Chapter 4
Four
ATLAS
“You have a visitor.”
I’d been in and out of consciousness for days. Or was it weeks? I’d lost track somewhere around the fourth surgery to put pins in my spine to stabilize the column so it would stop putting pressure on my spinal cord and hopefully bring back feeling in my legs.
It hadn’t. Yet. But I had movement, so there was hope.
I stared up at the nurse, Perlah, who had been my morning shift nurse for the last several days in a row. She was frowning, which wasn’t a good sign.
“Who is it?” My hopes were a little too high. I knew it wasn’t my brother or his wife because no one bothered announcing them anymore. And I doubted very much it was anyone from the band, considering there hadn’t been a single call or text from anyone—not even my manager or my agent.
I wanted to believe the label wasn’t full of sociopaths that would come threaten me legally while I was in the middle of, you know, not dying, but I didn’t have a lot of hope for that.
At best, I could fantasize about them feeling so sorry for me, they let me out of the contract without paying a shitload of fines.
But I didn’t want it to be any of them either. There was only one person I wanted to see. Only one person who sparked a sort of desperation in my bones that I wasn’t used to feeling. Not since I was young and had hope that love could be anything other than pain.
I couldn’t remember his name, but I remembered his face. And his gorgeous golden-brown eyes and the freckles on his cheeks. I remembered his sweeping brown hair and glasses, who had spent what felt like hours talking me away from going into the light.
Not that I’d seen a light. Or if I did, I couldn’t remember that either.
The shock from my injury had overwhelmed me in the ambulance, but I remembered hands holding mine, and a soft voice, a quiet laugh, and something about an island you could sail to from Savannah.
Though there was a very good chance in the haze of my pain, punctured lung, and internal bleeding, I’d made that all up.
I realized Perlah was waiting for an answer. “Um…yeah. Send whoever in.” It took until she was gone for me to figure out she hadn’t actually told me who was here to see me.
My heart beat hard enough to make my monitor ding for a second. I wanted to sit up a bit more, but I also had a fractured wrist, so trying to maneuver my lifeless legs into doing anything at my will was next to impossible.
I managed to wriggle my toes to remind myself that all hope wasn’t lost, in spite of it feeling like they were buried in six feet of wet beach sand.
It was still progress.
The door opened, and I blinked across the room. For a moment, I thought maybe they’d given me too much morphine. I had to be hallucinating because there was not a chance in fucking hell that Raleigh was swaggering into my hospital room, holding up a phone and wearing a face of absolute pity.
“Oh, fuck no. Tell me you’re not on live,” I rasped.
He clicked his tongue. “Baby—”
“I will sue the absolute fuck out of you,” I warned. “I’m not even joking.”
His eyes narrowed, but eventually, he put the phone down to his side. When I lifted a brow, Raleigh rolled his eyes and shoved it into his pocket. “It wasn’t on live anyway. This was for my Instagram, but I’ll delete it. Happy?”
“Not really. What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I heard about the accident, baby,” he simpered.
He walked over to the bed and tried to take my hand, but I wrenched it back from him, wishing I could get up and shove him out the door.
But all my legs did was give a feeble twitch.
This was not going to be some movie miracle where rage healed me, apparently.
His eyes flickered to my legs, then back up to my face. “How bad is it?”
“You caught me just as I was about to do a fucking Irish jig.” I swallowed heavily. “Seriously, Raleigh, what do you want?”
“There are things we need to talk about, babe. And I just—”
“Don’t call me that, okay?” God, I was so tired. “The last conversation we had face-to-face was you telling me about the tight twink ass you were fucking. We’re not going to pretend like all of that never happened.”
“Of course not.” He stroked a hand up my arm, and I fought the urge to punch him. It would have been weak and worthless though, and I wasn’t in the mood to embarrass myself further. All he had to do was tug the blanket down to see all the scars on my body, and the tube up my dick, and yeah…
Hard pass on all that.
“Look,” he said, his voice losing some of the sugar-sweet bullshit he usually used to get his way. He sank into the chair Tollin had left beside the bed. “Things were rotten before you left.”
“And?”
“And I think we both know that this is probably a sign.”
The room looked tinged with red suddenly. My blood pressure was skyrocketing. I took several breaths until my machine stopped dinging at me. “A sign of what?”
