Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
S omething was way worse with Trey than he’d let on. He’d been totally silent on the drive, not so much as telling West a thing, and when they got home, the kids were asleep, and Lisa and Belinda were playing Hearts with Mark, drinking hot buttered rum.
“I saved all the food,” Mark started.
Lisa nodded to them. “The kids are bathed and sleeping sound. School is cancelled tomorrow and then, of course, it’s the weekend.”
“Who wants hot buttered rum?” Belinda’s voice was too loud, and the thought of booze made West want to barf, but he smiled.
“Trey?”
“Sure. Why not. I could use a drink or three.” Trey smiled in the general direction of the kitchen, and West touched his arm, kind of hoping to help.
“Do you want to sit? I’m going to go change clothes. I’m miserable.” And his hand was starting to throb in that deep way.
“Sure. Okay.” Trey let him lead, and sat, head down. His gaze would be fixed on his hands, but West had a feeling he wasn’t seeing a damn thing.
“Be right back. I’m stiff and gross.” With blood, mostly. He’d put a plastic bag on his hand and wash up.
West turned on the light when he got to the bathroom, and then turned it right back off. The light had shot into his eyes like arrows, and that had damn near split his head in two. Christ.
He gagged a little, but he cowboyed up as best he could, wrapping up his hand so he could take a quick shower. There was a lot he couldn’t wash with one hand, but he could at least make sure he didn’t look like Frankenstein’s monster and make the kids cry when they saw him tomorrow.
He got the water as hot as he thought he could without it making him sick, then stepped in to wash down. Okay, so Trey. He’d been in the supposed check-up forever, so something had to be going on. He didn’t have any obvious head wounds, so West didn’t think it was a concussion.
But was it his eyes? That was really the most obvious thing, and the main reason he could figure for Trey to be so withdrawn.
He dried off as fast as he could, then grabbed a bottle of Tylenol out of the med cabinet and took three. He swallowed them, grimacing. Ugh. Okay. He needed to shoo everyone out. They would have a family meeting tomorrow with the kids.
When he came back in, Trey was sitting at the table, feeling around one of Zoe’s pretzels, tracing it round and round with his fingers.
“How are they?”
“What?”
“The pretzels. How do they taste?”
Trey chuckled softly. “Like pretzels.”
“They look like bizarre infinity symbols with a little monkey ass thrown in.”
Trey hooted, the sound unhappy.
He glanced at Mal, who slapped her hands on her thighs. “Y’all call us if you need to go anywhere. I think we’re going to head on down to put our feet up.”
Lisa looked at him, then nodded at Belinda. “Let’s go watch some TV. In our rooms.”
Mark cleared his throat. “I’ve washed up, so…”
“Go on,” Trey said.
After they all trooped out, West sat. “Okay. So how are you, Trey? Really?”
Trey shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“What? Did you see the doctor?”
“I did.”
“So you have to know. It’s a thing, knowing.” Doctors said things. Doctors sent home paperwork, dammit.
“I had another bleed. This one’s bad.”
His belly hit the chair. Just fell. Right there under his butt. Blam.
“How bad, baby?” He needed to know what Trey knew.
“Right now there’s no light in the one eye, and the other one is mostly red.”
“Shit.” He reached out, but had to think better of it and use his other hand. The one that hadn’t gotten cut by flying glass because he’d thrown it over Trey to hold him in place and not let him hit his damn head on the dash.
“It’s been bothering me. This just was…the last straw.”
The last…
“Babe. You can’t just not tell me things like this.”
“I am telling you.”
West pushed out a breath. “No. I mean while it’s happening. That it’s been bothering you.”
“And what were you going to do? Coddle me?” Trey snapped.
“No. I don’t know if I could have done anything but see if you wanted to go to the doctor, but I would have known, at least. I could have helped make it easier maybe.”
“Maybe. Maybe you would have made it worse. I don’t want to be treated like glass, and I’m fucking sick of doctors.”
