20. Easton #3
Who was I kidding? I had come here without hope. I had known that, but I had come anyway. Jace wasn’t going to rescue me. Jace wasn’t there to watch over me. All I needed was for someone to hit me so that I could finally feel something other than the pain of my own mistakes.
The world flickered out as I fell out of the big guy’s hold. The lamplight flooded my vision as if someone had brought it all the way to my face. White. Cold. Hot. Something bothered me, but I drifted deeper and deeper asleep.
I wasn’t going to see him.
He was gone. I’d come here for the beating I deserved, and that was all I was getting. But I didn’t feel the pain. That heat lingered, running through my face, burning me up from within, but the blows had stopped.
When had they decided to give me a break?
The ground was soft under me as I wandered the unlit corridors of my mind.
My soul drifted while my body shut down.
Was I dying? Was that the bright flood of light I had seen?
A guy like me wasn’t going to the well-lit place, I was sure.
My sins were too many and too great to let me pass.
Perhaps I would forever sit in this darkness.
How I wished my awareness would fade.
But I heard them even now. The hurried footsteps, the whispers, the plotting. How would they get rid of me? Was I breathing? I didn’t hear their voices or their words, but I could guess what they talked about.
It grew harder to hold on to reality. I didn’t fight the wave that came for me. I didn’t resist the quiet abyss that sucked me into its depths. I slept.
Damp. I was damp all over.
As pain slashed through my head, I realized that I needed to wake up. I had to. I was outside, in the rain, bleeding and cooling down.
I didn’t want to die. I just wanted not to feel.
Fight, dammit, I growled at myself. Wake up. Crawl back and lick your wounds, you coward.
As I became conscious, I noticed several things that didn’t belong. The air was warm when I inhaled. Warm and dry, and my throat hurt because of it. The ground was soft, too soft. The dampness wasn’t freezing over me. There was a sheet covering me, and it had absorbed my sweat.
I opened my eyes.
I lay in my bedroom in the middle of the bed, pillows piled under my head, the sheet wrapped around my body, and the light came through the small space where the door wasn’t completely shut.
I eyed the room wildly, thinking how impossible it was that I had dreamed all of it. The pain in my face was enough to assure me that I had done that terrible thing.
There, in the corner of my room, deep in the shadows, Jace moved in the armchair. “Awake?” His voice was low and flat, seething with anger.
“Uh-huh,” I croaked.
He said nothing for the longest time. Awareness came to me in pulses, like the beats of my heart, shedding more and more light on the events of the night. He was real, wasn’t he? He was sitting in my armchair, after all.
“Do you know what you did?” Jace asked, his tone unchanged.
“Sort of,” I said. Speaking made the left side of my face hurt.
“Mm.” He didn’t move. “You went out to get yourself killed.”
I didn’t argue with that, although it exaggerated the truth.
“Mild concussion,” Jace said. “Fractured cheekbone, probably a loose tooth with its fate as of yet unknown.”
I moaned quietly.
“Three stitches isn’t too bad, but it’ll leave a scar,” Jace informed me. He wasn’t talking to me. He was handing me this information like a doctor who couldn’t remember my name.
“Stitches?” I asked.
“The vet did the best he could,” Jace said. “You should be grateful to him.”
The vet… I didn’t say anything. Part of me wished I had stayed asleep. Jace was cold, far too composed, and I hated it. It made me feel small and ashamed. “Is there water?” I asked.
Jace walked over without a word, leaning down and pouring water from a pitcher into a glass, then supporting my upper back as I tried to sit up. He held the glass and me as I drank a few sips.
After I had had enough, I lay back, and Jace set the glass on the nightstand. He stood above me, looking.
I blinked; the light from the hallway outside my bedroom gave me a throbbing headache. “You stayed here all night,” I whispered.
“Night?” Jace asked. “Easton, it’s Tuesday morning.”
My heart hammered quickly. I left my apartment on Sunday evening and slept through all of Monday.
My gaze flicked to the window, and I realized that the blinds were down.
It wasn’t just dark outside. And this wasn’t the hallway light coming through but the daylight that snuck into the apartment through all its other windows.
“Easy,” Jace said, seeing the panic in my eyes most likely. “You needed the rest.” And when I said nothing to that, he asked, “Do you need to puke?”
“No.”
“And your head? How bad is the pain?” Jace asked.
