“It’s going to itch while it heals,” he admitted as he took up a seat next to the bed. “You need anything? Want to get up and walk the halls?”
I looked at the door. “I was told to, but the thought of walking sounds freakin’ awful.”
“Come on,” he said as he picked up a bag that I hadn’t noticed until now. “I got you some clothes and some shoes.”
I looked at the bag in his hands. “Does that bag have underwear?”
“It does,” he said. “I had your sister tell me the code to your place. I grabbed the softest stuff I could find that looked like it wouldn’t irritate your healing skin. I also stopped at the store and got you some slip-on shoes since you didn’t have any.”
“Oh,” I said. “What about a hair tie?”
The hopefulness in my voice had him grinning. “Got that, too.”
He helped me get dressed and didn’t once complain about the slowness of my movements.
By the time we were walking the halls of the hospital, I was moving even slower.
But I was moving.
Which was something I couldn’t say I’d thought I would ever do again when I was lying underneath a bear that was dead set on killing me.
“Tell me everything about yourself.”
He looked at me like I was crazy, but there was also a huge amount of wariness there.
As if he was remembering what I’d overheard this morning.
After he’d left, I’d done a quick deep dive into what I thought I knew about him, and didn’t come up with much of anything in the way of the internet.
But, after a while, I’d stopped even that because I would learn everything I needed to know from the source itself.
If he wanted to tell me.
And if he didn’t, that was his business, not mine. I wouldn’t push.
But that didn’t mean that he couldn’t share who he was with me.
He’d already been doing that over the last eight days that I’d been in the hospital and he’d been visiting with me, but I wanted the real stuff. The real Weaver Grant.
I smiled, though it was weak at best. “Anything to distract me.”
His eyes studied me for a long moment as he started to talk.
He told me of a life that he used to live in the South.
He told me of his once hopes and dreams.
But only when we were back in my hospital room did he tell me the real stuff.
He’d told me of his twin sister’s fiancée that was killed, and of that the subsequent falling out with her.
He told me of his child—the tattoo that he’d had on his chest that I’d wondered about a few days ago but hadn’t had the nerve to ask about—and how much he’d missed her.
And since I was assuming that there was way more to the story, I didn’t push. But I wanted to know the real reason his eyes always looked so haunted.
“What’s her name?” I asked, even though I knew.
“Boston.” He smiled, pretending like this was the first time he was telling me about her. “Boston Leigh. I had her young. When I was barely eighteen.”
