Anyone else would have seen JJ just being JJ; funny, straight to the punchline,alwaysgood for a laugh. But a darknesshung heavy in the room. The ghost of the last three days stood tall in the doorway. It sat casually in the chair next to JJ’s, sucking what little life we’d managed to regain. It loomed over Chance’s bed, a reminder that things had come so close to being incoherently, painfully different.
But while the reaper draped a black void around us, we weren’t alone in the abyss—we had each other. Always and forever, we’d have each other.
So, we sat quietly together. We all pretended not to notice the ghosts swarming the room, or the darkness-incarnate who clung tightly to the hopeful and relieved emotions buzzing around us. It plucked those strings of emotion like a tightly wound guitar, playing a symphony of grief, fear, anxiety, and anger for the three of us.
Chapter 66
Mari
Ten days with nothing else to do but lay with Chance was a new form of paradise. Over the last fortnight, he’d gone from sleeping as much as a house cat to staying awake with me during the day.
Due to JJ’s name dropping of who exactly was staying in their hospital, the nurses had set up my recovery and observation bed right here in Chance’s room. With all of the machines and wires, we couldn’t lay completely side by side, but Chance still held my hand.
We played TV trivia, guessing all of the answers to the gameshow questions. Turns out, we probably wouldn’t last very long on one of those shows. We ate ice cream and shitty hospitalfood, but stuffed ourselves stupid when Al or Nan brought goodies with them. Usually going on to fall into carb-comas and take long and uninterrupted rests.
JJ had been coming to visit too, just not as much. All of us had co-hosts standing behind us now, demons sitting on our shoulders. We needed a bit of time to learn those demons, to work with them instead of against them.
I wasn’t sure about Chance and JJ, but I remembered that night as if it was a bad dream I woke up to every morning. To be fair, it was. Randy had been found, arrested, and charged just hours after the ambulances arrived to take all of us to Brown’s Hospital in the next town over. But Talia? She was missing. Cops hadn’t found her yet, so she showed up in my nightmares every night.
But that didn’t matter right now.
Because after two weeks in hospital, we were finally going home.
Al had picked Chance and I up in his little Corolla. Since, if we put the seat back all of the way, he could stretch his leg and stomach out when he needed to.
Chance began softly snoring five minutes in. But Al waited forty, when Chance’s soft snores had turned into a nice, steady sleeping rhythm.
“I’m really proud of you, Mari,” Al said suddenly.
“What do you mean?” I replied with a yawn. “Mari, look at all you’ve done,” he said softly. “You always say that it’s me and your father who made Knock’s what it is and built its legacy. But it’s not. It’s you, darlin’. It’s been you all along.”
“I—”
“And what you’ve done for this young man here. Well … that’s something beyond special,” he went on.
“It’s always special when two people fall in love,” I countered.
“You didn’t just make him fall in love. You gave a man his worth back. A man who, for the last three years, had been told he had none. That’s not something to take lightly.”
“I didn’t give him anything, Al,” I said softly, looking over at the man still peacefully sleeping against the window. “I showed him.”
~
I must have fallen asleep during the drive back to Soggla, since it was Chance’s kisses and soft murmurs that woke me up.
“Hey, Sunny.” Those blue eyes greeted me with open arms, gleaming from the outside sunlight when he smiled down at me. “Wakey, wakey.”
“I fell asleep?”
“I can’t believe you didn’t wake yourself up with all of the snoring you were doing,” he teased with a wink. Leaning over my legs, he clicked the button to free my seatbelt.
His hands gently found mine and helped me out of the car. Chance was the one who had been shot and knocked up on death’s door, and yet here he was, helping me out of the car.
As I stretched my legs and raised my arms over my head, Chance’s eyes raked down my extended body. When his gaze finally found mine again, he wasn’t even subtle with giving me the eyes.
“Come on, lovebirds.” Al waved us on, up the driveway to Knock’s.
Chance and I took the walk nice and slow, neither of us in a hurry to get anywhere. His hand was in mine, and mine in his. There would never be a rush when we were together.
