Chapter 3 #2
The cold that moves down my spine has nothing to do with temperature.
The log.
Ridge has been under that log for three months.
The light flickers again.
“It was fun, Dr. Bennett.” He smiles again, before he’s…
Gone.
The rest of the paralysis lifts all at once the moment he vanishes. I’m on my feet so fast my chair scrapes along the floor and hits the wall behind me. Two strides and I’m at the foot of the bed, hands already reaching for her.
“Lennon.” Her name breaks out of me, and I don’t recognize my voice, but she doesn’t move at the sound.
Of course, she doesn’t move.
My hands hover, like I don’t know where to touch her without breaking something, before I grip the footboard instead, the wood biting into my palms.
“Darling. Come back to me.”
Her hand is still open on the pillow beside her head, like she just let go.
I drag in a breath that doesn’t fill my lungs and look at my watch.
4:44 a.m.
My gaze snaps back to her face, then to my wrist again.
4:44 a.m.
Fuck.
“Fuck!”
I hit the side table blindly, searching for something, anything, my hand closing around Alice in Wonderland. I don’t remember deciding to pick it up, but the next thing I know, I’m throwing it across the room.
It cracks loudly in the silence as it slams into the wall where This Man just stood, the pages splitting open as it drops to the floor.
That didn’t help.
Nothing is helping.
Lennon is unconscious, Ridge is living his worst nightmare because of me, and I’m throwing books at walls.
“Please.” I step toward Lennon and brace a hand on the mattress. My other hand hovers over her wrist for a moment before I finally let myself touch her.
Warm, she’s still warm.
“Please,” I repeat. “Don’t do this. You don’t get to just…”
Leave me.
I press my thumb to her pulse like I can anchor her here by force alone.
Tether her to me.
But I don’t know how.
I look at Tessa, at the same stillness and absence, and how she isn’t fighting for breath anymore, when Mrs. Vaughn opens the door.
Her gaze is not going to her daughter in stasis, or the love of my life, but to the book, still open on the floor.
She takes that in for a beat, then moves her gaze to me, and the sequence is visible on her face with confusion, recalibration, and then something that is not quite alarm but is close to it.
Nora Vaughn does not get alarmed easily, but she is looking at me with an expression I don’t usually receive, and I become aware, slowly, that my face is wet.
I press the back of my hand to my cheek.
Oh.
“What’s going on?” She walks toward me, not rushing but not hesitating either, as her gaze sweeps over Tessa, then Lennon, before coming back to me.
“Paul, are you all right?” She’s still in her dressing gown with a crease on her cheek that says she was asleep until she heard something.
The book, probably. Or the sound I made before it.
“No,” I hear myself admit.
She’s beside me then. We look at the bed, at the two of them still under the too-bright ceiling light.
Her gaze stays on Lennon before it finds mine. “What is she to you?”
“Everything.”
Mrs. Vaughn is quiet for a moment, then she nods slowly, as if receiving information she already suspected. She moves to the other side of the bed and methodically straightens the blankets. “You haven’t left her side in three days.”
“I haven’t.”
“You can, you know,” she says gently. “Go home. Sleep in a real bed. Have a shower. I’m here. I’ll give Lennon the same care I give Tessa.”
She already is. The tube, the schedule, the monitoring. Lennon is better off here than anywhere else, which is the only reason she is still in this bed and not in mine.
I don’t have the staff.
I don’t have the experience.
I don’t have the right to risk her because I need her closer. Wanting her is not the same as keeping her alive and safe.
Looks like I can’t keep anyone safe.
Something shifts in Mrs. Vaughn’s expression when I don’t answer. “I have a feeling that this wouldn’t have happened to her if she’d kept away from us.”
None of this would have happened if she had kept away from me.
“Lennon said Tessa was her best friend.”
Mrs. Vaughn makes a small sound between acknowledgment and grief. “They were inseparable.” She looks down at Lennon, then reaches out and pushes a strand of hair from her face.
My chest pinches hard enough that I almost step forward to stop her.
It’s the same gesture. The same gesture he just did, gentle against her cheek. I know it’s Mrs. Vaughn. I know it’s maternal and entirely different, but my nervous system still sits in the memory and cannot quite tell the difference from across the room.
“Lennon is kind,” Mrs. Vaughn says quietly, her hand dropping back to her side. “And good, so good. Always has been. I don’t know what happened to her in the last decade, but it felt like she arrived here needing Tessa as much as Tessa needed her.”
And now look at them.
“I don’t know anyone else,” she continues. “Who would have kept calling when the other person couldn’t answer. Who would have kept sending flowers, kept caring for someone who, in turn, couldn’t show up anymore.” Her voice is steady, but only just. “I mean… who does that?”
Someone who shows up, because showing up is the only tool she’s ever known that reliably works.
“Maybe she did,” I muse, making Mrs. Vaughn turn to look at me. “Show up, I mean. It’s possible Tessa maintained contact through dreams. The emotional tether between them would account for certain things…” I trail off, not sure how she’ll react.
She looks at me for a long moment with an expression I can’t quite read.