Page 69 of All That Glitters
And none of it made any sense to me.
Need you. Now.
I didn’t want to send the text. I didn’t want her to see me this way, especially after the way our last encounter ended, but I needed to see her. I needed…her. She was the only one… How it happened, I didn’t know and I was so close to not giving a fuck. I just knew… Something inside me had changed toward her that had nothing to do with what I had initially set out to do.
Where are you?
Home. Cottage.
She didn’t send another reply, but I knew she’d come. I knew she’d come no matter what, no matter the time of day or night. And I knew it had nothing at all to do with the bargain we made. She cared for me, whether I exploited it or not.
The old me wouldn’t have done that. Not to Helen. Not to any of my friends. I was no longer the old me, though. The truth was, I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know this Ashton and I really didn’t want to. I didn’t like him. I didn’t like me. I wanted to go back to being me and I wanted my friends back. Everyone knew I wanted my career back, my car back, but that paled in comparison to having the friends and relationships I once had.
Even Hale. Especially Hale.
But there was too much anger inside me and it clouded everything.
I wasn’t ready to get back into a race car. I may have been trying to convince others that I was, but the truth of it was that I wasn’t ready and I didn’t know if I ever would be. That fueled the anger more than anything. My mind wasn’t right. My body wasn’t cooperating. Uncertainty wasn’t something I was used to experiencing. I always knew who I was and what I was meant for…
I wasn’t anywhere near ready to be on a track with other people. Hell, I struggled just being in a regular car on the road with someone else driving.
Okay that wasn’t a good example. I never liked being in a car if I wasn’t the one driving and I’d been behind the wheel of some of the fastest race cars on the planet since I was thirteen. Younger, even.
Glitterati Racing had a test track nearby. My father bought the land that an old, closed up public golf course sat on, leveled it, and built a track. Most people didn’t know about it and there were no houses around it. It was one of the only unpopulated and undeveloped areas of Ponte Vedra and I used to take cars from the garage and run them, test them before the drivers got behind the wheel. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to do that again.
The memory of the night in the garage with Helen came back. I could barely sit in the car, in the driver’s seat because the panic overwhelmed me. The feel that every part of me was on fire scared the shit out of me, even though I could see that it was all perfectly normal.
The panic was as real as the fact that my heart tried to beat itself out of my chest.
The only thing that helped was Helen. Her touch on my arm, my shoulder, my thigh. Her touch calmed me, calmed the fear as it began to spill over.
There was no way I could do any of this without her. I didn’t know when that had happened.
And needing her to that extent was uncomfortable as hell. I never needed anyone.
I wanted her, sure. How I hadn’t ever seen her as a beautiful, sexy, sultry woman before, I couldn’t say. Definitely a fault in my internal wiring that somehow got fixed during one of my surgeries. Now, all I could see was her beauty, her sensuality, her smile, her kindness.
Before the crash, I’d been casually seeing someone. She’d tried to get in touch. Maybe she’d come to the hospital. I couldn’t remember. I doubted it, though. But Helen… Helen had been there often.
I never thanked her for coming to see me, to visit me, to keep me company even though most of the time I was either out because of pain meds or pretended to be asleep until she left. I never thanked her for caring. I honestly didn’t know how.
Hale had come, too. I’d heard his voice and I remembered the panic that set in, the beeps and bleeps and buzzing all around me. I remember something cold, then warm entering my bloodstream through the IV in my arm and then nothing. When I became aware again, there was only calm. As far as I knew, Hale never came back to the hospital.
I spent about a month there and when they deemed me ready to move on to the next phase, I hadn’t realized how scared I was to go back out into the real world.
No one really spoke about my hospital stay. No one really spoke about the months of rehab, the therapy, the anxiety attacks, the panic that kept me dizzy.
Then again, no one spoke about any of it because I didn’t let anyone in on the fact that I was still suffering, that I wasn’t healed on the inside, that I wasn’t ready for the only thing in my life that had ever made sense, that had ever meant anything to me.
Racing.
Though, there was something else now, too.
There were things I’d regret when it was finished. One of which would be the loss of Helen. She would no longer be in my bed or against my wall. She would no longer be mine to take in her room or on the hood of a car as I’d dreamed of doing since seeing her in the shop the other night. She would no longer be mine at all. Not my lover. Not my friend.
I’d already lost Hale. I would lose Helen, too.
The thought left a sour taste in my mouth and made my stomach roll with unease. Before the accident, I was not this person.
