Wild Like Us (Like Us 8)

Shit.

I look around quickly for strangers.

Sulli is safe.

No one else is here.

I told Banks that I loved him before telling Sulli I love her. Awesome.

So very awesome.

I push my hair back. My heart rate accelerates even faster, and Banks tilts his head, looking up at me from his slouched spot against the tire. His knowing, understanding gaze just punctures me more.

Very gently, he says, “It’s not a brain aneurysm.”

Sulli comes back, kneeling beside Banks. She helps him with the pain meds, but she eyes me like I’m the one barfing on the ground and in need of assistance.

I lick my dried lips, then go to massage my knuckles, but my phone is in my fist.

They both know my mom has been in the hospital for brain aneurysms. She’s had six over the course of her life. Surgery for three. Same symptoms that I just saw from Banks right now.

Sensitivity to light.

Nausea.

The day she had her first seizure, I found her in the kitchen. I was eighteen. I’d just lost my dad a year before, and I thought I was about to lose my mom.

After she got a diagnosis, she chose to move back to New York. Family upon family are all there, cousins and aunties and uncles who are closer than close. Family that my parents left when they had me and ended up in Philly. Family that I didn’t grow up around.

It was always just me and my mom and my dad.

Thais look after their elderly parents, and even though she wasn’t old yet, I thought my mom would let me help her. Be there for her. Take care of her.

But she chose New York and her brothers and sisters a year after I opened my gym in Philadelphia. A year after I sunk my dad’s life insurance into a business that I couldn’t abandon.

A year after I committed myself to the city where she raised me.

She left, knowing that I couldn’t follow.

I was nineteen.

And she keeps me briefly in the loop about her health, but I hate feeling like she left because she didn’t want to burden me. Some days, I just miss my mom. I worry about her regardless if she’s a mile away or a hundred.

And now I’m afraid for Banks.

“You can’t be sure it’s not a brain aneurysm,” I tell him, “or something worse.”

Banks washes down paid meds, forcing his eyes open on me. “I’ve had migraines since I got back from my deployment.” He takes a sharp breath. “It’s been like this since I was twenty-two. There’s nothing more to them than this. I promise.” He’s not as pale. He’s able to speak.

“Have you ever seen a neurologist?” I ask.

He shakes his head.

“Banks,” Sulli says in shock. “I’d slug you right now.”

Banks tries to smile, but he’s trying not to puke again. “Doctors are expensive.”

“I pay for your health insurance,” I remind him. “And it’s fucking good and expensive for me.”

His lip manages to quirk. “Maybe I just don’t trust them.”

“That sounds more accurate,” I say, my phone still in my fist. If I let him get on a plane and something were to happen to him mid-air, I couldn’t live with that. It’d be the worse decision I’ve ever made.

But if it’s only a temporary migraine and I send him to the hospital where he misses Thatcher’s wedding…

Shit.

What am I going to do?

I flip my phone in my palm.

Trust yourself, Nine.

I pocket my phone. “Can you stand?”

Banks relaxes seeing the threat of an ambulance gone. “Yeah.” He weakly picks himself up with Sulli’s and my help. And once he’s able to stand on his own, we grab the bags. He tries to pick one up, and I shove his chest.

“What is it you always say?” I ask him, then snap my finger. “No way in hell.”

Banks cracks a weak smile. “That saying doesn’t work for you, Akara. You’d find some way in hell. That’s why I follow you and not the other way around.”

I almost smile back, but I won’t fully breathe until we’re in Philly and he’s standing on two feet. “Promise me, when we get back home, you’ll go see someone about your migraines.”

He gives me a nod. Barely a promise.

But I accept what I can. Right now, we have a plane to catch.

47

BANKS MORETTI

My phone is heavy in my hand. I stand at the huge glass window, overlooking a half-a-dozen idled planes. The sun has gone down; lights blink around the tarmac, and rain batters the glass and the pavement and my fucking soul.

The airport is packed with restless and sleeping bodies. Electronic boards read delayed, delayed, delayed. Sulli has been making calls to her family. Her sister steamed her pale-yellow dress and has been holding onto the garment bag. Every bridesmaid is going to wear a different pastel, cotton-candy color.