Dropping the phone, I got to work, desperate to save the other half of my soul.
“Don’t you fucking do this,” I snarled, more angry at the world than at her.
Popping every button, I stripped my dress shirt off and wrapped it around her wrist, tying it as tight as possible before repeating the process with my undershirt on her other arm. “You promised me!” I raged, lifting her hands over her head to hopefully slow the bleeding until help could arrive.
Her breaths were shallow, and she was a terrifying shade of gray. Ghostly. If I was being honest, she’d been a ghost of the woman I’d fallen in love with for months.
My heart rattled my ribs as it pounded at a marathon pace, but it was the soul-crushing emotion in my throat that took my knees out.
As I sank down onto the blood-covered bed beside her, a boulder of grief settled in my gut.
What if this was it?
What if she didn’t survive this time?
Tears I’d long since given up on trying to control rolled down my cheeks. “Goddamn it, you promised me. Do you hear me? You hold on because I am not done yet,” I choked, barely able to get the words out. She needed to hear it, or more realistically, I desperately needed it to be true. “You are not allowed to leave me. Not like this.”
The day we’d met, I’d thought it was fate. She was perfect. Her laugh. Her chaos. The levity I felt in her presence. It took approximately an hour for me to fall in love. Deep, unwavering, life-altering love. The kind that burrows into your bones and rewrites your DNA.
But maybe the only thing that had been truly fated about our relationship was the fact that I had been destined to lose her from the start.
Remi
“Please tell me this is a joke,” I said. My father’s rickety office chair let out a loud creak as I leaned back and lifted a napkin with a handwritten IOU.
His thick gray mustache did little to hide his sheepish smirk. “What? Kenny always pays.” He cut his gaze off to the side and mumbled, “Eventually.”
“Which is never.” I dug a manila file stuffed full of similar paperwork from his desk drawer. “And Allen?”
He harrumphed and rested his crossed arms on his round belly. “He’s between jobs.”
I paused and leveled him with a glare. “Heather?”
“Give me a break, Remi.” He paced from one side of his tiny office to the other. “I don’t see you complaining when I feed your boys for free anytime they show their faces around here.”
“Mark and Aaron are family. Meanwhile, Heather told the entire school I had herpes after Mom left.”
“You still holding grudges from well over a decade ago?” He sliced me with a disappointing scowl, making me shrink in the chair.
“Well, no… Not exactly.”
“Since high school, she’s had two girls and married an alcoholic who has no problem spending his rent and grocery money on booze only to come home and make her pay in different ways.”
I winced, immediately feeling guilty, and my father didn’t miss it.
“So yeah,” he said. “Last I heard, you don’t have herpes, but she does have some serious issues. If I can give her and her girls a hot meal and a safe place for a few hours, I don’t give a damn if she can pay the tab or not.”
God, I loved my dad. Yes, even in the middle of a grade-A scolding. He’d always had such a kind and generous heart. Perhaps not the best head for business, but he made up for it in other ways.
Resting his hand on my shoulder, he stared deep into my eyes. “Talk to me, Remi. What’s really going on in that head of yours?”
Instinctively, I shrugged him off. “Nothing.”
It wasn’t a lie. It also wasn’t the truth. I’d been off for days. I attributed it to the finality of the settlement, but putting the past to rest should have come with relief, not anxiety.
He slanted his head. “You sure? Aaron said—”
“Aaron?” I rolled my eyes. Of course they’d been talking. While he was my ride-or-die most of the time, Aaron was one hundred percent a snitch when it came to my dad. “If you want to worry about someone, your informant hasn’t slept in almost a week.”
“Damn,” he whispered, shaking his head. “How am I supposed to leave you kids while you’re still dealing with all this?”
My stomach knotted as it had so often since he’d told me he was retiring to Miami. He’d tried to cancel the move at least a dozen times after the plane crash, but if there was ever a man who deserved happiness, it was Jack Grey.
“First off, we haven’t been kids in a long time. Secondly, I think Crystal Dawn would be pretty upset if you stood her up now.”
