He was still as he spoke, didn’t move, didn’t touch me as I ached for him to do. He just kept talking.
“I realized I might’ve been tired of the shitshow that was my life, but I wasn’t ready for it to be over. To stop battlin’.” His eyes glittered. “So I scraped her off. She didn’t take it well. Shit went down. People died. There was a small gang war.” He shrugged. “Thought it was over. Had an inkling to watch out for her comin’ back into my life, though I didn’t think I’d need to watch carefully because if she did, I’d notice it. Bitch is too crazy to do anything but blow up a building to show me a new pair of shoes or some shit.” He shook his head. “Near-fatal mistake babe. It almost cost me you.”
Then he wasn’t still anymore, moving to kneel beside the bed, clasping my hand in-between his as if he was in prayer. “Never would’ve been able to live with myself had you not woken up. Had—”
“I did wake up,” I interrupted, unable to hear the utter agony, the pure blame in his voice. “So we’re going to stop all the self-deprecating shit right now.”
His eyes flared at my curse.
I smiled. “Yes, I’m cussing to get your attention.”
“Will, ‘shit’ isn’t cussing, and you’ve already got my attention. You’ve always got my attention,” he growled, laying a kiss on the fingers he clutched in his hands.
I sucked in a breath at the small contact. “Okay, well then hopefully you’ll hear me when I say this is not your fault. We are not beholden to the actions of others. And we definitely do not take on sins they commit in our name. This woman had you. She lost you. As someone who has you, and has lost you, I know how tenuous that grip on reality can get. I’m not making an excuse for this vile woman. But it’s part of my point. There’s a reason they call love a disease, Gage. Because it turns foul and fatal when it dies in one person while the other still suffers.”
“I never fuckin’ loved her,” he interrupted. “Never loved anyone or anything but my baby girl and you. She never fucking had me, babe. Because there was nothing to have… until you.”
“Have you found her?” I asked.
“We will.”
“And what will you do when you find her?”
“Oh, I’m gonna kill her.”
The words were ugly and hard and should’ve sickened me. But they didn’t.
Because I was already sick.
With that disease they called love.
My recovery didn’t happen overnight. I was close to complete organ failure. To death. I knew just how close because I saw the shadow of the grave in Gage’s eyes. Felt it in how lightly he touched me, as if he were afraid a tight grip would be the nail in my coffin.
Someone might hold tighter when they thought someone was going to float away, to the point of pain. But Gage’s way was pain. That was his normal.
My grandmother stayed for as long as it took me to get out of hospital—which was almost three weeks in all—by which time my room looked like her New York loft and her LA townhouse had had a baby. Pretty much the second I’d woken up—once Gage had let anyone near me—after she’d scolded me for “giving her the scare of her young life,” she’d began decorating. She refused to let me “wither in this depressing room full of death and polyester—which are one and the same, if you ask me.” And of course, she’d had me out of the hospital gown and into silk pajamas as soon as I was well enough to stand for long enough.
Well, it was Gage who’d put me in the pajamas, and though I was well enough to stand—for short periods of time, at least—he refused such a thing to happen, carrying me to the bathroom and changing me. His jaw had been hard during the process. And he’d been silent. His mouth, at least. His demons spoke louder than any words.
His eyes were hard and intense on my stomach, brushing it with his hands before he cradled the flat skin—I had lost a lot of weight, there being a reason they called it ‘dead weight,’ after all—with his palm. His eyes stayed there for the longest time. I was afraid to move, to breathe, because there was something in that gaze. Something precious and painful.
“Thought you were pregnant,” he murmured, eyes meeting mine, hand still on my stomach. “I noticed it, you getting sick, because I notice everything when it comes to you.” He paused. “You hadn’t had your period, so I thought…”
My stomach clenched.
I had been skipping my period on my birth control because I’d been greedy and selfish and didn’t want anything to interrupt what Gage and I had.