

  “That happened, right?” Savanna asked with tears and a smile.

  Fletcher noticed the muscles in his neck and shoulders relax a fraction. He nodded.

  Savanna stabbed a finger at the call button and reached her other hand across the bed to grab Fletcher by the arm. “What did you say to him?” she asked, relief and excitement flooding her face.

  Fletcher needed to wait a second before he trusted his voice to carry the message. “I told him if he woke up, you’d be here,” he said. “Oh, and that there’s pie.”

  She laughed. “I swear, Gates, if he woke up because you mentioned pumpkin pie, I’ll break your kneecaps. You’ll be recovering in the next room.”

  “Whatever it takes,” Fletcher said.

  A nurse pushed through the door and glanced at Fletcher and Savanna. Before she could remind them that only one visitor could be in the room at a time, Fletcher said, “I’m on my way out.”

  He stepped around the nurse, who checked monitors and machines, nodding and making notes in the file on her tablet. Glancing at Savanna, he asked, “Is Hadley still here?”