Page 94 of Proof

I nodded but didn’t say anything because I owed JJ my silence.

“I wasn’t in a coma because of the bullet. The doctors put me in a medically induced coma to give my brain time to heal butthen they couldn’t bring me out of it. When I finally did wake up, I saw Sully and all these strangers looking down at me like I was some fucked-up science experiment. Sully was the first one to explain what had happened, but I didn’t understand him. Not that day or the next or the one after that. So not only couldn’t I talk, I also couldn’t process, I couldn’t think. I was just…stuck.”

JJ eased himself to the floor so he was sitting next to me. He slowly ran the fingers of his right hand along the inside of my forearm until his fingers were linked with mine.

“It took another six months of speech therapy, psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, and pretty much every other type of doctor to get to me to a place where I understood that I’d been shot and while I would be okay, I had to learn how to do certain things over. By then, my brain had healed enough for me to process things. That should have been a good thing, right?”

I shook my head because I knew JJ to his core. He was a survivor, but he was also a realist. He would have known what was in store for him to become “okay.”

“Every baby step of progress that I made was applauded as if I’d just won an Olympic medal or something. My voice was the last thing I got back. The first thing I wanted to do was scream at the top of my lungs that none of those people had saved me. They’d condemned me to a life I hadn’t wanted. I hadn’t been able to tell them that in the beginning, though. I couldn’t even write a note to say I wanted a DNR form. I was literally a prisoner of my own body.”

The idea that JJ hadn’t wanted any life-saving measures to be performed in the event his heart stopped beating or he was no longer able to breathe on his own made me sick to my stomach.

“When I was released from the hospital, there was this huge crowd of people waiting for me. A lot of them had signs that said they loved me. Officers I’d never met were there by the hundreds. One microphone after another was thrust in front ofme. I was a hero. Not one of those people seemed to get the fact that I hadn’t done anything heroic. I’d been shot, I’d bled out on the street, and the paramedics, surgeons, nurses, and pretty much everyone in the hospital behind me had put my body back together. They’d been theheroes. And yet there I was being celebrated as if I’d done something to earn those people’s adoration. The whole thing made me sick. There were officers sacrificing their lives in the line of duty every day and yetIwas the hero,” JJ scoffed.

“I didn’t know how to compartmentalize, though. I blamed everyone for what my life had become. I hated all those doctors and nurses and other medical workers, I hated the EMTs who’d gotten my heart started while I’d been lying there in the street, and most of all, I hated the media because they had no idea what I’d become. Hell, they probably would have sold even more papers if theyhadknown.”

JJ lifted his hands and separated them as if scanning a billboard or marquee.

“Hero cop found frequenting gay bars. Medical miracle officer engaging in gay sex with strangers,” JJ called out as if he were actually reading the headline. “After that, the tabloid fodder would have begun. Do you have any idea how many pictures of guys fucking me in dirty bathroom stalls would have ended up on the internet? What would that have done to my brother’s fledgling business? What wouldhehave thought about what I was really doing every night when I told him I was going to hang out with some buddies at a bar to watch the game?”

JJ paused and drew in a deep breath to calm himself before continuing.

“I didn’t compartmentalize. I played one role during the day and another at night. Losing even that small piece of my past made it feel like I’d lost all of it. My mind would convince me that the life I’d led up until the moment where everything wentblank was some kind of lie or trick that my brain had come up with. Sometimes I still don’t know how to reconcile all the different versions of myself that have popped up. At one point I wondered if I might have that multiple disorder thing, but when I looked it up, it said people who suffered from it were being protected by alternate personas who took over when the person couldn’t deal with something. I knew all my personas. I was in the driver’s seat the entire time.”

Releasing his fingers from mine, he used one to stroke over my cheek. “Until you,” he said softly. “You saw them all and you accepted them, even if you didn’t agree with them. You saw something in me that was worth fighting for, but it wasn’t something you could do for me. All you could give me was the promise of a tomorrow that would someday be different. You took all the bullshit I threw at you, and you accepted it. You loved me anyway. You hurt when I hurt, you celebrated when I celebrated.” JJ paused for several beats. “You loved when I loved.”

“I would have killed you, JJ,” I admitted in a shameful whisper. “I hurt your arm, I slammed you against the wall, I put my hands around your?—”

JJ gently grabbed my chin so he could force me to look at him. He brushed his mouth over mine. “Sweetheart, you’re forgetting one piece of pretty important information,” he said with a soft smile. “You may be stronger than me, but believe me, I’ve taken down bigger guys than you. Tactical training was kind of a requirement in the academy, and I’ve had years to put that training to good use.” He grinned victoriously.

Despite the ugliness of what had just gone down between us, I couldn’t help but let some of JJ’s cheekiness rub off on me.

“So you’re saying you can take me down?” I asked.

“Remind me to give you a little demonstration of my skills when we have a very big bed in a very empty location and a veryremote place where no one can hear your screams,” he said with a slight arch of his eyebrows. The idea of wrestling a naked JJ for the prize of who got to be in control in bed eased the cramping in my stomach.

“I’m going to hold you to that,” I responded. My eyes fell from the bruise forming on his cheek to the welts on his neck, and I couldn’t keep myself from running my fingers over the red marks. “Why didn’t you stop me?” I asked in all seriousness.

“Because you needed me,” JJ responded.

“I don’t understand,” I said. His words made no sense.

“You were back in that place. That fucking cold, ugly place where the only thing you needed to do was survive. But this time you needed something else. Something you put away in one of those boxes in your head.” JJ ran his fingers along my temple and then through my hair.

“You needed me to come for you, Cass,” he said softly as silent tears began to slip down his face. “You were waiting for me to fix everything and get you out of that place. That’s what I was trying to do. I couldn’t let you spend even one more second in?—”

I captured JJ’s mouth and kissed him over and over again, sometimes by just brushing my lips over his, other times by slanting my mouth over his and letting our tongues dance for the briefest of moments. I forced myself to end the kiss because my body was already responding to his proximity and neither of us were in a place to do anything about it.

Still, that didn’t stop me from staring at JJ. It was the only thing I could do. The only thing I wanted to do.

He’d come for me. It may not have been the scenario I’d envisioned in those early days, but as soon as hehadbeen able to get to me, he’d unlocked the door, taken my hand, and led me from the depths of hell and into the warm, welcoming rays of the sun.

JJ had come for me.

I was free.

Finally, truly free.

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