Chapter Five
Lola
He doesn’t look like my dad.
That’s the thought that keeps looping in my mind as we walk out of the hospital.
I still see the wires, the machines, the steady rise and fall of his chest that isn’t really his anymore.
The ventilator is doing the work now. Not the man who sings Springsteen off key while flipping pancakes of a morning.
Not the man who once confronted a soccer referee because he thought I got fouled too harshly.
This version of him feels wrong. He’s too still, too quiet. Reduced to nothing but beeps and blinking lights. It makes my chest ache in a way I can’t find the words for.
I want to turn around, run back to the ICU, grab his shoulders, and shake him awake.
I want to make him blink, smile, or say something goofy, warm, and Dad-like.
I would do anything to hear him swear quietly, tease me about my posture, or threaten to scare off boys with a shotgun. Anything to prove he’s still in there.
Instead, I keep walking, my shoulder brushing Jace’s arm as we head for the exit.
I don’t trust my legs to hold me up right now.
The building spits us back out into the night, and I barely notice anything before Jace is already there, opening the passenger door before I can think about reaching for it.
He doesn’t say anything. Not a single word. He waits until I’m seated, makes sure I’m in, before he gently shuts the door, as if I might shatter if he slams it too hard.
That alone almost destroys me.
He’s been there for me today in a way no one else has. He’s been solid. Present. It’s unsettling how much that matters.
He gets in, starts the car, and the headlights cast a harsh white light over the hospital wall before we drive away. The building disappears from the side mirror, but the image of my dad hooked up to those machines still haunts me. I curl my hands into my lap, fingers tightly clenched.
“Do you want me to call Aubrey?” he asks.
I shake my head as I gaze out the window.
“What about Sam?”
“No.”
He glances over at me, quick but searching. “Are you sure, Bells?”
The way he says my name hits me deep in the chest. It’s soft, as if it belongs to him. I fucking hate it because it cracks something open inside my chest that I’m barely holding together.
It makes my eyes sting all over again.
“I said no,” I snap.
The words echo in the car, ugly and brittle.
“Okay,” he says softly.
The word lingers on my tongue, heavy with guilt.
I should apologize for snapping at him. But I don’t say it, because he doesn’t realize that for weeks now I’ve been out of sync with the two people I used to rely on. That Sam and Aubrey are now caught up in their own little worlds.
He doesn’t know I’ve been walking the halls alone. Sitting alone. Eating alone. Telling myself it’s fine, that this is what happens, that people grow, and that it’s normal.
He doesn’t realize I kept waiting for one of them to look up and notice.
They didn’t.
But he did.
And that’s the part that messes with my head, because Jace Cooper is not supposed to be the one who sees me. He’s the guy girls cry over in bathrooms, not the one who sits beside you in a hospital room, holding your hand because you can’t breathe.
He shouldn’t be the one I lean on, the one making me feel less invisible. And yet, he noticed I wasn’t myself in the library. He noticed the way my voice cracked on the phone.
Jace fucking noticed.
The car continues moving. Streetlights flicker across the windshield in slow, fragmented waves.
I turn my head to look at him.
His eyes are focused straight ahead. Hands steady on the wheel, fingers loose but controlled. No arrogant tilt of his mouth. Only silent focus.
Jace looks older like this. Not the guy who lounges back in cafeteria chairs and runs his mouth. The one who smirks, talks about sex and acts like he doesn’t give a shit about anything.
“I didn’t mean to snap,” I say.
His eyes flick to me for half a second.
“I know,” he says.
He shifts his focus back to the road and pulls into my street.
The lump in my throat hurts as familiar houses drift by. Same mailboxes, same cracked pavement. The broken streetlight halfway down the street.
Jace slows the car, the indicator ticking softly in the quiet, then turns into my driveway.
The headlights sweep over the front of the house, illuminating the small garden bed by the porch that Dad keeps promising he’ll fix properly someday.
Jace parks the car and turns off the engine.
Neither of us moves.
The headlights dim, and for a moment, sitting in the dark, I wonder how I’m supposed to walk into that house and pretend I’m not terrified out of my mind.
The dashboard lights glow faint blue across his face, softening the hard edges. I notice the way his thumb taps once against the steering wheel. The only sign that he’s not as unshaken as he appears.
