He’s too empty to answer me, so he blinks. His long lashes flutter on top of his red eyes and I reach out to touch them to settle that yearning in my body.
“Lourdes?” Coach Williams rasps.
“Coach Williams.”
“I—I didn’t know you were there too.”
“Yeah...you never do.”
After today, I’m knee deep in Ace’s Kool-Aid and I don’t want to be rescued from drowning—especially not by a man who thinks Ace is still a boy after everything that happened to him on Earth.
“I didn’t mean for you to hear all that.”
“But you meant for Ace to hear it?”
My tone is calm. It’d been that way since I had to let Nurse Shelby know she wouldn’t get shit out of Ace, but an answer from me when she called.
“Babygirl, I’m just disappointed in him, that’s all. He has to learn how to communicate with me. It’s something me and him struggle with but that’s neither here nor there and none of your concern. He has to understand that he can’t do whatever he wants. He can’t leave right before a—”
“I needed him.”
“I understand there’s some puppy love going on and you have a crush, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that he le—”
“My mama is in the hospital. Who else was I supposed to call? You?”
“CeCe’s in—in the hospital?” he stutters out.
“Yeah...” I swipe at Ace’s closing eyes and wipe at his dry cheeks. “She is.”
“I’msosorry, babygirl. I didn’t know. I—if you need me, I’m here.”
“I don’t.”
I didn’t need rescuing from the only person who meant well for me.
CHAPTERTWENTY-EIGHT
Ace
I forgot how hospitals make my brain work. They always convince it that every germ from inside the walls hitched a ride on my clothes so I have to crawl out of them as soon as I step outside. I’m scared the hospital did the same to Phat, so I send her to the shower as soon as we get off the elevator and stumble inside. She begs for me to come too.
After two and a half months, I’ve turned her into a beggar—a “you better still have your ass here when I get out since you won’t shower with me” type beggar. She said it with her finger pressed into my chest like I was brave enough to go anywhere without her now that I had her back.
I think she’s a lady for sure now. She checks nurses for flirting with me when CeCe’s in pain, she presses Pops about me, and I know she’ll fuck me and Marcus up if we ever argue about family business in front of strangers again.
I fall back onto the couch with a glass of 1942 in my hand and my body melts into the cushions until the water stops whirring in the bathroom and her feet pitter patter across the floor.
“Ason?”
At first I think I’m dreaming like all the other times I heard her in here. Then I remember the desperation in her voice when she called out for me for the first time in two weeks.
I swallow the burning tequila and pinch my eyes tighter. “Yeah, kid?”
I was never sober enough to come up with that contingency plan while she was gone, so I’m coming up with shit on the fly now that she came back—I have to respect her new boundaries, take shit slow, and keep her calm. I’ll only touch her if she asks. I’ll be less impulsive and more stable. It all sounds like some shit Mom would suggest, but I don’t have her reassurance that it’ll work.
“Open your eyes,” she whispers.
I pry them open and she’s there, naked, gripping a Magnum between her fingers.
