Alphas Like Us (Like Us 3)

His forest-greens stay on me, screaming love me.

Love me.

And he says, “You’ve always been smarter than me.”

“Don’t.” I shake my head repeatedly. I can’t listen to him admit that I’m wiser, older and stronger. “Don’t.” My head whips. “OLIVEIRA!” I yell at Oscar to hurry the fuck up, and cameramen scream questions at me about whether Maximoff is alive.

I tune out the chorus of alive and dead.

Maximoff stares right into me and chokes out, “I love you, you know that?”

We’re both crying. “Stop.” I clutch his sharp jaw. I’m a stubborn idiot too. Because I refuse to say I love you back in a goodbye.

Maximoff takes a shorter breath. “Tell Jane I love her…” He swallows a knot in his throat. “Tell my parents they’re the greatest…”

“Maximoff—”

“I love you,” he repeats.

“Stop. Stop.” I can’t do an ending with the one person I’ve loved enough to want to last forever. I can’t. I haven’t even told him that I can see forever. I haven’t said all that needs to be said yet.

“Take care of my sisters…my brother—”

“Look at me.” I hold his face as his breath shortens. “You’ll be here tomorrow and the next day. This isn’t it, wolf scout. You’re not ending here. And I’m confident…” I nod over and over, his eyes flooding. “You will see your sisters grow up to be old women and you’ll see your brother become an old man—and I’ll be right by your side.”

He blinks and tears fall down his sharp cheekbone. “You will?”

“Yeah,” I nod. “You’re stuck with me, wolf scout. I’ll annoy the shit out of you every single morning for decades. Longer, and our kids will take your side because you’re good and lovable.”

He breathes deeper. “We have kids?” His iron-willed eyes drift to imagine this future, our future. “How many?”

A rock lodges. “As many as you want,” I say, never lying to him. “And when I agitate you and I really hit a nerve, you’ll joke about how you wish you died in this car crash.”

His lip wants to lift. “Romantic.” He coughs, then grits through pain. “Fuck.”

His skin is starting to discolor, and as I look out in the rain, Oscar is running towards me with an umbrella and the kit.

“…Farrow,” Maximoff chokes.

“Shh,” I whisper.

“...I don’t want to die…” His neck strains.

My chest is on fire. “That’s good, wolf scout.” I nod. “Because I’m not writing down your will right now.”

Maximoff stares upward. “Thanks…like you write anything down…”

I grab all the medical supplies Oscar collected. He snaps open the umbrella and shields rain from us while I work.

I tear open antiseptic and cleanse the site. Then I take out the needle catheter from the kit. Quickly, I run my finger over the top of the third rib and the second intercostal space, midclavicular line on the right side.

My hands are shaking.

In all my life, my hands have never shook.

“Take a second, Redford,” Oscar tells me.

I breathe out. Relax, Farrow.

My hands steady.

No more hesitating, I insert the needle catheter, and a rush of air expels like the burst of a balloon.

Maximoff inhales deeper, and his right lung finally has movement. I keep the catheter in place and remove the needle. He’s more stable. And now, all I can do is wait for the ambulance.

I hover over him again. “Better?”

He nods once, taking another breath. He’s still in a lot pain from multiple fractures. Our eyes latch for a heady moment as a flash strikes the air.

As the night sky rumbles above us.

Maximoff stares out in a short second before he looks back at me and says, “That’s us.”

I don’t follow. “Plato talking to you again?”

He groans, then coughs.

“Relax,” I tell him, ambulance sirens blaring in the distance. And it’s only when lightning cracks the sky and thunder roars again do I realize what he meant by that’s us.

Thunder.

Lightning.

My brows rise. “I’m lightning then, and you’re thunder. You always follow me every time I appear.”

His lips lift in a choked laugh. “You’re right…you will annoy me to death.”

My chest swells, and I can’t hold back. I lean down and kiss Maximoff, gently, on the lips, and he tries to kiss back and even sit up. But I don’t let him.

Later.

There will be a later. There has to be one.

7

MAXIMOFF HALE

A heart rate monitor lets out quiet beep beeps. An IV is hooked in my vein, connected to bags of fluid, and I ended up asking Farrow what the nurse clipped to my finger: a pulse oximeter.

I’ve been dazed for a while.

Maybe since I was put on a stretcher and wheeled into an ambulance and brought to Philadelphia General.

I think about how I’ve been stalked, threatened bodily harm and death. How I’ve crashed my motorcycle dozens of times, back-flipped into ravines, skydived, wiped out on a snowboard, eaten pavement after skateboard tricks, swam in strong ocean currents, and after all these things, all this damn time, I’ve never been afraid to die. And then tonight.

I was afraid.

I was fucking terrified.

My mortality, my fragile life, just crashed against me, and I remember that I’m only twenty-two. I remember that I can’t control the direction of anything, and I’m a passenger to the universe—but God, this ride can’t end for me. Not here, not now.

I wasn’t ready.

I’m not ready.

I begged and pleaded to receive one more minute with Farrow. I’d been surrounded by the love of family for twenty-two years, but I didn’t even get a full year with the love of another man, a companion, a soul mate—and maybe I was being selfish.

Asking for more when I’d been given so much already.

But then I thought about how he never had a family that really loved him for him. And I thought, if not for me, don’t do this to him. Don’t gut him.

So I’m not returning this second chance, this e

xtra time. Maybe it’s why I can’t stop staring at him now.

Then again, my brain has always been obsessed. I’m pretty sure he knows that too.

“Aren’t you supposed to be reading to me?” I ask Farrow as he clutches a paperback in one hand, my paperback, and flips a page. “You know, out loud.” I sit up as best I can on the firm hospital bed.

Farrow has claimed a seat at the end of my bed.

My bare legs stretch over his lap. One of his inked hands moves up and down my leg, settling on my kneecap for a few seconds before moving again.

“I’m saving you from a dull read, wolf scout.” He flips another page.

He’d say everything on this planet is a dull read because he rarely reads, and he already folded the cover and dog-earred the pages just to irritate me.

“I’ve read that philosophy book before,” I tell him.

His eyes flit to me, a spark of amusement in them. “I know. You have a hard-on for Cicero. There are little highlight marks and scribbles on basically every line.”

I almost smile, and I lick my dry lips. “Not every fucking line.”

He flashes the page he’s on. It’s annotated to hell and back.

“Fine,” I concede. “I like Cicero.” I lie on top of the hospital sheets, my throbbing right arm secured in a loose sling. A thin blue hospital gown reaches my thighs and hides the reddish-bluish bruises that mar my abs and chest.

My sore body thuds in a harsh rhythm like I’ve been run over a billion-and-one times, but I have the best distraction in front of me.

“He loves Cicero,” Farrow repeats as he skims the book.

“Likes,” I correct.

His biceps look ripped in a Yale T-shirt, but the crew-neck conceals the symmetrical pirate ships on his collarbones and inked skull on his sternum. He said he gave Winona his black button-down for her busted lip, so he ended up borrowing the shirt from Oscar’s gym bag.

Farrow flips another page. His speed-reading is fucking annoying.

Another page turns.

More seriously, he asks me, “Why do you like him?”

“You jealous?” I try my hand at teasing my boyfriend.

His brows slowly lift at me like I’m the geekiest fucking geek that ever did geek. “Of a dead Roman philosopher?”