72. Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Two
Jordan
Thirty minutes have become forty-five.
Forty-six.
Take a breath. He’s not disappearing.
I force myself to do just that and take another lap around my apartment.
I’ve already put away all the clothes I dug out, just in case the bed is needed. Thrown on an old Goo Goo Dolls shirt. Cleared the dishes from last night out of the sink.
Made sure there was another box of mac in the pantry.
Forty-eight minutes.
I check Cookie’s food for the thousandth time, and she eyes me warily as I snatch her water bowl and end up spilling half of it because it’s fuller than I realized.
Both dishes are sparkly clean and full at the fifty-nine-minute mark.
“Calm the fuck down, Jordan,” I mumble aloud and suck in a breath. “He said he was coming.”
Cookie comes to me when I flop on the couch and rub my hands down my thighs. They’re damp and tingling and my stomach is in knots.
Why is he not here yet?
I lick my lips. Scrub my face.
“God, I’m so nervous,” I tell my cat. “Am I really doing this?”
I should have picked him up like I’d planned.
The cat stares at me, which is not unusual, but then she hops up in my lap and her pupils dilate.
It’s been too long.
I pet her head, but she dips out of my reach and nails me with another look.
Blinking, I watch her pupils flex again and my stomach sinks.
“Something’s wrong.”
My feet are already under me when she jumps away, my shaking hands grabbing at my keys and knocking them off the hook.
I curse and dip to snatch them from the floor when the ring of my phone pierces the silence.
It’s loaded and heavy and I’m trembling when I look at the screen to see Peach’s name flash.
There’s no picture this time.
No blinding grin or gorgeous guy.
Just a scrolling name that screaming all the things I feel deep in my gut.
Nonono.
It takes two tries to swipe the answer button far enough to engage it and my apartment is immediately filled with the wail of sirens.
“Mr. Kauffman?”
Suddenly, I’m no longer in my own space, but in Mac’s instead. Seeing the slump of his shoulders at the claim of best friends first with only Mark Wahlberg as my witness.
On the outside of a photoshoot where I saw Mac as something more for the first time. Something fierce. Something … devastating.
But then I’m in the rain, watching as he lets the storm hide the hurt in his eyes.
A treehouse surrounds us as he tells me he loves me, and I believe him.
I don’t know how to say it back.
The hotel room where he told me to leave his life.
Then my gym. The dance studio I never found a purpose for, only to find Mac having taken up the space with his own thing. Asking him out with a flutter to my stomach and a hope brightening my chest.
Come over.
It all comes cascading down like shattered glass.
“Mr. Kauffman? This is Officer Smith. There’s been an accident, and you were listed as an emergency contact.”
This is all my fault.
“Where are you taking them?” I all but growl with my gut somewhere near my knees.
“Sir, they’re en route to the hospital.”
They.
My lungs freeze, my heart stopping, but my feet are moving and I’m running.
Driving.
Running again, this time over pavement then squeaking linoleum.
The walls are whitewashed, but all I see is a club bathroom.
Except this time … I’m the one on the verge of hyperventilating.
I should have never told him to come over.
My chest burns as I pass a nurse’s station, their protests falling on ringing ears.
Carts and gurneys wing by, but I don’t stop.
Room after room flashing by, the boulder in my gut gaining momentum in its sink to my feet with each one that doesn’t hold my drummer.
“Mac!”
Another room. Another sickly patient that I disturb.
“ Mi Vida .”
My steps slow like I’m rushing through cement sludge with each second that ticks by, and I don’t see Mac. Or Peach. Or any-fucking-one that I recognize.
My chest hurts .
This can’t be it.
Memories I’ve spent years and years building defenses against rush over me.
The burning of my skin.
The scent of charred everything .
The screams.
“Jordan!”
I whip around in slow motion at the sound of my name and the world tilts when another bodyguard rushes to me.
“Lugh. Lugh . Where are they?”
The larger man huffs through a tight jaw and pushes me back around. “Prepping for surgery.”
My heart sinks even farther.
“Mac?”
He shakes his head, telling me he doesn’t know, at the same time an alarm rings over the PA system.
A sound we both trained to but hoped to fucking God we’d never hear.
Someone’s coding.
And we fucking run.