I let it.
I stayed in the chair beside his bed and told him everything. I told him Coach Little made him sound like a national treasure with anger issues. I told him Briggs cried but would deny it under oath. I told him Easton looked like he was two seconds from fighting the entire hospital until Aura made him sit down. I told him Ryan stayed with him and kept telling me he didn’t leave, and I told Cade he better wake up enough to thank him properly because Ryan looked like his soul had been dragged through a paper shredder.
I told him his parents were here. I told him his mom cried when she saw him and between the two of us, he was never alone. I told him his dad was terrifying in a way that made much more sense now. I told him my dad hadn’t left. I told him my brothers were losing their minds quietly, which was somehow worse than when they did it loudly.
I did not tell him about the meeting. I had no way of knowing what Cade would remember, but I knew and would never forget what this man with devastating cheekbones and a lethal mouth had done for me.
For now, I gave him the only truths that mattered.
“You’re alive,” I whispered, brushing my thumb over his hand. “And apparently we’re boyfriend-girlfriend now thanks to media coverage outing us, so rude of you to make me your girlfriend while in a coma. Romance fail, babe.”
The monitor kept beeping, and his chest kept rising.
My hand never left his, and for the first time since Ryan called Knox, hope did not feel like a lie.
45
Cade
Three weeks after Luke Dempsey tried to kill me in a service hallway beneath The Furnace, the hospital finally decided I could leave.
Which was generous, considering I still felt like shit.
Improved shit, according to the doctors, which apparently counted as medical progress.
I had two healing stab wounds, a lung that had recently attempted to quit its job, an abdomen stitched and repaired in places I preferred not to think about, and a medication schedule so complicated Bliss had color-coded it, laminated it on pink glitter-edged paper, and threatened three separate nurses with emotional violence if they deviated from it. I could walk short distances if I moved like an old man with a bad hip and trust issues. I could breathe without a machine. I could sleep for more than forty minutes at a time if my mind stopped remembering the hallway long enough to let me. I could eat bland food without wanting to kill Luke Dempsey all over again.
Miracles everywhere.
Still, leaving the hospital felt wrong.
Not because I wanted to stay. I had spent three weeks trapped in rooms that smelled like antiseptic, flowers, fear, and my father’s money trying to fix everything he couldn’t physically control. I wanted out more than I wanted most things, but the outside world felt larger than it used to. Brighter. Sharper. Full of people and noise and doors and corners and all the stupid little vulnerabilities I had never considered before one man with a knife reminded me skin was not armor, no matter how good you were at taking hits.
Bliss stood at the foot of my hospital bed in one of my hoodies she had cropped because—fashion—arms crossed while she stared at me like she had personally invented discharge paperwork and was prepared to fight anyone who disagreed with her interpretation of it.
“You’re doing that face,” she said.
I looked at her from where I was sitting on the edge of the bed while a nurse explained things I had already heard six times. “What face?”
“The emotionally constipated one.”
My mother, seated near the window in a cream sweater that probably cost more than Briggs’s car, made a soft sound that might have been a laugh.
My father did not laugh, but his mouth moved like it had considered the option and rejected it for brand consistency.
“I’ve been stabbed,” I said. “I’m allowed a face.”
“You’re allowed many faces. This one is just annoying.”
The nurse wisely pretended not to hear any of that while Bliss took the folder from her hands and immediately started reading it like my recovery was a hostage negotiation. Her hair was pulled up today, messy and soft, little blonde pieces falling around her cheeks. She wore leggings, Nikes, and my KFU sweatshirt like she had claimed joint custody of my wardrobe somewhere around day four in the ICU and never looked back.
Almost dying had done terrible things to Bliss Bennett’s boundaries.
Before the attack, I had been prepared to bribe, manipulate, and sexually compromise her into never leaving my bed again.
Turns out, getting stabbed twice expedited the process.
“I’m moving in,” she had informed me two days ago, while I was half-asleep and apparently not too wounded to enjoy the hell out of her bossy voice. “You can have a male nursebecause I support modern medicine but not the female nursing population giving you sponge baths. Plus, a male nurse won’t be distracted by your looks and accidentally kill your healing organs. But I’m still staying until it’s safe for me to be your nurse.”
