Level Hands: Bend or Break, Book 4

by Amy Jo Cousins

  “Look, I get it. This is important.” The look on Denny’s face begged for Rafi to understand, but he never, ever would. “But so is your rowing, and you’ve worked fucking hard for this. You can start the indoor season by killing it in this race. You know it.”

  “No, you don’t get it.”

  “But you won’t even be able to see her right away, right?”

  “Jesus, Denny, what’s wrong with you?” Rafi snapped. This was ridiculous. “I’m not going there just for Lola. I’m going for all of them, so I can be with my sisters when they need me. And because I need them right now. Because we’re scared as shit and I don’t want to be a thousand miles away while we’re waiting to find out if anything else, if anything worse, is going to go wrong.”

  “I’m not saying don’t go. I’m just…” Denny pulled out his phone, punching up a search engine probably. “I can check for direct flights while you make your race, and then take you straight there. Your race is practically first. You’ll be done in, what? Two hours? You don’t even have to stay for the rest of the regatta.” He looked up from his phone.

  Rafi stared at him. “Seriously, what is wrong with you? Is this because your family is all fucked up? Because your parents want to control everything you do, but don’t actually want to talk to you?”

  “Hey.” Denny stepped back, one hand out, the other opening and closing in the sling on his chest. “That’s not fair.”

  Rafi knew it wasn’t, but he didn’t have time to spend on explaining this shit to someone who clearly didn’t get it. All he wanted to do was get out of there. To go home.

  So he didn’t say another word. Just pushed past Denny, pausing only to scrape his keys off his desk as he headed to the door and left without a backward glance.

  The taxi from the airport to the hospital cleared out Rafi’s bank account when he slid his debit card through the reader as the cabbie pulled over in front of the hospital. He’d need to borrow money from his sisters to get back home.

  To campus. The mental slip startled him as he got out of the cab.

  Assuming he was going back at all. Mari was texting him every half hour, updating him on the surgeries as they were scheduled. She kept telling him that everything was going to be okay. Lola was stable.

  Fucking stupid word. Stable. Didn’t tell him anything about anything. Was she awake? Was she hurting? What could still go wrong?

  He didn’t blame Mari. Was amazed she was holding it together, able to send him coherent words when he knew she had to be freaking out. She was their mama cat, damn near licking them upside the head to make sure they were clean before bed every night, growing up. To wait and be unable to help would be devastating for her.

  The sliding glass doors into the main atrium opened without a sound at his approach. At the reception desk, waiting behind an elderly couple to get the cardboard square he needed to clip to his collar for access took forty-seven years. By the time he made it up to the floor where Lola was waiting for her next surgery, he was ready to stab someone in the eye with a hypodermic needle if they couldn’t help him find his sister faster.

  The door to his sister’s room was shut. He didn’t know what that meant. Should he go in? Should he wait in the hall? He scanned the immediate area, hoping for a helpful nurse or anyone with enough authority to tell him what to do.

  Before he realized it, he was cataloguing the differences between this hospital and the one they’d taken Denny to in Vermont. He couldn’t help noticing the worn spots on the tiles, the psychedelic artwork from the seventies no one had bothered to update, the crappy laminate of the countertops at the nurses’ station. No fake hardwood floors like in the hospital rooms in Vermont. He’d thought that was the weirdest touch of all, until he’d realized the floors weren’t really wood, made instead of some material that could be molded to look like hardwood but could no doubt be hosed down by disinfectant and come up shining.

  And that hadn’t even been the fancy hospital. Rafi had offered to take the bus into Boston to visit Denny at the hospital there during his forty-eight hour stay, only to be told that there would be a waiting list at Denny’s hospital door, no doubt, of family lined up to see him. To take care of him. Denny’s family might not be good at the day-to-day love stuff, but they made a point of showing up for the public crises.

  Rafi had bitten down on his tongue to keep the words in.

  But I’m the one who’s supposed to take care of you.

