Redeemed: Book Two of the Love Seekers Series

by Maria Vickers

  “No problem, Chad,” she snickered.

  My gazed drifted downwards and found a nurse wearing a pair of purple scrubs. Something about her was vaguely familiar, and yet, I couldn’t quite place where I knew her from. “Uh…” I tried to come up with something suitable, and in my current frame of mind, found the task impossible. Lack of sleep, worry about Rayne, and emotional turmoil turned a person’s mind to mush.

  Shaking her head, she supplied her information, “I’m Lee.” She continued when she noticed I still had not made the connection, “Lee Ching. I was your girlfriend’s nurse in the ICU.”

  Now I remembered. She was petite with a heart shaped face, and had come in to check on Rayne several times during her stay in the other ward. “Sorry, I’ve been a little out of it.” I didn’t correct her misconception about Rayne and her status as my girlfriend, because I liked the sound of it. I liked the thought of her being my girlfriend, even if it was in this stranger’s mind.

  “I understand. How is she doing?” she asked, her tone full of sympathy.

  “About the same,” I answered honestly. Lee had been there when Rayne woke up, she would understand.

  She nodded. “I get it. Just hang in there. Sometimes they just need a little push.” She patted my shoulder and then walked away.

  A push? The way I saw it, Rayne needed to be bulldozed into thinking differently. A little push wouldn’t do anything. That woman could be more stubborn than a mule.

  But, standing around doing nothing wasn’t accomplishing anything. Maybe a shove was in order.

  With renewed confidence, I sped to the elevators and hopped on. I was anxious to get to her and do…something. I still didn’t have everything planned out, but I refused to let her go. It already felt like she had started to slip through my fingers like sand; I would grab hold of whatever I could and yank her back to me. Even if I was banned from the hospital and her life forever more.

  It was a possibility I needed to anticipate. Ever since the day Rayne had been brought into the hospital, her parents welcomed me with open arms. Bryan on the other hand, watched me warily. He never left me alone with his sister if he stopped by the hospital to visit, never questioning me, only watching.

  As soon as the doors opened to the correct floor, I flew out of them and practically ran down the hall toward Rayne’s room, and ground to a halt feet away. Outside, I saw her parents talking with the neurologist overseeing her care. Panic that something had happened made my gut flip and churn. “Is Rayne all right?” I asked out of breath. My excitement at getting in her face and forcing her to face reality dwindled. Anxiety took root, the bad kind that made you terrified to look away. Now, I felt breathless for a completely different reason. My skin became clammy and tingly, waiting for their answer.

  Candy walked over to where I stood, and pulled me into her arms, hugging me as her body shook with tremors. Something had to be wrong. If nothing was wrong, they would have answered me immediately.

  Patting my chest, she looked up into my face and said, “She’s not talking to anyone that’s visiting. And today the nurse said she didn’t want any more visitors. Dr. Stiggler just told us that he has sent psych in several times and she didn’t give them the time of day. So we were discussing what to do next.”

  She wasn’t a dog or a piece of furniture. I shouldn’t get mad at what they were saying because it needed to be discussed, but I took offense. I got angry. And then I got furious at Rayne for her selfishness. She had always been selfish, but now she was taking it to another level.

  I set Candy to the side and dictated, “Let me talk to her.”

  “Chad, maybe now isn’t—” Fred started to say.

  “If not now, when?” I seethed, uncaring about his opinion. “We’ve been tiptoeing around her for weeks. I get it. It fucking sucks that she can’t feel her legs, but she’s fucking given up and I can’t stand it. Look at Emma, she adapted. My sister has adapted. She can too! I’m going in there to give her a kick in the ass. Maybe if she gets mad too, she’ll start giving a damn about life again.”

  “Chad—” Fred began again, and his mouth snapped shut when he saw the determined expression on my face. The only way they would stop me from entering that room was bodily force, and none of them had the strength. His eyes narrowed, and then he chuckled. “You might be right. Good luck, son.”

  I blinked in shocked, some of my bravado deflating. Did that mean I had his permission?

  Fred jerked his head toward Rayne’s door. “Well, go on.” His eyes showed his fear and hesitation, but he didn’t want to stop me.

  Nodding, I stalked over to her door, took a deep breath, and entered without knocking. I didn’t want to give her the opportunity to tell me to go away. If she wanted to say anything to me, it would be to my face.

  Chapter 35

  Chad

  I closed the door behind me and shifted my gaze to the bed. The collar around her neck had been removed shortly before her move to this room. Tubes ran from bags down to her arms, where IV catheters were situated inside her veins giving her medicine and nutrients. The room smelled like a florist shop with the multitude of bouquets that had been sent to her. I had been bringing her flowers daily, but she didn’t notice, didn’t care, and there were enough colorful blooms in here that anything additional would be lost in the shuffle.

  When I entered, Rayne didn’t flinch. Her head was turned toward the two windows on the wall to the right of her. Along that wall, a small wardrobe could also be found. The bathroom and sink were closest to the door and the TV hung from the wall in front of her bed. It was on, but the voices were so low I couldn’t understand a thing they were saying.

