Page 7 of The Rest of the Story
“Where are the police?” John shouted. “What are theydoingabout this?”
Kathy had texted me an update about that. “They’ve arrested Coates. He’s—he’s here, in the hospital.” Kathy refused to tell me where or what wing. “And he’s under guard and handcuffed to his bed. Whenever he gets out, he’s going straight to jail.”
“Good,” John hissed. “He needs to stay there, forlife—”
“Mr. Elsher? Mr. and Mrs. Darling?” The nurse who’d abandoned me all those hours ago was back, hovering in the waiting room door. “Shea is out of surgery and is being brought to his recovery room. I can take you to him.”
* * *
Shea was stone-cold out. The surgeon met us and said that he’d be zonked until at least noon, and that the best thing he could do for the next twenty-four hours was rest.
His right leg was elevated, propped up on cushions and pillows and air bladders, and he had surgical gauze covering Frankenstein stitches all over his thigh. Kathy was right with her prediction. Shea had been fitted with an external fixator, a thick piece of metal that ran down the outside of his leg, with nails and pins going into his skin and into his bone and the titanium rod they’d drilled into the shaft of his femur. He looked like a bionic man waiting for his exo-suit.
We all took up positions around Shea’s bedside and held his hand. Even though he was out, Amelia talked to him, told him how proud she was and how brave Shea was. I told them about how Shea had saved that little kid’s life, had shoved him out of the way and probably lost a few seconds doing it, seconds he might have used to get free of Coates. Amelia pulled Shea’s hand to her lips and kissed his knuckles, crying silently as she held his fingers to her cheek.
I kept one eye on the clock. Brody’s parents were more than halfway to Boulder, and I needed to get them set up for their stay, check on Brody, and start planning for the morning.
The last thing I wanted to do was let go of Shea’s hand or leave his side.
“Go,” Amelia said when I explained it to her. “You heard the doctor. Shea won’t be awake for hours. You’ll be back by then.”
“Yeah.” Damn right I would be. Still… the thought of walking away was shredding me. I didn’t know if I had the strength to physically turn my feet toward the door, put one in front of the other.
I still had my hoodie from earlier. When I pulled it on that morning, Shea had surprised me with a kiss as soon as my head poked through the neck. He’d smiled at me, cupped my face in both of his hands, and kissed me with intention, wrapping a leg—his right leg—around my thigh. I’d grabbed a handful of his ass and told him if he kept that up, we’d be late to pick up Brody. “Brody will be late on his own,” Shea had mumbled into another kiss. “We’ve got time for a quickie, right?” I’d hefted him into my arms and carried him to the wall, and he got both of his legs around my waist, and—
And we did have time for a quickie. When I pulled my hoodie on again later, Shea had kissed me sweetly, and then laughed and told me we were late.
I tugged my hoodie off and laid it over his chest and under his chin like a blanket. It was covered in salt tracks and dried snot, but I took one of the sleeves, one of the cuffs, and curled it around Shea’s cheek, as if it were my hand holding him. God, I wished I didn’t have to be anywhere but here, doing nothing but cradling the sleeping face of the man I loved more than anything else in this life.
“I love you,” I breathed into his hair before I kissed his cheek and his forehead and brushed my lips against his.
Amelia and John both hugged me before I left. Amelia was crying again. “Go help Brody,” she choked out. “Shea wants you to help him, I know he does. We’ll all be here when you get back.”
Thirty-One
It was4:00 a.m. when I pulled into the driveway of the rookie house. The moon was a pale disk, so far out of reach it seemed comical to me that we’d ever imagined we could slingshot ourselves past it. I tipped my forehead against the steering wheel and struggled to breathe.
The front door was unlocked. Gavin’s wife, Julia, and Gabe’s wife were huddled in the dining room like they were standing guard. They were on their second bottle of chardonnay, and five little kids were tucked into a nest of pillows and blankets in the corner of the room.
“They’re in there,” Julia said, pointing to the living room. She scrubbed at her face with the pulled-down sleeves of her hoodie. Her eyes were puffy and pink.
The living room was dim, but not dark. The rookies had installed underlighting beneath that monster couch, and the soft RGB light wiggled across the floor, rose up and cast a haunted glow over the room. It was just enough to see the bodies curled on the sofa: Gavin, Gabe, and Josh, thrown back in the recliners; Logan, curled up in a ball and hugging a throw pillow; Brody, given the lion’s share of the cushions and lying on his side, holding Gavin’s little girl like she was his personal teddy bear; and Lawson, sitting up with Brody’s head pillowed in his lap.
Of the bunch, only Lawson was awake. He’d been awake for hours, by the look of it, and had been crying for all that time. He kept his face turned, though, so the tears he’d shed wouldn’t fall on Brody while he slept.
Lawson’s fingers moved slowly through Brody’s hair, gliding from front to back, front to back, never stopping.
I slumped onto the end of the couch next to Lawson. He shifted half of his body to make room, the half that wasn’t dedicated to holding Brody.
“I called Brody’s parents,” I said. “They’re driving in. They should be two or three hours away. I was going to put them up at mine, but Shea’s parents are here, and they’re going to stay with us—”
“His parents can stay at my house,” Lawson said automatically. His voice was ground-up gravel, none of that smooth honey and down-home earthiness we all loved. “They can have the whole place as long as they like. So can Brody. They need to be together. I’ll— I’ll stay somewhere else.”
I blinked. “Don’t you think Brody would want you to be close?”
Lawson clenched his teeth so hard I thought they’d shatter. He couldn’t turn away from me without letting his tears land on Brody, so he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to grit through it. A deep rasp punched out of him, followed by a shiver and a flinch, like he was recoiling from himself.
“You’ve never told him how you feel, have you?” I whispered.