  He’d had to wait until Denny was back on campus to find out what he needed and make it easier for him to get it. To read up on the physical therapy program Denny was following, information he hoped would come in handy once Lola was on the road to recovery too.

  By the time a nurse left Lola’s room and told him that yes, he could go in, Rafi was braced for the worst.

  The gasp from Mari and the full-body slam of her hug let him take his first deep breath since hanging up the phone with her earlier that morning.

  Lola wasn’t conscious, but she was only sleeping, his sisters told him, and the docs had said there was no internal bleeding. A miracle. The girls whispered as they gathered in the farthest corner from the bed and hugged him. Nita and Sofi and then Mari again. He was so much taller than all of them, except for Lola, that it always felt like children crowding around him when they gathered close. They let him go over to the hospital bed where Lola slept. Bandages, some of them visibly bloody, seemed to cover every inch of her arms and legs. He could see that her chest was wrapped too, and electrodes and IVs were attached absolutely everywhere. About the only part of her that didn’t look damaged was her head, and he damn near dropped to his knees again in gratitude for that fucking helmet José made her wear.

  The entire time, he couldn’t stop seeing how faded the paint on the walls was. How the corners of the room were dingy, as if maybe they didn’t get cleaned perfectly.

  He heard his sisters talking about who was making the dinner run and interrupted to drag Mari out into the hall with him, dragging her by the simple expedient of clamping a hand around her arm and pulling. She was the family decision maker. He needed her for this.

  “Stop it. Ow.” She twisted out of his grip.

  “I’m sorry.” He meant it, but he couldn’t think straight right now. This was too important. He needed to know. “Should we move her?”

  “Lola? What do you mean?” Mari wrinkled her forehead.

  “To another hospital.” When Mari didn’t say anything, he repeated himself. “A better hospital.”

  “This hospital is perfectly fine.” She shook her head as if he were being silly and took a step toward re-entering the room. He blocked her without thinking.

  “Perfectly fine isn’t as good as it gets.” He didn’t know how to explain what he’d seen. How much better things could be for people with money. How full of burning frustration it left him to see his sister in a hospital with fucking linoleum tile peeling up in the corner of the hallway, damn it.

  “Yeah, and as good as it gets is what I want for cancer. Or if I get breast implants.” Mari snorted at the look on his face, before softening and putting her hand on his arm. “Rafi. I’m kidding. The humor’s been a little dark around here today. She’s gonna be all right. Really. You can take a breath and relax, okay?”

  “But what if there are other things they should be doing for her?” Nothing in this place was cutting-edge. Everything looked second-class.

  “There aren’t.” He opened his mouth to argue. Mari’s sharp look shut him up in a hurry. “I’ve talked to ten different doctors in the past twenty-four hours and spent every free minute researching every word they said to us online. I’m not an idiot, Rafaelito.”

  “I know, but—”

  “No buts.” Mari slapped a hand against his chest. “Everything she needs is old school. Surgeries they’ve done a thousand times. She got the shit banged out of her, but none of i
t’s anything they haven’t seen before.”

  “There are better hospitals.” He couldn’t stop saying that.

  “Yeah, and who’s gonna pay for that?” Mari sighed, wrapping a hand around the back of her neck. “When she can get the exact same care right here?”

  Shit. He hadn’t even thought to ask. “She’s got insurance, right?” He turned his back to the nurses’ station as he said it, in case the answer was no.

  Mari glared at him. “Of course. It’s the law, isn’t it? But her deductible is high as hell. She’s looking at medical bankruptcy either way, maybe. I’ve been talking to a lady in billing about getting her into the hospital’s aid program.”

  “I can come home. Go back to work. Help.” He didn’t even need to think about it.

  “No, you fucking will not.” Mari pissed off was a fierce, short fighter with tangled hair twisted into a knot that looked like something ancient warriors might have worn to scare their enemies in battle. “Who do you think that helps in the long run? Nobody.”

