Chapter 4 #2
“What instrument did you play? No, wait, don’t tell me.
” She lifted my hand and examined my fingers.
“Guitar?” I nodded, and she grinned. “I always get it right. And singer too, yes? You have such a nice voice. Like…one of those piano singers who smoke too many cigarettes. Though you really shouldn’t be smoking. ”
I huffed a tiny laugh. “I don’t smoke. My manager would kill me.
” Fuck, my manager. Was Christopher anything to me now?
I hadn’t spoken to him since I left, but…
god. This was going to get complicated. There were probably a dozen texts and emails waiting for me on my phone, but my phone had been smashed in the accident, and Tollin was waiting on a new one to get here.
So much had been lost, but it was hard to mourn any of it.
Right now, the only thing that mattered was finding out how much my body was willing to heal. And if I was going to dig around in my past, it was going to be for the angel who saved me. The one who’d held me and kept me not only from falling to pieces, but from literally giving up my ghost.
There had to be a way to solve that mystery. He was an EMT, so clearly, he came to the hospitals in the city, right?
“Perlah?”
She was checking my IV, but she hummed as she looked up at my face.
“Is there a way to find out who brought me in the night of my accident?” I hadn’t been brave enough to ask before now, but fuck it. After seeing Raleigh, I needed something to hold on to.
She frowned. “It was an ambulance, honey.”
“No, I—I know that. I meant the specific EMT.”
“Oh. I don’t have that kind of information. I wasn’t on shift when you were brought in, and that was weeks ago.”
“There must be some kind of log, or—” I stopped when she pulled a face. “Right. That’s probably not appropriate, is it?” I rubbed at my eyes, feeling defeated. “I just want him to know that what he did saved my life.”
“The EMTs always know that you’re grateful for their help.” She gave my thigh a pat.
And I was sure that was true. Really. But the way I felt was more than that.
He—the nameless brown-eyed man with the constellation of freckles, who loved a tiny island and ancient history—was more than a stranger.
I could remember the timber of his voice, and I remembered there was a sadness to him that I’d wanted to soothe, but I could barely speak then.
Fighting for my life had nearly ruined me, and I had no idea what he thought about me now—if he thought about me at all.
I startled when there was a knock on my door.
“That’s going to be your brother,” Perlah said. “I’ll leave you two alone for a while. Just hit the button if you need more medication.”
She was gone after that, and a moment later, Tollin appeared. He was holding my four-year-old niece on his shoulder, who was dead asleep.
“Why do you look like you’re trying to take a giant shit?”
I rolled my eyes. “I can’t feel my ass. I don’t know if I’m trying to take a giant shit.”
His face did that thing—that weird, complicated thing it always did whenever the reality of my situation was brought up.
But I wasn’t going to sugarcoat it for him because I couldn’t sugarcoat it for myself.
I still had no idea how much feeling and movement I would regain once the swelling in my spine went down, but I needed to be prepared to accept every reality.
There was a chance I would walk again.
And there was a chance I wouldn’t.
“So, I might be losing my mind,” Tollin said as he dropped into his chair and leaned back so Sadie could keep sleeping, “but I swear I saw fuck-face in the parking lot.”
“Raleigh,” I said. “Yeah. He was here.”
His head dropped back. “Oh my god, it was him? What the actual hell did he want?”
I licked my lips, not sure if I wanted to tell him or not. Tollin was nothing like me. He’d spent his high school years focused on weight training. He’d played football in college. He coached now, but when he wasn’t bench-pressing weights, he was bench-pressing his kids or his wife.
He was kind, and he was anxious, but he was also protective. He never took risks, but he had a hair trigger for anyone on his shit list, which meant he would come to blows if someone threatened the person he loved—whether that was blood family or the family he’d created.
Raleigh was at the top of Tollin’s list now, and probably always would be. And as satisfying as it would be to have my brother beat the shit out of him, I didn’t need him throwing his daughter on my bed and going after Raleigh and ending up with an assault charge.
“Atlas,” he pressed.
“I’ll tell you, but you have to swear you won’t do anything rash.”
He stared at me, eyes narrow. “Fine. I swear.”
I knew he wasn’t lying. He wouldn’t put himself in danger of jail time because he was a dad now, and he wasn’t going to spend time away from his wife or his kids.
I took a breath, then shrugged. “He came here to let me know the band was replacing me. He said that the label was going to be sending me a bunch of papers to sign to terminate my contract.” I left out the shitty stuff he’d said about wheelchairs and the stage, and how he’d tried to make me feel like this was all my fault—like I’d done it on purpose.
I was already struggling to accept my reality. I didn’t need to replay that dickhead’s words.
Tollin grimaced. “I swear to god, I am going to snap the neck off his guitar and shove it so far up his ass—”
“You’re going to wake up Sadie,” I told him when his voice began to rise.
He took a breath, but his cheeks were mottled pink with his anger. “Did you tell him to get fucked?”
“I told him to leave. I don’t care if they want to replace me. I was already fucking done with them.”
He adjusted Sadie, then leaned forward toward me.
“You need to care. Most of those songs—the ones that made his punk ass rich enough and bold enough to think he could step out on you—came from your brain. From your hands. You’re not walking away with nothing.
If they want you out, they’d better buy you out. ”
I doubted there was a disability clause in my contract that would shut me out without compensation, and Tollin had a point. They were my songs. I had proof they were my songs. If they wanted to keep them, I was going to make it painful on their wallets.
The band could have the sound. It wasn’t mine anymore. It had never really felt like me anyway. But if they wanted to hurt me, they’d see that it didn’t matter what condition my body was in, I would hurt them back.
“Look, I gotta get this kid home, but don’t sign anything until tomorrow. And call your lawyer.”
That was the last thing I wanted to do, but I hadn’t spoken to anyone since I’d woken up from the accident. Tollin had been handling my agent and my PA, but I was going to have to nut up and do something now that I was more cognizant.
Even if I couldn’t feel my damn nuts at the moment.
I fought the urge to reach down and touch them and my dick to make sure they were still in place. I was doing that a lot—feeling around my stomach, my ass, my knees. Everything was in place. It was just…detached, all the nerves misfiring, leaving me mostly numb.
The way my toes were burning now, though, was a nice reminder that they still existed. And I was definitely going to need something for the pain as the burning started to get worse.
“I’ll see you after work tomorrow?”
Tollin stood up and looked down at me. “Maybe I should take the day off and—”
“No.” I had my first PT session in the morning. I didn’t want him there for that. I knew I was going to cry. “I need to do some of this by myself, okay?”
“Alright. But you’re still moving out of that loft, right? And in with us? I can give Lyria the go-ahead to start the ramp build for the house? We got an email from the contractor, and they’re ready to start next week.”
My stomach hurt as I faced yet another consequence of my accident. I didn’t want to live with him. I wanted to live alone. I didn’t want to sacrifice independence because someone made a bad decision and took me along with them.
But what else could I do right now?
I took a breath and nodded.
I reminded myself that whatever happened now—whatever I was giving up—it wouldn’t be forever.
If I became a full-time wheelchair user, that didn’t mean I had to live with my brother and let him wipe my ass and spoon-feed me soup or whatever he was thinking I needed him for.
I could learn to live on my own. When I was done with taking Raleigh to the cleaners, and with the investments I currently had, I could build myself a little sanctuary and figure out who I was now that my past had been burned away.
I just needed time, and for the moment, time was all I had.