Chapter 7 #2
“Not gonna die on you. Go, drive the road a while, keep looking. I’ll be here when you get back.”
In the end, she can’t refuse. She sets a glass of water by his bed with a promise she won’t be long, but they both know anything could happen when she walks out that door. It’s just as likely that she’ll die out there and never return as it is that he might pass while she’s away.
The urge to give his hand another squeeze is overwhelming. She refrains. She’s already pushing her luck tonight.
Once she’s in the car, it’s difficult to see anything beyond the headlights, and she doesn’t make it thirty minutes before she’s on track to get lost. One or two wrong turns and she’ll never find the house again.
The gas tank creeps lower along with the sun.
When darkness sets in, her frustration escapes in a scream as she turns the car around.
She pounds the wheel with her fists, no doubt bruising them.
Leans her forehead against the leather and lets herself wallow for all of ten seconds after parking, before rushing back in to check on Wyatt.
She finds him where she left him, propped against two pillows with his leg elevated and a grimace on his face.
It transforms into a brief flicker of relief when he sees her again. “You’re back.”
“It’s dark. Easy to get turned around. I can’t find her if I get stuck in a ditch. You need to eat those.” She points to two donuts left in the pack.
“Not hungry. Thirsty.”
He drank all the water, so she refills it. Left with nothing else to do, she curls up in the chair at his bedside again and decides this is where she’ll sleep tonight.
“You don’t have to stay with me,” he tells her.
“I know I don’t. Maybe I don’t trust you not to do something stupid, like not wake up, if I don’t shake you every half an hour.”
His half-groan, half-huff at her poorly timed tease feels like a victory until his next words come out pained and sad. “I’ve been through worse.”
“I’m sorry that you have.”
He blinks at her in shocked confusion, maybe having expected some sort of dry joke or flippancy.
Anything but an acknowledgment that what he suffered must have been horrific.
Peeling his clothes off exposed a part of his past, and she is eager for more pieces to his puzzle.
“Can I ask what happened? You don’t have to answer. ”
For a moment, she thinks he might ignore her. Tell her to mind her business or offer some made-up story. Then, he sighs, shifting his legs under the sheets and staring at the ceiling instead of her.
“When I left Alaska, the first place I went was to find my ex-wife. The whole back half of the apartment building was on fire. The whole thing was just going up in flames like a tinderbox. So I ran in there like a fucking dumbass, knowing she’d rather see those flames than see me, but not able to leave her there, and… ”
Addison leans forward when he pauses, tucking her feet up under her on the chair.
“…and she had already shot herself. I stood there longer than I should have. Numb, in shock maybe, until the flames licked at my legs and back. I had to run through them to get out. Almost didn’t make it. I can still taste the smoke in my mouth sometimes.”
“You said ex-wife. But you still went back for her even though you were separated?”
“I’m an idiot?”
She raises a brow with a tilt of her head, not accepting his answer.
“We were together a long time before the divorce. I guess I felt like if I didn’t check on her, I’d never be able to live with myself.
She didn’t have much family. I knew she was alone when the virus hit.
The dating app guy she ran off with didn’t last. It was stupid of me to go in there.
Earned myself a lung full of smoke and leather skin across my back for my efforts. ”
“I don’t think it was stupid. I think it was kind. There isn’t much of that left these days.”
How strange it is that her own husband abandoned her so easily, while Wyatt possesses the kind of loyalty that would have him running through a burning building for someone he cares about, even after they’d betrayed him.
The cat appears with a birdlike meow to jump on the bed, offering them a buffer from a conversation that could get too deep, too fast.
“I said that hurts, buddy,” Wyatt groans when little paws kneed his good leg like bread dough.
“He’s worried, too.” Addison plucks the cat off him and into her lap, pulling a blanket over her legs to shield her from well-intentioned claws.
“More like he’s tenderizing me in case he needs to eat me later. Maybe we should make sausage outta him first.”
“Wyatt!” she gasps.
He snorts.
The attempt at humor doesn’t last long before it’s replaced with another hiss of agony.
“There are some pills in the drawer. Get ‘em for me?” he pleads.
Her brows raise in surprise when she fishes out a small bag of drugs from the side table.
“It’s from that safe zone. I took what I could, just in case, before it got overrun. I was gonna save the antibiotics until I got a fever, but that knife he got me with was dirty as fuck.” He swallows two pills, then another, leaning back against the pillows with a sigh.
“The last one was to knock me out for a while. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking tired, but I can’t sleep.”
“It’s okay.”
“You don’t have to stay with me”
“I know.”
“But you will?”
She nods gently, not missing the hint of hope in his tone. “I will.”
“You blew stuff up today.”
“I didn’t think it would work.”
“Never had a doubt,” he whispers, as he begins to drift.
She’d seen it in a movie but figured it couldn’t be so simple. She doesn’t do that sort of thing. Doesn’t make waves, doesn’t take initiative. She sits back and waits for someone else to make the decisions. That’s how it’s been most of her life.
Vincent brainwashed her into thinking any idea she came up with had to be stupid, but Wyatt doesn’t think her ideas are crazy. Never told her she’d fail if she tried. He said she could do it, and she believed him long enough to make it happen.
The rush of shock after having killed someone probably gave her a shove, too.
Her skin still crawls from the weight of a stranger pinning her down.
How awful his breath smelled when he told her what he had planned.
Wyatt’s right, he deserved her knife through his eyeball, and she doesn’t regret it.
It’s still shaken her to the core, though, if only because she never thought herself capable.
It’s not only the world that’s changing.
The world is changing her.
She isn’t sure how she feels about that yet.
Most of the day has flown by in an adrenaline-fueled rush, but it’s quiet now.
Moonlight illuminates them while the cat purrs and Wyatt wheezes.
She feels so alone, which is silly because he’s right here.
For the first time, everything rides on her.
If he offered to let her crawl into that bed with him, she’s so damn needy at the moment, she might take him up on it.
Addison runs her fingers through soft brown fur instead. When the cat nuzzles against her hand, she lets her tears fall onto its back.
Tomorrow she’ll be okay. Tomorrow they’ll both be fine. She’ll pick herself up and keep going. Keep looking. Keep hoping.
Tonight, she is terrified of losing this man that she’s grown attached to and even more terrified that she lost her best chance at finding Emma.
It’s not until the following day that the fever sets in, and Wyatt lapses into frightening hallucinations.
Soon, her every waking moment is consumed with trying to help him reach the other side of a devastating infection.
She’s getting an even deeper look into the ghosts that haunt him and isn’t at all prepared for what she sees.