  He knew what she meant. Didn’t need it spelled out for him. Full-ride scholarships to elite colleges didn’t fall out of trees, he knew. At least, not a second time. If he came back to Chicago, he was looking at begging for his City Sports job again, at the barely-over-minimum wage the nonprofit paid, or picking up shifts waiting tables somewhere. In the long run, a degree from Carlisle meant everything.

  “We can talk about this more later.”

  “No, we can’t.” His sister stood on tiptoe, and he automatically bent down so she could kiss his cheek. “We’re glad you’re here, Rafi, but we don’t need you to stay. I promise.”

  There weren’t enough chairs in Lola’s hospital room for everyone to sleep there. Not that there was much actual sleeping, what with the nurses coming in every half hour or so to check on things. Rafi had been surprised to see the computer in the corner of the room, where it seemed every detail of his sister’s care was available at a keystroke. No more hanging a clipboard with printed forms at the foot of the hospital bed. Probably no one had done that for ages, but the image was stuck in his head from a TV show or something.

  He’d followed one of the nurses, an older white woman with short blond hair and wide hips, out into the hallway after her midnight visit. Not knowing—what might happen next, what they were worried about, what they weren’t—was driving him crazy. He’d offered to share his peanut M&Ms and quizzed her on what she was doing when she typed at that computer station. She had work to do, no doubt, but was patient with him, explaining about the need to keep an eye on the swelling in Lola’s smashed leg, because too much would crush her blood vessels, depriving her foot of blood, which could potentially lead to a need to amputate.

  The hangover from the adrenaline rush he’d had at that news was keeping him awake in the lounge at 2:00 a.m.

  “Don’t freak out,” the nurse had said, a hand on his arm stopping him from sprinting to Lola’s room to whip back the sheet over her legs to check whether or not they were more swollen now than ten minutes ago. “There are several things the doctors will do in that scenario, from surgery to relieve the compartment syndrome to external fixation.”

  He’d made her spell those words so he could look those procedures up on his phone, and, holy shit, they were gross. The surgery the nurse mentioned was basically cutting slits in Lola’s leg to relieve the pressure, which made him want to gag.

  Then he saw the pictures of an external fixator and had to close his eyes until the dizziness went away.

  “They drill giant screws into her shin and thigh bones and then use a rack to stretch her leg to ease the pressure on the crushed bones. I mean, they drill right through her skin and muscle and bone, like a cyborg,” he’d said to some poor dude at the vending machine. Rafi had been standing there, trying to figure out how to get the dollar bill into the slot, because his brain was too tired to figure out which way was up for Washington.

  Pretty sure he’d scarred that guy for life.

  Pretty sure he’d scarred himself for life.

  He couldn’t stop looking at the pictures he found online—and people were fucking strange, taking pictures of their bloody cyborg legs in the hospital and Instagramming them, for Christ’s sake—and reading articles about how the procedure worked. He’d found that the more he read, the easier it got to look at the pictures, actually, because he started to understand what he was seeing and that let him relax.

  Not enough to sleep, of course, but he stopped freaking out about his sister losing her foot or most of her leg to amputation.

  Which meant that he was at least half asleep on the couch in the lounge, lights turned down as low as they would go, when the cushion dipped at his hip as somebody sat on it and a hand slid into his.

  “Hey there.”

  Even half asleep he would know that hand anywhere, that rough palm with calluses not yet fading despite Denny’s weeks of inactivity. But he could be dreaming Denny’s hand in his, so he kept his eyes closed and breathed deep, because he didn’t want to wake up yet.

  “I saw Mari. She gave me the keys to her place and told me to take you home for six hours of sleep or she isn’t letting you back in Lola’s room.”

  “Can’t leave.” He didn’t have the words for it, knew he was still wrangling with his fear that Lola had died and he was blocking that knowledge, pretending it had never happened.

  The sheer relief of admitting that thought out loud shocked him awake.

  “Hey.” Denny’s smile was a curve in the dim light. “Nurse Nikki said to tell you, and I quote, ‘There is no visible increase in the swelling, so there’s unlikely to be any need to decide on whether or not to try external fixation until later today.’ Hope that means something to you.”

