With a sigh, I curl on my side and thankfully, blissfully lose myself to exhaustion.
Thank fuck.
I can’t deal with my own thoughts just now; I need a fucking break.
I find myself terrified to face Cade Grainger.
“Fuck,” I grumble, swiping a thumb over my purple-painted lips. I really overdid it today with the dressing up. In an effort to feel more like myself, I donned a pair of cherry red leather pants, Beast’s jacket, and motorcycle boots. My makeup is heavy, like I’m off to a nightclub, and it’s got a decidedly gothic tint.
I tell myself I’m dressing up in an attempt to scare the hospital staff away. In reality, I may or may not have dressed up with the prospect of seeing Grainger.
“Go on, suge,” Beast encourages, pushing the door in.
Grainger is more or less sitting up on his own, his head thrown back in the pillows. He’s frowning, which I guess is a good sign? He looks … poisonous, rather than weak or comatose.
With a deep inhale, I toss my glossy black hair over one shoulder and strut into the room, purposely letting my footsteps fall loud enough to rouse him. Cade lifts his head up suddenly, blinking at Beast before swinging his gaze over to me.
I pause beside him, and we stare at each other.
It’s awkward. It’s really fucking awkward.
Why can’t I just crawl on him and kiss the life out of him the way I did to Sin?
“Gidge,” he says warily, his voice husky and broken. Grainger struggles to clear his throat, and I do my best to blink the images of him getting chest compressions from my mind. I looked up the statistics of survival for someone who’s been resuscitated. Long-term survival rates aren’t great, even after initial success.
“Cade,” I reply, swiping my tongue across my lower lip. It tastes waxy, like the lipstick I smeared across it earlier. With a small curse, I reach out and run my nails over the back of Cade’s tattooed hand. I spent the morning filing and painting them, so it’s a substantial improvement over the ‘post bomb blast and fight to the death’ manicure that I had before. “It’s nice to see you—” I almost say alive. The word catches in my throat, but I make myself breathe past it. “Awake.”
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty fucking hard to kill,” Grainger growls out, and then he coughs a little and shakes his head like he’s shaking off a wave of dizziness or nausea or something. The first thing on my mind when I saw him was the pregnancy, but my emotions are far too raw right now to bring that up.
He lifts that umber gaze of his to mine, and I frown at him, but I don’t move from where I’m standing.
“Who is Raelynn Grainger?” I blurt, and he goes completely still.
“Did you meet her?” he asks, his voice strange and distant. His face is dark with stubble, but even though I can see that he’s in no state to get up just now, the fire is there in his eyes the way it always is. From what I hear, he threw his food tray at the wall earlier over a disagreement with a doctor. You’d think this asshole would be more grateful to the staff for saving his life, but … Cade really hates being told what to do. Almost as much as I hate it.
“No. But the hospital’s … whatever, social worker or something, she mentioned her.” I pause there, waiting for an explanation. I can’t help the nervous butterflies in my stomach. It never even occurred to me that one of these men might have like, an ex-wife or something. Or maybe even a wife that they never divorced … Ugh.
Luckily for me, Grainger puts me out of my misery after only a minute of contemplation, like he’s deciding how much of himself he wants to share. I’m not going to give him a choice: if he wants to be with me, he’ll tell me everything. We’ll have no secrets between us.
If he wants to be with me, of course. Because I feel like he has yet to commit either way.
“Raelynn Grainger is my mother,” he explains, looking me over with a gaze that’s entirely inappropriate for the hospital setting in which we’re standing. If he had enough energy, I bet he’d flip me over on that bed and rut into me until I was begging for this pregnancy to be his.
Gross.
I sneer at him, even though the thought is mine. It’s a defense mechanism that I’m trying to weed out, but it’s especially hard around someone like Cade who makes life difficult by simply breathing. I’m so relieved right now that my knees feel shaky and yet, I’m scared to show him how much I care.
I need to break that habit, that fear of rejection.