Jace walks me to my front door, with my keys still clenched in his hand. He doesn’t rush me. He stays close enough that if I tipped sideways, he’d catch me.
The porch light flickers as we step into its glow.
Jace steps in front of me, unlocks the door, pushes it open, and steps inside.
The lights are off. The house seems... hollow. The air smells different, like grief slipped in through the cracks while we were gone and settled into the walls.
I kick off my shoes by the door. They fall sideways instead of neatly side by side like Dad always insists. He hates clutter. Says chaos starts with shoes left in the wrong place.
I walk toward the hallway without thinking.
Jace takes a few steps forward. Boots quiet on the hardwood floor. He stops near the living room, scanning the space carefully. The couch. The coffee table. The framed photos on the wall. He takes it all in with that guarded, assessing look he wears when he doesn’t trust the world.
“You good?” he asks.
I nod, but it’s a lie so obvious it’s almost insulting. “I just need a minute.”
I climb the stairs slowly, my hand sliding along the banister. Each step creaks in the same spots as always.
My bedroom door is halfway open. When I get to it, I step inside and push it shut behind me.
Everything is exactly how I left it this morning.
Bed unmade. The duvet twisted from where I kicked it off in a rush.
My hoodie slung over the back of my desk chair.
The photo from my recital two years ago still sits beside my lamp.
Dad’s arm is wrapped around my shoulders, his grin wide, pride written all over his face.
He’d cried that night and said it was allergies.
I stare at that photo for too long and lean back against the door, letting my head rest on the wood, and for a moment, I just stand there, trying to breathe through it.
Then, the weight hits.
The hospital room, the machines, the wires taped to his skin. The doctor’s calm, careful voice telling me nothing except that he had a severe stroke, and now all we can do is wait.
I slide down the door until I’m sitting on the floor. My knees pull up to my chest on instinct. My hands cover my face and I cry the way I didn’t in front of the nurses.
The way I didn’t in front of the doctor.
The way I didn’t in the car in front of Jace.
Time loses all meaning. It shatters into fragments—a breath, a hiccup, the sound of my own heartbeat in my ears.
Eventually, my throat burns and my head aches. My tears fade into shallow breaths and silence.
The house seems overly still. It hums with absence.
I push myself up off the floor, my legs unsteady, fingertips dragging across my cheeks to wipe away whatever’s left of the tears.
I open my bedroom door and walk into the hallway. The silence that surrounds me is deafening.
Suddenly, I wonder if Jace has left because that’s what Jace does. He drifts in and out, and doesn’t owe anyone anything. He’s the boy who never sticks around after. The one who disappears before things get complicated.
And tonight was fucking complicated.
Maybe he waited a few minutes, stood in the living room, and looked around at the family photos before deciding this was all too much and left.
The thought makes my chest hurt.
I descend the stairs slowly, one hand brushing the banister, each step creaking under my weight.
When I get to the bottom step, I stop.
He’s still here, lying on the couch.
Moonlight filters through the blinds of the living room window, casting soft silver lines across him.
It highlights the sharp edge of his jaw.
His blond hair falls over his forehead. His shirt has ridden up slightly, revealing a strip of skin above his waistband.
One arm rests on his stomach, while the other is tucked beneath his head.
He looks peaceful.
Nothing like the boy who throws out filthy one-liners and walks away before anyone can get too close.
For a moment, I think he’s asleep, but then his voice breaks through the quiet.
“Are you okay?”
I flinch, my heart jumping.
“I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“I wasn’t sleeping,” he says, eyes on me. “Just thinking.”
“About what?”
He props himself up onto his elbow. “You. If I should go up and check if you’re okay.”
I move toward him and climb onto the couch next to him. He makes room for me. He wraps his arm around me, pulling me into him. My back curves into his chest, and his breath brushes warm and slow across my shoulder before he buries his face in my neck.
When he breathes me in, every hair on my body stands on end.
I’ve never been this close to him before. Never been held like this by Jace Cooper.
I feel his hard cock pressing against my ass.
He doesn’t move away.
I shift just enough for him to notice I feel it.
He breathes deeper.
His voice gently brushes my skin. “Tell me about your mom.”
I swallow hard, forcing air into my lungs, trying to pull one clear thought out of the chaos in my head—anything to distract me from the heavy press of his cock or the way his mouth lingers at my neck, as if he’s already claimed my skin as his.