  “Rayne,” I called out to her as I started to approach her bed. She ignored me, pretending she heard nothing. To her, I was nothing more than a whisper on the wind.

  “Rayne.” My voice rose in volume. I tried to be gentle and got nary a response. This got a small sigh.

  “Rayne,” I snapped, my sharp tone demanding that she look at me, pay attention to me. This time, she flinched. I barely noticed and would’ve missed it if I hadn’t been studying her intently for some sort of reaction. “I know you can hear me, so why the fuck won’t you answer me?” If anger was the only way to get her attention, then fine, because I was sick and tired of her acting as if her world had imploded and she had nothing left to live for. And I was fucking tired of her pushing everyone away and of her shutting down. Like hell I would allow it to continue.

  Stomping over to the end of her bed, I grabbed the footboard with both hands and squeezed as I prayed for patience. “Look at me,” I growled.

  Another sigh, but she spun her head to look straight at me. “I’m not up for company.” Her voice came out flat.

  “I don’t really give one fuck what you’re up for and what you’re not!” Spit flew out of my mouth and landed somewhere near her foot.

  She turned her head away from me to look out the window again in an attempt to shut me out for what seemed like the millionth time. If she wanted to play that game, fine. She was about to learn that I hated to lose.

  Stepping around to the side of her bed, I stood in front of her view with my arms crossed over my chest, making me appear more severe. She closed her eyes. That was fine. “You can close your eyes, you can try to shut out the world and pretend your fucking life is over, but guess what? It isn’t. You are still alive and breathing. Or did you actually try to kill yourself?”

  Her eyes popped open wide. “No,” she whispered. I had her attention.

  “No? Could’ve fooled me. Did you know we’ve all been here every single goddamn day for you? But you just want to have a pity party? It’s either that or you wanted to die.”

  She shook her head, denying at least part of what I said. “No.”

  “No what? No you aren’t pushing us away, or no you didn’t want to die?”

  “I didn’t want to die.”

  “That’s not the way I see it.” God, I hoped that what I wa
s doing would force her to fight back, that it would snap her out of her own head. “Oh, I get it now. Because you can’t move your legs, even though it might be temporary, you hate yourself, and now you want to die because you’ve become the one thing you can’t stand in this world. Poor Rayne. She’s paralyzed. Feel sorry for her. Woe is her. You know what I say? Fuck all that.” I was purposely being harsh, purposely baiting her, and fearful that my methods would push her further into her shell. “You don’t deserve anyone’s sympathy. Not after the way you treated everyone else. Miss High and Mighty isn’t so regal now, is she?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” A couple of tears fell out of her eyes. One rolled into her hair, and the other travelled down the side of her button nose and onto her lips where she licked it away.

  “I don’t? I’m just telling you what I see.”

  “You don’t know shit.” She had a little fight in her after all. Relief swept through me hearing it.

  I took a deep breath, because the time to confess had arrived. “I don’t? Do you want to know what I see when I look at you lately? My heart breaks when I come up here.”

  Before I could continue, she questioned me, “Then why do you?”

  “I do it because I have to. I have to be near you. Before me I see a woman who used to be so strong, so haughty, and now she’s been reduced to a zombie in a hospital bed. I see the woman I love, the woman I fell in love with, choosing to give up on life, on living, and that breaks my heart.”

  She started to shake her head no, her eyes wildly searching mine. “But you love Emma. No, you were with someone else at the club.”

  “I do love Emma, but she is nothing more than a friend. And I was with someone at the club because I wanted to forget you. Even then, I couldn’t get you out of my head.”

  “No, I’m broken. You don’t.”

  “You are not broken. You are beautiful and you are dealing with something that is going to be a challenge. It’s up to you to either let it control and defeat you, or to take control of it yourself. If you take charge, it will make you stronger.”

  “No, you hate me.”

  “You know what? I really hate the word ‘no’ coming out of your mouth. Stop with the fucking negativity. If you don’t believe me, that’s fine. I don’t give a damn what you believe and what you don’t, but I refuse to let you give up on living. I’ve seen enough people who have had bad things happen to them, and they didn’t give up. Are you going to stop living because of a setback?”

  She closed her eyes and more tears started to fall. It broke me, my heart crumbled watching it, and yet, I refused to give up.

  “Things like this don’t happen to people like me,” she whimpered.

  Something told me those words had more to do with her past than the present. Again, I wondered what had happened to her before I met her. “Rayne, it can happen. Bad things happen to good people all the time, and not everyone needs to be locked away or are liars. Emma and Megan are two of them. Same with you.”

  “No.”

  “Stop with that fucking word,” I yelled. I despised that word.

  “He lied though. He wasn’t hurt,” her whisper sounded panicked.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “He wasn’t sick. He lied.”

  What was she saying? Where was this coming from? It didn’t make sense. “Rayne?”

  “I was going to turn thirteen in a couple of months and my parents told me that they were going to take me to Paris for two weeks. It was going to be my early birthday present before I started the school year. Bryan couldn’t come because he was trying to cram all his credits in to graduate college early, and after that I knew he would be leaving soon. I think I naively thought that I would talk to him every day after he joined the Navy—I didn’t, he couldn’t. My friends and I were on our way home from the library. A man sat in a wheelchair and needed help. My friends left me. I wanted to help him and he…” She squeezed her eyes shut. Her voice had grown in volume and became higher pitched.

