Chapter 25 Nineteen Days
nineteen days
Preston Darling
I woke to the sound of a monotonous, obnoxious beeping. I couldn’t see anything, but there was a throbbing pain in one side of my face like my skin was being slowly eaten away by corrosive acid.
I groped around, disoriented.
“Oh my god,” said a high, breathy female voice. “Mom, Dad! He’s awake.”
“Lindsey?” I asked, reaching for my face, wanting to get the thing off me that was eating my flesh and blinding my eyes. Something pulled tight in the back of my hand, and pain throbbed there, too. A needle. I was hooked up to a needle, and the beeping…
I was in a hospital.
“It’s okay,” Lindsey said, but I could hear her crying, her breath hitching. “Preston, you’re alive.”
I groped for her hand, some deep, primal terror gripping my body. I didn’t want to know what had happened.
I heard the scuff of shoes, and a soft, cool hand closed around mine.
“Oh, thank god,” my mother’s voice said. “We’ve been praying night and day for you, baby. Even had the pastor come down… The whole congregation’s had you on their prayer list…”
“Don’t baby him,” Dad snapped. “He might know something that could help us with Devlin.”
“What?” I asked, so disconcerted I couldn’t put it together. My head was throbbing harder, and it felt heavy and thick with pain and some kind of bandages…
Devlin… We’d left the annual New Year’s Eve party at Grampa’s when we heard the Dolces were attacking Darling houses. We had to defend Grampa’s house, the property itself but mostly the people there. We’d gone out to stop them, met them on the road, and fought. Then we’d gone back to the party and—
“Your cousin’s missing,” Dad said.
“It’s the Dolces,” I mumbled through the pain. “It has to be the Dolces.”
“Their daughter’s missing too,” Mom said softly, squeezing my hand.
“Then she lured him somewhere…”
“They found his car,” Mom said. She started crying softly.
“Lindsey, hon, why don’t you take your mother down and get her a Diet Coke,” Dad said. “Stretch your legs a bit. We’ve all been in this room too long.”
“Okay, Daddy,” Lindsey said.
“Here’s my card, stop by the gift shop and get something for your brother too,” Dad said.
I listened to their footsteps, my head throbbing so hard I had to clench my teeth so I didn’t scream.
“I can’t believe you let them get the best of you,” Dad seethed the moment the door settled closed behind them with a soft thump.
“Our family just lost the chance to secure the future mayoral seat because you couldn’t hold off a couple pretty boys from the city, probably never got their hands dirty in their lives. ”
I tried to push up on the bed, but Dad’s hand flattened on my chest. “I want you to tell me exactly what happened that night,” he said. “Colt’s been worthless. You better hope you have a story that’ll bring Devlin home.”
I swallowed, a panicky, dizzy feeling swimming through me, like I was submerged in water, swaying with the currents. “I—I don’t know,” I said. “What happened to me? How long was I here?”
“You lost an eye,” he said. “And a cousin, if you can’t give us the information leading us to him.”
I went through the night painstakingly, painfully, from the moment we picked up the hooker to the moment we left Devlin with Crystal at the river where we met the Dolces to fight that night.
“Did he say where he was going?” Dad asks.
“No,” I said. “He hugged me, and he said goodbye.”
“You didn’t ask where they were going?” Dad thunders. “You left him there?”
“He had a car,” I protested weakly. It hadn’t sunk in yet, that he was gone.
A fist lodged in my gut. I hadn’t had time to prepare, to tense up. I couldn’t see anything. I was so out of it, I probably wouldn’t even have blocked him if I could.
“You cowardly son of a bitch,” Dad raged, sinking his fist into my ribs this time. “This is your fault. You could have stopped this. You could have beaten them if you fought like a man instead of crying and kissing like a little pussy boy. I taught you better than that. What made you like this?”
The monitors beside the bed were going crazy. I held my hands up, blindly defending myself from a man who had two arms, two eyes, that still worked. He landed one more blow before the door burst open and someone rushed in, the room full of bustling footsteps and voices.
“Don’t fix his face,” Dad snarled at them. “He’s not worth the expense.”
That was the last thing I heard before a strange kind of peace descended, numbness and the constant bleep of the monitor.
*
I woke fully and could see for the first time after a long, painful blur where everything was a jumble of waking and sleeping, being fed, taken to the bathroom, doctors and nurses, my mother and sister, so many voices and noises.
I didn’t know how long I’d been there. It felt like months.
The pain wasn’t as bad, and I felt clear headed.
