She tried to step around me. I matched her, sidestep for sidestep. Her eyes blazed, a storm front of disappointment and rage. “Get out of my way.”
“No,” I said.
It hung there, a brick in a punchbowl. She wasn’t used to being told no, certainly not by someone she considered gutter trash.
She drew in a breath to launch her next salvo, but Floyd’s voice cracked through it, sharper than any blade. “Vivian. Go home.”
She hesitated, floundering for a script.
Floyd kept going, his voice rising with each word. “You’re not wanted here. You never were. The only thing you ever did for me was leave, and you weren’t even good at that.”
If I hadn’t been so invested in the moment, I would have given him a standing ovation.
Vivian’s mouth opened and closed. Her skin went blotchy with a surge of bloodless fury. “I’m here because someone has to take care of you. God knows no one else will.”
Floyd sat up as much as his injuries would allow. “I have someone. You’re looking at him.”
She jerked her head to me, incredulous. “Him?”
I took a step back, just enough that Floyd was in full view of her. He met my eyes—really met them, none of the old shame or sidelong glances. I saw love there, raw and exposed and so terrifying it made me want to scream, or kiss him until one of us suffocated.
Floyd’s voice was steady as a heartbeat: “My lover, Ransom McKenzie.”
The words were air, water, everything. My knees almost gave out, but I locked them, forcing myself to stand tall. I didn’t care that the nurse behind Vivian was now staring, or that the heart monitor was ticking up like it was keeping score. I didn’t even care that half the town would know by sundown.
What mattered was that he’d said it. Out loud, in public, with Vivian Hardesty as witness.
Vivian made a noise somewhere between a banshee’s wail and the last gasp of a dying transmission. Her hands curled into claws, her voice shrill enough to shatter the fluorescent tubes overhead.
“What the HELL is wrong with you?” she screeched, taking a swing at the air like she wanted to claw the confession out of existence.
Floyd only smiled. “I’m finally happy,” he said.
Vivian stood there, speechless for the first time in her life. I savored it like a cold beer on a hot day.
She made a noise in her throat, spun on her heel, and stalked out. The nurse, still hovering in the hallway, tried to offer a polite, “Have a nice day, ma’am,” but Viv just bulldozed past.
Chapter Sixteen
~ Floyd ~
The quiet in my hospital room wasn't really quiet. Under the surface, the place always hummed. There was the heart monitor, which beeped every time it decided I was weak, and the portable oxygen hissed like it was auditioning for a horror movie. There was the distant rattle of a janitor’s cart, and, at intervals, the shouting from the nurses' station when they forgot anyone had ears outside their bubble. But when it came to Vivian Hardesty, all those sounds ducked for cover and made way.
She didn't slam the door when she walked in again—probably realized it didn't have the satisfying, courthouse boom she was used to. Instead, she stalked three steps in, planted herself at the foot of my bed, and said nothing. Her jaw clenched so tight the sides of her face quivered like they were trying to break free. You could see the years peeling back, layer by layer, to the raw core of a woman who’d built her whole life out of appearances and control.
Ransom didn’t move, but I could feel the shift in his posture: squared up, hand gripping mine, the warmth of his thumb tracing a slow, reassuring arc across my knuckle. He didn’t bother to let go, and neither did I. We both knew the second we unclasped, the whole balance of the room would tip in her favor.
Vivian’s eyes flicked from our hands to my face, then to Ransom, and I watched the color rise in her cheeks, starting at the collarbone and working its way up like an incoming storm.
“My lover, Ransom McKenzie,” I’d said again in case she forgot or thought I was joking. She needed to understand just who Ransom was to me.
She chewed on the words, tasting each one, before spitting them out in a voice that could cut through inch-thick glass.“Your lover,” she repeated, the syllables stretched thin and brittle. “This criminal?”
She didn’t even look at Ransom now, just the tattoos that ran up his arms, the way his t-shirt strained over muscle, the dark, perfectly-groomed beard. The disgust was so rich it practically glimmered in the sterile light.
I could have folded then. I could have thrown Ransom under the bus, or played the “bad judgment while concussed” card, but something in the way he held my hand made it impossible. There was a steadiness to it, a grounding I hadn’t realized I’d missed for years. I squeezed back, hard enough that he knew I meant it.
“Yes, Vivian,” I said, letting the weight of the words drag her closer to the edge. “My lover. And he’s not a criminal—he owns a business and employs half the kids who’d be on your desk for juvie otherwise. He’s a good man.”