  “He what, Rayne?” I swallowed hard, my voice softer.

  “He dragged me to an alley. He touched me, he slapped me, and punched me in the stomach.” Her voice came out rough and full of pain.

  My own tears started to fall. “He raped you?”

  “No, but he stopped when someone turned down the alley. He ran away.”

  This explained so much, and I found myself hurting for her and angry on her behalf. No wonder she didn’t trust people who were disabled, why she didn’t believe them. As a young impressionable girl, a handicap person did this to her. A liar. Someone who should be put away. Someone attacked her, hurt her, and I wanted to kill him.

  Tears fell from my eyes. I judged her without truly understanding her, and my sister warned me that something could’ve happened to her. I brushed Megan’s advice off, even though my gut told me something I should listen to my sister. I heard Rayne’s plea in her sleep, and instead of giving her the benefit of the doubt, I kept pressing her, wanting her to get over her damn prejudices. I called her selfish, when that title should have fallen onto me.

  Falling to my knees by her bed, I reached out and grabbed her forearm, careful of the tubes in her hands, I said, “I’m so sorry, Rayne.” Those words held my apology for the rash judgement, for forcing her to do whatever I wanted, and for the fact she endured such a tragedy at such a young age. She had been twelve. TWELVE.

  ****

  Rayne

  “You weren’t the one that attacked me. It was someone who was disabled,” I told him, confused as to why he apologized. In my head, I knew that it wasn’t someone who was actually disabled, it was someone who faked his injury and pretended to need help in order to lure an unsuspecting victim. However, to a twelve-year-old tried to wrap her head around why this happened to her, I became leery of younger people who claimed to be handicapped. I avoided them like the plague, and had been successful in my endeavors until Emma.

  The first night I met her, she surprised me. I knew Mel had made a friend named Emma, but I hadn’t realized that she claimed to be disabled. All of my old fears and insecurities flooded to the surface, and when they did, my mind placed Emma in the same category as the man who attacked me as a child. It seemed irrational, but it wasn’t to me. If someone pretended to be disabled, then putting them away would stop the lie. If someone was really disabled, then putting them away would give them care without having to question if they were a liar or not.

  And now I had become one of those people. Broken. When I got in the car accident, I didn’t want to die. I remembered thinking right before I hit the tree that if I made it out alive, I would call Chad. He had been my last thought before impact.

  I never wanted to hurt him. He had fallen beside my bed and cried, something I never thought I would see, but why was he crying. None of this was his fault. It was mine for getting into the accident in the first place. It was…

  No, I couldn’t blame Emma any longer. Chad’s words, “Sometimes bad things happen to good people,” echoed in my head. Was Emma really sick? Probably, but my old prejudices still colored my thinking.

  “I shouldn’t have criticized you without knowing your story.” Chad sounded gruff, his face was blotchy, and his nose and eyes were red.

  Not his fault, he didn’t know. No one knew. Not even my family. I didn’t want to tell anyone, and I wasn’t sure why I told him today. It mattered not, I was still broken.

  “You’re not fucking broken! You’re not allowed to say that word either,” he hissed.

  Had I spoken aloud? I hadn’t realized, but I did know that his dictates were starting to annoy me. “You can’t order me around.”

  “I can and I will until you decide to take your life into your own hands again and start fixing yourself.” He got to his feet again, his tears had stopped, but his cheeks still glistened with the lingering wetness. Standing to the side with his hands on his hips, he leaned over me and growled, “You are going
to pull your head out of your ass, you’re going to do what the fucking doctors tell you to do whether you like it or not, and then you’re moving in with me.”

  I narrowed my eyes and snapped, “You’re assuming a lot of things there.”

  “I’m not assuming anything. You love me, I love you.”

  “I didn’t admit to anything. You’re the only one that confessed. Maybe I don’t want your love.” In truth, hearing that he loved me, gave me a speck of sunlight that was slowly growing into a spot, and then a ray of light.

  “You do.”

  “Now you sound like my brother dictating to Emma when he admitted he loved her.”

  “When we know, we know. Besides, I never said you were going to be moving in with me because of love. I only said you would be moving in with me. You’re the one who made that leap.”

  I blushed. I thought about what he said, and he was right. “Why do I have to move in with you?”

  “Your apartment isn’t large enough. Depending on how long it takes for you to start walking again, which I have every belief that you will, you need more space. My place is large enough and I work from my home office, so if you need anything, I’ll be right there.”

  Damn, his logic made sense. But no. I refused to let myself believe. I was broken and it was best for me to go away or something.

  “Fuck your damn belief system. It sucks and is bullshit.”

  I glared.

  “I’m not the one mumbling under my breath. You are, Sweetheart.” He grinned.

  Hearing him call me Sweetheart again gave me a small thrill and my heartrate accelerated, which could be seen on the monitor. Damn monitor. I wished they would disconnect the damn thing.

  “You like me calling you Sweetheart?” His smile became that cocky smirk I had been missing for weeks.