Page 45 of Misadventures in Blue
I look down at my fingers, still stained with Jace’s blood. “It might be.”
An hour later, with Russo gone and Jace’s family camped all around me, a nurse comes in to say we can go in to see him—but we can’t go all at once.
I’m desperate to get to him, desperate to trace his lips with my fingers and reassure myself that they’re still warm. Anxious to see the rise and fall of his chest and know he’s here. Still here. Still alive.
But Jace’s parents are here, and they have the right to go first. I lace my fingers around the cup of tepid coffee and give Jace’s mother a look I hope she’ll interpret as a signal that I won’t protest her going first…no matter how much I want to.
She walks up to me. “You’re Cat Day?” she asks. Her voice is fractured from crying, and tear tracks have dried in streaks along her cheeks. She’s very pretty—gray-eyed and full-lipped like Jace, and as tall and broad as he is too.
“I am,” I say quietly. “Please, you go in first.”
She gives me a watery smile. “Jace told us about you,” she says, tucking a gray-salted lock of hair behind her ear. “That you two were dating, and he couldn’t wait—” Her chin trembles. “He couldn’t wait for us to meet.”
Jace told his mother about me? Wanted us to meet? My heart flips over at the discovery, at the proof that his declarations weren’t just the lust-fueled blurtings I’d suspected. That he not only wanted more with me but was actively laying the foundation for more.
Telling his parents. Wanting me to meet them.
The same things my illicit fantasies have been showing me for the last three weeks: a real life together.
My flattered joy is tempered with something unpleasant. I look up at his mother and realize she can’t be more than ten years older than me. I realize she’s looking down at me and seeing…
Seeing what?
A predator? A peer?
Both options are depressing.
“What you must think of me,” I manage with a weak smile, and she shakes her head.
She reaches out and touches my shoulder. Not as a gesture of comfort but to draw my attention. I look at her hands, rough and calloused like Russo’s, and remember that she was a firefighter. That her son’s bravery and dedication to hard work comes from her.
She’s touching stiffened patches of garnet splattered on my blouse. There’s dried blood all over me; I look like I’ve emerged from some kind of abattoir.
“I think you’re a hero,” she pronounces. “You saved his life.”
And then she and her husband follow the nurse into the ICU.
It’s another hour before they leave, and finally I get to go in.
Jace is still unconscious, his face pale and his huge frame dwarfed by the massive mechanical bed, and I cover my mouth with my hand so my unhappy gasp doesn’t wake him. As if anything could wake him up after all that blood loss and morphine.
There’s a chair pulled up beside his bed, but I ignore it, dropping my things on the floor and crawling right into bed with him, careful not to tug on any cords or tubes as I do. He’s warm but not as warm as I’m used to, and I’m just as cold as I press my body along his and lay my head on his good shoulder.
“Jace,” I mumble. “Why? Why are we here?”
Tears are leaking now—the fast, uncontrollable kind and the first I’ve cried since Gia fired that gun. “I love you,” I finally admit, hating myself that I never told him before. That I never told him when it mattered. “I love you, and it scares me. It s
cares me because you love me back and you love me back so much that you’d get yourself killed trying to protect me.”
Just like Frazer.
Beneath my cheek, I feel Jace’s steady if shallow breathing. All around us, various machines and monitors beep and glow with reassuring consistency, as if to say he’s doing okay, he’s doing okay.
But how can I ever be reassured of his safety ever again? After I’ve been spattered with coppery, vibrant blood as I begged and begged him to stay alive?
Maybe he didn’t die today, but he came close enough to prove every point I’ve ever made about us. He is blessed enough to live and have this second chance, and surely he doesn’t want to waste it on a woman so much older than him. Surely he deserves more tomcat years before he even has to think about settling down.
And most importantly…