One of my eyes fluttered open, and I saw Dolly Beckett lying on the pillow just inches from me.
I wanted to believe it was a dream, but she was crying.
“Dolly,” I said, my voice raspy from disuse.
“Preston,” she said, scooting closer. “Oh my god, Preston…”
“Is Devlin back?” I asked.
She shook her head, tears still falling. “No, Preston. I’m sorry. He’s dead.”
“No,” I said. “No, he can’t be. He said goodbye…”
The stinging started behind my nose, the one I hadn’t felt since the shame after I took her virginity. I took that from her, from Devlin. I’d never told him, and now I never would. I hadn’t just stolen the golden boy’s girl. I’d killed him. That’s what Dad said.
This is your fault.
What made you like this?
I hadn’t answered. I’d been lost in drugs, in pain, and he hadn’t come back. If he had, I would have had the answer for him.
You did, Dad.
Dolly’s face crumpled, and she buried it in my shoulder and sobbed. “He’s gone,” she said. “They’re both gone. They had search parties, but no one found them. They dragged their car out of the river. They said the water rose too fast. They didn’t make it out in time. I’m so sorry, Preston.”
I held her, and I waited for the tears to come for me, but they didn’t. Maybe I was in shock. Maybe it only worked if you had two eyes.
Dolly fell asleep, but I lay there, trying to put it together, to come to terms with what had happened, how fast everything had changed.
The end of the year was cursed, from October onwards.
Each year, it got worse than the last. I didn’t know how I could make it through another winter. The only thing worse was death.
When Dolly woke, I stroked her hair back from her cheek and kissed it.
It was dark outside the small window, but the nurses had checked and then tiptoed away, not having the heart to wake the sleeping girl in my arms. I still had bandages on my face, but only the injured part.
I saw Dolly’s eyes move to them and then away.
“How you doing?” I whispered.
“I’ve been better,” she said with a weak laugh.
“What’s it been like at school?” I asked.
“Weird,” she said. “Tense. Everyone’s been pretty shocked about the disappearance, and there were search parties after school for a while… Devlin’s gone, and you were gone. It’s just Colt and Mabel. I think she might be dating Baron Dolce, but it’s hard to tell with her.”
“What?” I asked, surprised. I’d seen him chasing her around a couple times, but Mabel wasn’t into the social scene, and she’d never had a boyfriend that anyone knew of.
In fact, she tried so hard to be invisible and stay out of the spotlight that even I forgot she existed sometimes, though she lived with Colt.
When we went to his house, she stayed in her room.
Unless it was a mandatory Darling event, she never showed her face around town, and at school, she preferred to be a nobody even though she could easily have been the most popular girl in school.
Still, she was my cousin, and I felt a certain protective instinct. Warning bells went off the moment I heard that Baron was still pursuing her. Apparently it wasn’t enough to send my other cousin to the grave. They seemed to be intent on getting rid of all of us.
“How long have a I been here?” I asked.
“Almost a month,” Dolly said. “You almost died. They put you in a medically induced coma for nineteen days, Preston. I thought...”
Her voice cracked, and her fingers curled into the fabric of my hospital gown.
“What?” I pressed, stroking her cheek.
“I thought I’d lost you too,” she sniffles.
“Never,” I promise. “You’ll never lose me, Doll. I’ve always loved you, and that will never change.”
Maybe it was the drugs making me bold, taking away the filter, making it so I couldn’t think straight and the truth came pouring out.
“Preston…”
“Stop pushing me away,” I whispered, leaning in to kiss her tearstained cheek. “It was always meant to be us, Doll. I’ve always been yours, even when I couldn’t have you. And you’ve always been mine, since the moment I laid eyes on you. Before I learned to walk, I knew you were my forever.”
“Do you mean that?” she asked, her big blue eyes shiny with tears and hope, as if she’d been waiting to hear that all her life.
I kissed her again, ignoring the bulky bandages over my eye and cheek.
“You were always meant to be mine,” I whispered, sliding a hand behind her neck.
“That’s why I never dated anyone, so I could be ready when you were.
It’s why I never woke Devlin up that night, and I went to the treehouse and met you instead.
Even though I let you go, let you have time to date around until you figured out what you wanted, I wanted to be your first. I knew someday you’d come back to me, that you’d love me in your own time.
I knew you’d choose me if I waited long enough. ”
She stilled, something flickering over her gaze. “You did what?”
“I knew it would be us in the end,” I said. “That you’d see you loved me and that I love you in a way no one else ever has because I know you in a way no one else can.”