He stared down at the bandages on his hand, because they were turning red. He’d been clenching, and he’d probably popped a stitch. He needed to hunt up his superglue. “Babe?—”
“No! Look, West, you have a concussion. You could have been killed. We can do all the recriminations tomorrow, but tonight could you just— Just not yell at me? Love on me? Take me to bed and just be all bruised and tired with me?”
“Yeah. I reckon I can do that. I think I need to re-wrap my hand.”
“Your hand?” Trey frowned. “You never told me what happened to your hand.”
“Just some flying glass.”
“This hand?” Trey turned over the hand West had put on his, tracing it with his fingers.
“No, the other one. Gentle. Here, feel.” West held it out. He had to give Trey the same courtesy he wanted from Trey, right?
“That’s a big bandage.” Trey frowned. “And it’s wet.”
“Yeah, I think I popped a stitch.”
“West!”
“I’ll just superglue it. I’m not going out again tonight.”
“I can get Mal to come back up and…”
“Nah. I got it, baby.”
“You’re maddening. It’s your dominant hand.”
“Well, you could hold it shut for me. Not like you can see the blood.”
“I am going to kick your ass.”
West chuckled. “Just don’t hit me in the head. I don’t think I can take another blow there tonight.”
Trey chuckled. “No, I don’t suppose that’d be a good idea. Come on, let’s get you fixed up. I don’t believe you’ve popped a stitch. You’ve got to be careful.”
West arched an eyebrow. “Hello, Pot. I’m Kettle.”
Trey’s lips tightened. “Don’t fuck with me, man.”
“I’m not fighting with you. I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
What for? Christ, for everything, West thought. “For wrecking the truck. For missing the family meeting. For hitting my head.” He shook his head in frustration, and, Christ, it hurt. “That your eyes got worse.”
“Yeah, me too.” Trey closed his eyes and exhaled, and for a second, West could see the hurt, the barely contained rage, and he wanted to tell Trey to just let it out, to let him have it.
But he couldn’t.
He wasn’t sure that he was strong enough to carry that. Not today.
Not with the weight of everything else.
And, like West knew it would, the moment passed, and Trey was himself—Mr. Super Capable. “Come on cowboy, let’s go get your hand fixed up. I know where the superglue lives, and together we’ll just squirt some in there. Burns like hell, but it works.”
“You got it.” He rose, following Trey to their room.
West was so damn ready for today to be tomorrow.
Trey couldn’t sleep.
He listened to West for what had to be hours, his soft breaths going in and out. Not quite snores, but proof that the cowboy was deep asleep. And still alive.
Then he wandered to check on the kids, listening to their little sniffling noises. He loved the way that Zoe threw the covers off and then pulled them up and then threw them off and then pulled them up, over and over. Then there was Noah, who slept on his belly, his butt up in the air, breath muffled by the pillows.
He just wasn’t sure what to do.
His problem wasn’t even practical. He had money, a nanny, a driver a foreman. He had a dog guy.
A cook.
A housekeeper.
That wasn’t it.
His worry was the sheer weight of what to do for the next forty years. Was he going to sit there the rest of his life and listen?
Just listen to the sounds of people living around him, time and space spinning without him seeing anything else.
It wasn’t like he didn’t know this had been coming. He knew this was an inevitability. He had been young for hemorrhages to start, so there was no way he was going to make it to good old age with his sight.
But it was too early.
It was too soon and the thought that now his life was going to be passive, that he was waiting.
Waiting for someone to take him somewhere.
Waiting for something in the world to happen so he could interact with it.
Waiting to listen.
Waiting to hear.
It seemed like it was a weight he just was too small to carry.
It didn’t matter though. It was his weight, and God didn’t care if he was too small or not.
In fact, this mess kind of worked out for a lot of people.