  “It does.”

  “She also said, ‘Please get him out of here so I can get some work done.’” Denny smiled at him. “But she said it really nicely. I think she likes you.”

  “Yeah, right.” He was just what she needed. Some college kid grilling her about treatment options in the middle of an overnight shift. But Denny was here. Or else he was asleep and this was the best dream ever. And he knew he’d said some shitty things way back in the morning hours that he ought to apologize for, but nothing mattered like squeezing the hand in his and getting a squeeze back. His eyes stung.

  “I mean it. But you know what you can do to make her like you even more?” Denny held Mari’s keys up in the air and swung them in front of Rafi like a hypnotist. “Come home with me, Rafael Castro. You are getting sleeeeeepy. Very sleepy.”

  Rafi was tempted. He knew his sisters had been forcing themselves to take shifts sleeping at home. They were all aware this wasn’t going to be a short visit for Lola, and hyperorganized Sofi had dealt with her stress by making a schedule on a Google calendar and sharing it with all of them while Rafi had been in the air somewhere over Ohio.

  Denny had more guilt trip yet in his bag of tricks. “Seriously. Mari said she won’t feel like she can leave until there’s someone well rested here to be in the room when the doctors talk to Lola, and she wants your fresh perspective. They’re all dizzy with information right now.”

  And there was the thing he needed to give himself permission to leave. If it would help Lola for him to go home and get some sleep, then he could allow himself to do it.

  Outside in the open-walled parking garage, Rafi sucked the clean night air deep into his lungs.

  Okay, so it was Chicago, and the clean night air smelled like exhaust from the nearby highway mixed with the scent of chocolate from the Behr’s candy factory, but anything was better than the disinfectant-and-sick-people smell of hospitals.

  It took them twenty minutes to find Mari’s car, because her memory was clearly for shit when parking in a crisis, but eventually they were in the beat-to-hell Mazda, zooming through the quiet streets to the familiar building off the ma
in drag in Pilsen. As if they’d agreed to it, neither of them said a word about their argument in Rafi’s dorm room. Or in the gym on Tuesday. Or even how extraordinary it was for Denny to have followed him to Chicago.

  Not talking meant not acknowledging all the shit that had gone down between them, and right now that seemed the safest way forward. Denny was here, with him, and Rafi didn’t give a shit about the rest.

  Denny had come home with him dozens of times during the months he’d stayed with Cash in Chicago, so Rafi didn’t need to give any directions after they found parking. When he fumbled with his keys at the apartment door, Denny took over, unlocking the knob and the dead bolt and then securing them after they entered, leaving their shoes on the mat in the hall.

  Sister in the hospital or not, Rafi knew better than to wear his shoes inside, and Denny had smiled at him and toed his own lace-ups off too.

  They slung their bags in the corner of Rafi’s room, stumbled through pissing and brushing teeth in the dark, sharing the tight bathroom space as if they’d always done it that way.

  Stripping off and falling into bed with Denny felt like heaven now, if only because they were in his king-size bed and had space to stretch out both of their six-foot-plus frames. The last time he’d tried to share a bed with Denny had been the unsuccessful attempt to share his twin in the dorm. He dragged the comforter over to his side, and watched Denny climb cautiously onto the bed. Denny had taken the sling off but held his arm carefully to his chest.

  “Need extra pillows?” Rafi asked, eyeing the way Denny settled onto his good shoulder, facing him.

  “Nope.”

  Rafi tangled their legs together and tugged Denny over to him, careful not to jostle his arm. Denny’s hand slid down to Rafi’s ass, and he opened his mouth against Denny’s in the dark. They didn’t need words for this.

  Soft. For all his muscles and calluses, Denny’s mouth was soft and yielding under his, offering heat and comfort in equal measure. Rafi snaked his fingers into Denny’s hair and tightened them until Denny gasped into Rafi’s mouth. He wasn’t trying to hurt, just needed to hang on to someone as tightly as he could.