Chapter 19
By the time Lacey reached the fourth floor and found Alex in the operating room, one of the doctors had already given the proper drugs to Kelsey and Bensen to bring them out of the general anesthesia. Lacey was stunned to discover that Bensen was the transplant patient but ignored him as she checked Kelsey’s vitals to make sure she was okay. Her sister would be out for a while yet, but she was going to be fine.
Lacey helped Alex lock up all the doctors and McDonald in a supply closet just off the operating room, where he also found himself some medical scrubs to wear so he wasn’t standing there completely naked as he continued to try digging the bullet out of his chest. He said he wanted it out before the cops showed up, which should be soon.
“Here, let me do that,” Lacey finally said after watching him root around like a man trying to make the buzzer on that electronic game Operation go off as many times as he could.
Standing there with her sister and Bensen only a few feet away, Lacey took the forceps and gently slipped them into the wound, working both by feel and guided by the soft direction Alex made every once in a while. Apparently, he could actually feel the bullet in his chest, so he was able to help her navigate the forceps in the right direction. She was shocked that what she was doing didn’t seem to hurt him. She was even more stunned that the wounds where the bullets had passed straight through him were already closed up and had stopped bleeding. As a veterinarian who’d seen a lot of gunshot wounds, that was pretty hard to accept. But she supposed when it came to Alex, she was going to have to learn to accept a lot of things on faith if nothing else.
They didn’t talk much as she worked, and for a while, that was okay. Even if she was digging in him with a medical instrument, at least she was getting a chance to be close to him, touching his warm skin with her hands. It wasn’t what they’d had before, but it was something.
Finally, though, the weight of all the words that weren’t being said began to pile up, threatening to crush the air out of her lungs.
“Sorry about freaking out over the whole werewolf thing,” she finally said, not sure how else to start the conversation.
He shrugged, taking her hand and gently nudging the forceps in a slightly different direction. Lacey felt the tips of the metal instrument bump into something hard, and she prayed it wasn’t something important.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s not every day a woman finds out that her boyfriend has claws and fangs. You got a little overwhelmed there at Bensen’s junkyard. It’s understandable.”
She winced, wishing this could be as simple as just saying she was sorry. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t just talking about how I reacted that night. I was kind of apologizing more for how I’ve been behaving since then.”
“O-kay,” he said slowly, clearly not really understanding what she was talking about.
Lacey knew she had to keep going, because there was so much more she needed to tell him, and she didn’t know if she would ever get the chance again. Jayna might think Lacey and Alex were The One for each other—and maybe they were—but there was also a good chance that Alex had only been hanging around after the way she treated him because he felt he had an obligation to help her find Kelsey. Now that he’d done it, there might not be anything keeping him in her life anymore. After the cops showed up and everything was straightened out, she might never see him again.
“This is really hard to say, so I’m just going to start talking and hope this comes out right, okay?” she said, glancing up at him.
He nodded, but then she was forced to wait as the forceps clamped down on something solid. Tightening her grip on the handle, she carefully pulled out the bullet. Not that it looked much like a bullet anymore. It was nothing but a smashed-up, bloody bit of jagged metal. She dropped it on one of the surgery trays, glad the task was done.
She picked up a piece of gauze from the tray and held it against the wound to stop the bleeding even though she didn’t need to. As she did, she gathered her thoughts on how she really felt about him. The answer was simple. Saying it out loud wasn’t.
“When I first saw you…shift…I was sure you were a monster,” she admitted, quickly hurrying on when she saw Alex’s eyes harden. “But after I talked to Wendy that night and thought about it some, I knew you weren’t. Yes, you have claws and fangs, and sometimes you can be scary as hell, but you’re not a monster.”
Alex didn’t say anything, so she kept going. “I should have told you all this before, and that’s the part I’m really sorry about. I’d like to say it was because I was worried about Kelsey, but that would be a cop-out. The real reason I didn’t say anything is because I was scared. As lame as it sounds, I found it easier to let you keep thinking I thought of you as a monster than tell you how I really felt.”
“Why was it easier?” he prompted when the silence had begun to stretch out again. “What were you so scared of, if it wasn’t the fangs and the claws?”
She took a deep breath and jumped in the deep end of the pool. “I thought that if I told you how I really felt, you’d end up bailing on me at some point anyway.”
Alex didn’t say anything for so long that she thought she’d spoken too softly for him to hear, even with his werewolf senses. She prayed she didn’t have to say the words out loud again. Once was enough.
“You mean like the way your father and those other men bailed on your mom?” he finally asked.
She opened her mouth to tell him that wasn’t it, that she wasn’t her mom, but stopped herself. Maybe that was it. As wonderful as everything had been between her and Alex in the beginning of their relationship, there’d been a part of her waiting for the other shoe to drop and for Alex to turn into the asshole her dad had been, the same assholes her mom had gone out with all those other times.
“Yeah, just like that, I guess,” she murmured. “Stupid, huh?”
“It’s not stupid at all,” he said. “I’m a product of the dysfunctional family situation I was raised in. Why should you be any different? Every guy you’ve ever been around has disappointed you, so it’s not shocking that you assumed I would at some point too. When you saw me shift, you figured the big bad you’d been waiting for had just happened, and you bailed on me before I could do the same.”
She looked up at him, trying to figure out how any man could be so rational about something like this. “You’re not mad at me?”
“Why?” he asked with a smile. “For protecting yourself?”
“But I wasn’t protecting myself,” she admitted. “I was being a coward. I’ve known for a while that you’re the best thing that has ever happened to me. I think I knew from the very beginning, but I didn’t want to get hurt, so instead of taking a chance and going for it, I turned and ran the moment things got tough.”
“You’re not running now,” he pointed out. “What changed?”
