Home Again
They’d been lying in the grass, staring up at the night sky, wishing on stars, sharing their dreams, holding each other. But she’d known it was time to go home. Her father would be getting back from his business trip.
She pulled away from him, staring down the long, darkened stree
t. The thought of leaving him, returning to that cold house and her even colder father, made her feel almost sick with desperation. “I don’t want to go back….” She realized instantly that she’d said too much. She held her breath, waiting for Angel to call her silly or stupid or childish—all the words her father hurled at her with such regularity.
But he didn’t. He touched her cheek, gently turned her face to his. “Don’t. Stay with me. We could run away … raise a family … be a family….”
Madelaine had never known what it could feel like to love someone until that moment. The emotion swept through her, filling her soul with heat until, suddenly, she was laughing, and then she was crying. “I love you, Angel.”
Ah … it had been so painfully sweet….
He pulled her into his arms, held her so tightly, she couldn’t breathe. Together they dropped to their knees in the spongy grass. She felt his hands on her, stroking her hair, her back, her hips. And then he was kissing her, tasting her tears, claiming her so completely with his mouth that she felt dizzy.
At last he drew back and stared down at her. There was an intensity in his eyes that stole her breath, made her heart beat wildly. “I love you, Madelaine. I don’t… I mean, I’ve never…” Tears squeezed past his eyelashes and he started to wipe them away.
She stopped his hand. “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered.
He gave her a trembling smile. In that instant she understood so much about him, about the way he was. He went about swaggering and blustering and acting like the rebel, but on the inside he was just like her. Scared and confused and lonely. He didn’t believe in himself, didn’t think he was good, but he was—she believed in him enough for both of them. And he loved her like no one had ever loved her before….
Such powerful, powerful words: I love you….
After that, she’d told him everything, opened her heart and soul to him and let him become a part of her. Without him, she hadn’t thought she could live.
What if he could do that to her again?
She forced herself to remember the other things, the other moments, letting the pain wash through her in a cold, cleansing sweep.
She’d thought she’d forgiven him for what he’d done to her—for leaving her without so much as a good-bye. Honestly, truly, she thought she had. Time and again she’d replayed the sequence of events in her head. She told herself she didn’t blame Angel for running out on her. She told herself that seventeen was young, so young, and with each advancing year of her life, it felt younger still. She told herself it had been for the best, that they never would have made it, that they would have ruined each other’s lives.
Yes, she’d told herself a lot of things, but now, in this second, staring down at him, she recognized the truth at last. They were lies, all of them lies. Pretty foil paper on a dark, ugly gift.
She hadn’t forgiven him. How could she?
He’d killed a part of her that summer, a part he’d created and nurtured and claimed to love. A part she’d never gotten back.
* * *
Angel came awake slowly. For a single blissful second he didn’t know where he was or what had happened to him. Then the muted sucking sound of machines drifted to his ears, the murmur of the heart monitor.
After his futile jailbreak attempt, Hilda the bird-woman and a marine-sized nurse had hooked his useless heart back up. The machine kept its clicking record, spitting out reams of paper.
He felt like hell. His chest ached, his head pounded, and the needles in his arms burned like spots of fire. He couldn’t move without hurting somewhere. He could feel the telltale whirring of drugs in his bloodstream; he’d used narcotics too often in his life to be fooled.
He groaned, letting his head loll to the side. The smell of old cotton, green Jell-O, and boiled turkey filled his nostrils.
Lunchtime in cardiac hell.
He winced as the sunlight stabbed deep in his head. Blinking, he tried to wet his parched lips, and reached shakily for the Wedgewood-blue plastic pitcher labeled 264-W.
“I’ll get that for you.”
The voice washed over him. At first all he noticed was the soothing huskiness of it, the Debra Winger throatiness. It reminded him of something, some distant night in his past when he’d picked up a waitress in Tulsa, taken her home, and fu—
Oh, Jesus. That wasn’t the right memory at all.
His idiotic heart lurched, rammed into his rib cage, and started to knock like an old engine on bad gas. The monitor beside him spat a sudden Gatling-gun clatter into the room. He couldn’t breathe.
Breathe deeply, you asshole. Calm down. Slowly he tilted his chin. And saw her beside him.