“You need to go deal with everything involving your daughter,” she urged.
I did.
“I’ll be fine,” she promised. “Go.”
Just as she said that, Sage came back in with an armful of towels. “We’ll get her all nice and clean. You can see her later tonight.”
I reluctantly went, dropping the cat back at my place before making a multitude of calls on my way into work.
Apollo immediately got onto getting Boston and Nettie on a private flight from St. Louis.
I called my parents back using my work line to let them know that I would handle Boston, and that they didn’t need to worry anymore.
And then I called Nettie to update her on Eddy’s situation like I did every day.
The last person I called was Boston.
Luckily, she didn’t answer.
But I knew she had her phone.
Leaving a voicemail, I told her exactly what she needed to do, ending with, “And ditch the phone.”
Then I spent the rest of the day worrying about two very different ladies that took up two whole complete pieces of my heart.
A woman that I’d just met that I couldn’t stop thinking about. And a girl that I’d known from the moment of her birth who would break my heart when she grew up.
Sixteen
If you’re a junior, your mom has probably moaned your name during sex.
—Food for thought
Eddy
The stitches around my eyes had come out, and now I was staring at the smattering of raised, mutilated skin like it was on someone else’s body.
The door whispered open and I looked up, not bothering to pull my gown down.
I didn’t pull it down and cover myself mostly because I’d thought the person coming in was my nurse.
Had I known it was the object of my every affection, I would’ve covered back up.
His eyes immediately went to the black, red, and blue coloring my body and winced.
“Ouch,” he said. “That’s a lot of bruising.”
“I had an eight-hundred-pound bear using me as a trampoline,” I snorted, which only caused my ribs to protest. “It looked way worse earlier when I was getting cleaned up. With all the dried, black blood off me, it almost looks good.”
“What’s the rest look like?” he asked.
I pushed down the covers to show him my hip and part of my backside.
He whistled. “You’re gonna have some gnarly scars.” He studied me in great detail. “That one is gonna be the worst.”
The one he was talking about were the four claw marks going from the fat area just underneath my armpit to the fleshy area above my right hip, just above my butt.
“It itches,” I said. “Like mad.”