West got to run the big ranch and got a lover out of the thing. West was getting exactly what he’d always wanted. The kids got a dad, just what they needed. Hell, think of all the extra people he got to hire. Even Little Nate. He wanted to train dogs for disabled people. Well, bingo-bango.
Trey was the one who was losing, and there wasn’t a goddamn thing to be done about it.
Trey had to suck it up and cope and be grateful, because it could be worse.
He was lucky, right? Blessed?
He sank down onto the hallway floor, his legs turning to jelly. He found himself kind of drawing up his knees and holding himself upright, cheek resting on his knee, hands clasped around his shins.
Man, he could host an amazing pity party.
Go him.
He’d stay here for a minute and then get his ass up and he’d be done with this shit. He didn’t have time for it.
God knew nobody else did either. People got handed their lot in life, and that was that.
Goodie.
“Trey?” West’s voice came right out of the dark, footsteps padding over to him. “You need anything?”
He sighed, trying to stifle it. “Your head hurting?”
“I rolled over on my hand. Where’d you go?” He could hear the concern in West’s voice, could hear the questions he didn’t ask.
“I—I was just. Shit, man, I don’t know. What do you need for your hand?” He didn’t think he could help. He thought he was pretty much stuck here on the floor, folded up like he was origami. He was never going to get used to opening his eyes and having it not make a difference. “I think my butt is asleep.”
“That’s because you’re on the floor and the floor is cold. It’s like three thirty in the morning. Come back to bed. Quit just sitting there and worrying.”
“I’m not worrying.” He was stressing and raging and fussing and…whining. He was doing a lot of whining. He wanted to though, and fuck anybody who said he couldn’t.
West cleared his throat. “Right. Well. Whatever it is that you’re not doing, could you not do it in bed where it’s warm?”
Trey tried to parse that sentence out. It just wasn’t working for him.
“Come on, Trey. My hand hurts. I can’t just pick you up. Please just come back to bed. We’ll start dealing with the shit we have to deal with in the morning.” West sounded so put-upon, as if he could not believe all this shit was happening to him right now.
Trey got that, like on a bone-deep level. “Can I have your good hand at least? I was serious. My butt is asleep.”
He held up his hand, and West grabbed it, hauling him to his feet and keeping him from falling down because his legs didn’t want to hold him.
“You don’t have to sleep. We’ll turn on the radio. We could turn on an audiobook, we can turn on the TV and you can listen. I’ll even stay awake if you need me to.”
“Don’t lie.”
“I’m not lying. We went to bed at like eight thirty. I’ve had seven hours of sleep, which is, to be honest, more sleep than I usually get in a night, so we could just sit up and talk.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so. Let’s not talk.”
West started wheezing and it took him a second to figure out that he was laughing. Like hard, wild, hysterical laughter.
“West! You’ll wake the kids up.”
Trey started moving them back down the hall because West couldn’t even answer him. He wasn’t one hundred percent sure the fine son of a bitch was breathing, except for the wild whooping sounds he was making every time he tried to inhale.
“I swear to God, you wake those kids up, and I’m gonna beat you within an inch of your life. Lisa’s not on the clock until eight. That’s very many hours from now. I haven’t been to sleep yet.”
He was starting to giggle, which was ridiculous because he was not amused. He was angry.
Not amused. Mad.
Like deeply pissed off, and he was not laughing. Whatever sound that was coming out of his mouth was absolutely not laughter.
West managed to get the door shut, and they both made it to the bed, plopping down and rolling. The sounds just ringing out and filling the air.
West slapped his good hand on something. His leg. The bed. Something. It sounded loud, even with them laughing like loons.
“West. Stop. I can’t breathe…”
“Uh-huh.” West snorted, the sound like something out of a Minion movie. Then he wailed, laughing harder.
They clung to one another, and whether it was comfort or happiness—it didn’t matter. He didn’t care. It was enough.
Like West said. They could deal with the rest of their shit tomorrow.