“That it’s time to move on. I have some papers being sent your way. No financial cost to you,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender. “But while we were in New York, we met this amazing man who fits the new sound we’re going for perfectly.”
It took my brain a moment to catch up, what with the painkiller haze and the lingering shock of nearly dying. “You’re…you’re here to kick me out of the band?”
He laughed softly. “Darling, please don’t be upset. I mean, this was a very dramatic way to do it, but you and I both know you were looking for an out. Of course, you didn’t have to get into a car crash to get my attention, but—”
I managed to sit up a little, grasping the railing with my one good limb. “Did you just imply that I paralyzed myself as a way of getting out of my fucking contract?”
“Para—oh.” He froze. Shit. He didn’t know.
When he spoke again, his voice was very small.
“I didn’t know it was that bad. I thought…they said broken bones.
” He lifted a hand to his mouth, and I noticed it was shaking.
“They said something about a lung puncture, and—” His breath left his chest in a tremble. “Is it permanent?”
I swallowed, trying not to take my tongue down with the mouthful of spit I had, and my rage settled into a quiet simmer.
I couldn’t hate him for the information he didn’t have.
Not that it changed things. “I’ve regained some movement in my feet, but I don’t know if I’ll walk again.
But this isn’t me acting out, you absolute fuck-stick.
This isn’t a tantrum I threw because I finally got tired of you cheating. ”
“Open relationship, darling—”
“That was you,” I snapped. Fuck, my heart was beating too hard, and my hurt lung was struggling to take in a full breath.
“You opened it up without my consent so you could do whatever the fuck you wanted and absolve yourself of any wrongdoing. But I don’t care.
Live with those sins, die with them, whatever makes you happy.
I’m not sad we’re over, and I’m more than willing to leave the band so you can follow your new sound. ”
He stood up and looked down at me. “So. Whatever happens with…this”—he waved his hand up and down my body—“I guess my decision is for the best. Just tell me you’ll sign the papers and maybe consider a quiet retirement. You’ll still get plenty of residuals, and if I remember right, you did invest.”
I blinked at him. “Retire?”
“I’m only saying that I’m not sure the stage is fit for, you know”—he dropped his voice to a whisper—“wheelchairs.”
I knew what he was doing. He was uncomfortable. He felt a level of guilt his shriveled heart was incapable of coping with, so he was lashing out. He was trying to hurt my insides as much as I was hurt on the outside so I would focus on that and not on him being, well.
Him.
I almost laughed as he gave my cheek a pat, then turned and walked off without waiting for me to say another word. Not that I would have. This felt like a giant cosmic joke. I flopped back against my pillow and covered my face with my good hand, trying not to dissolve into an endless scream.
Why was I in this bed and that motherfucker was strolling away?
He got to go home, turn off his feelings, dick down his walking glitter-mesh fuck toy, and allow himself to forget me.
He’d think of me sometimes—randomly. He’d see the disabled section of the concert hall—men with canes and wheelchairs—and he’d wonder, for a single moment, how I was doing.
And then he’d forget again, because he wouldn’t really care. Not the way someone else might.
That was who Raleigh was. That was the man I had wasted so much time on.
“That was the boyfriend?” Perlah said, walking back into the room. “Honey, you know you can do better, right?”
I burst into laughter, which quickly turned into tears. Fuck, I hated crying over that piece of shit. In the weeks between me leaving him on the road and the accident, I’d only cried over the time wasted on him. I didn’t miss him. I no longer wanted him.
So why did I feel like this?
“Oh, honey.” She walked up and brushed her hand through my hair. It reminded me a little of the guy from the ambulance, but not comforting in the same way. “Don’t let him get to you. He doesn’t deserve you.”
“I know.”
Swiping my hand over my face, I shook my head. My lungs ached, and every fiber of my being wanted to get up out of this fucking bed. But I wasn’t allowed yet. My spine was still healing, and I wasn’t going to take any risks in making all of this worse, killing my chance of making any of it better.
“He’s my ex,” I finally told her. “We worked together before it ended.”
“At an office?”
It was kind of nice she had no idea who I was. “We have—we had—a band.”
“Oh. A nice band?”
I shrugged and tried to hide my smile. I really liked her. “It was nice at first, but it got kind of toxic over the years, and I was ready to move on.”