He flashed me a grin. “I don’t really care what it was, to be honest. I’m just glad to know.”
Was he?
I couldn’t see why.
“Creed…”
“I fucked up,” he whispered. “And the reason I lied and told them I was your fiancé was because I was freaking the fuck out. I wanted to see you, and I didn’t see any other way for that to happen without the title of fiancé.”
I said nothing.
“Not to mention, since Charleigh and I aren’t family, we would have no clue what was going on until you woke up and let everyone know we were allowed to be in here,” he admitted. “And Charleigh and I made an executive decision not to call your dad.”
Relief hit me straight in the chest.
“Good,” I breathed. “Where’s Charleigh?”
“I had a friend come and pick her up and take her home to shower and change,” he said. “A nurse gave her a set of scrubs, but she looked like she’d just run a marathon in blood. She needed to get cleaned up, and she wouldn’t leave. So I had a friend take her.”
“She’s not going to be happy with you about that,” I pointed out.
Charleigh was the most fiercely independent person that I knew. She had a chip on her shoulder a mile wide, and I was afraid that Creed had just dug his own grave.
He scoffed. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
Well, if he knew, then there was no reason for me to remind him.
I worried my bottom lip with my top teeth before saying, “Why do you care?”
He jerked back as if he hadn’t been expecting the question to come out of my mouth.
He opened his mouth, then closed it.
Taking a seat on my bed, I had to resist the urge to lean into him as he stared at me intently.
“My sister is my world.”
I swallowed hard past the lump in my throat.
“When I was a kid, like I’m talking a baby myself, my little sister was born. She was this incredible, perfect little human being that my mother had in the bathtub in our single-wide trailer. Within an hour of giving birth to her, my mother placed Bernice in my hands and said, ‘Take care of your sister. I have to go get some smokes.’” He studied his hands. “I was seven.”
I inhaled.
“From that moment on, Bernice was mine. I raised her. From the age of seven. She was mine to take care of. Mine to protect. And I had to do that a lot. I missed more school than I made for two years after Bernice was born. Then Mom cleaned herself up for a couple of years, and everything was great. Then she got back into drugs and alcohol, her boyfriend decided she wasn’t worth the trouble, and then I was back to taking care of her. I dropped her off at her first day of school. I picked her up from class every day until she turned twelve and asked to walk herself home. Then one day after I turned eighteen, I took the measly savings I’d managed to gather up over working odd jobs, and I moved out with Bernice. Into a one-bedroom apartment over a barn. That’s where we lived for a year and a half until my mother found us. She was pissed as fuck because I’d changed the address to where her social security checks and our food stamps were coming. I’d been forging her name on them for a solid eighteen months, and she was pissed as hell.”
I had a feeling I knew where this was going.
Bernice had told me enough that I could put together the pieces that he hadn’t said yet.
I lifted my bad hand and placed it on his thigh. “Don’t say anything here.”
I gestured with my head at the flimsy curtains separating us from the rest of the very large room.
I could hear nurses talking just beyond the curtain, and it didn’t matter how quietly he was speaking. I didn’t want him to chance it.
“Bernice told me,” I whispered. “Don’t say it again.”
He ground his teeth together for a few seconds before he gritted out, “I can’t say that I reacted the best that I could have.”