I shrugged. “I’ve had worse.”
“In the rink, yeah, I heard that before,” Jace muttered.
“The doctor shot you up with painkillers last night. They’ll be wearing off, so don’t panic.
You got it easy, all things considered.” He turned away from me and walked toward the chair, but he didn’t sit.
He stretched his arms above his head and rose to the tips of his toes, making a satisfied sound as his joints cracked.
“It’s lucky I had business there, and I knew the guys you went after. They won’t bother you.”
“Lucky,” I said softly. “That wasn’t luck. You followed me.”
He said nothing. Slowly, he turned to face me again.
My back was sore, and I pushed myself up against the pain. I sat in the bed, yanking the cover off my body. He had changed me into a clean pair of sweatpants, but my torso was bare and slick with sweat.
“Can you stand?” Jace asked darkly.
I tossed my feet over the edge of the bed and clambered up, standing as the floor swayed gently under me and steadied as if it were a ship running aground. It was still now, and I took another step, reaching for the door to let in the light. “Pretty much.”
“Good,” Jace said and moved in haste toward the open door. The light blinded me momentarily, but I saw his shape receding into the hallway. “I’m leaving, Easton. Don’t do stupid shit like that.”
My heart hammered quicker. Sauntering into the hallway, I pressed a hand against the wall for balance. “You’re not,” I said.
Jace hesitated. He wore his usual baggy, dark clothes, the artwork of the tattoos along his arms concealed by the sleeves.
The backs of his hands and fingers and those little spots on his face and shadows on the neck were the only ones I could see.
Rare Soul, the tattoo on his fingers said.
Each letter for the back of one finger. And he was indeed.
He was the rarest soul I knew. Capturing a soul like that, taming it a little, letting it take you wildly away from your empty little life was a privilege. But it wasn’t enough.
“I need to,” Jace told me.
I shook my head despite the pain. “No.”
“It’s not your choice,” Jace said. “Besides, you already let me go.”
“And the fact that you still followed me means nothing?” I asked.
Jace shrugged like it didn’t matter. “Kyle is still out there, Easton. He could move against you.”
“And you want to protect me,” I said.
Jace struggled, closing his eyes for a moment.
“I can’t protect you from myself, Easton.
We both know this. Every bad thing that happened to you happened because of me.
And you were right. I hijacked your life, and you never should have let me in.
” His voice dropped to a bitter growl as he flung my words back at me.
“It’s just us, Jace,” I said. “All our lives, it’s always been you and me.”
He snorted. “You, me, the hate between us, and Kevin with his belt.”
“He’s gone,” I said. “I told him the truth. I set the house on fire, Jace. He knows it was me.”
A flash of horror crossed Jace’s face. I’d hoped, maybe, he would feel vindicated, but I hadn’t expected this. “Don’t be stupid,” he gasped. “They pay for this place.”
“I don’t care.”
“They’ll disown you, asshole,” Jace said as if that hadn’t crossed my mind.
“Let them,” I said. “If they could send you away, I don’t want them.”
Jace paced to my piano and back, rubbing his forehead. “You’re talking about ancient history, Easton. This isn’t a game.”
“Everything’s a game,” I said, grasping for straws.
“Stop,” Jace said. “You’re talking nonsense. It’s the concussion.”
“My head is fine,” I said.
Jace freaked out again, reaching the edge of my piano and heading straight for the door again. “I have to leave.”
I was faster, although not because I could easily run but because I lost my balance and slammed the door with my right hand both for support and to bar his exit. “I’m not letting you leave. And you’re going to have to deal with it.”
He stared at me, confused and terrified. “What happened to you?”
“I finally understand it,” I said.
“No,” he protested in a pained voice. “You understood it all just fine the other day. You understood that I ruin things wherever I go. You know this, Easton. Letting me in only brings harm.”
The rapture in Jace’s psyche was far worse than I could have anticipated. It was the result of years of attempts on his self-worth. We had stripped everything good from him and made him into this. But he wasn’t beyond saving. Neither of us was. I couldn’t accept that we were.
“Bullshit,” I said. “We hurt nobody. It’s us versus the world, Jace, and I’ll bet my life on you.
Because when I walk into a fight, you’re watching my back.
And when I fall apart, you pick up the pieces.
And I’m done letting everyone do things for me.
It’s beyond time that I should be here for you. ”
“Why?” he whispered incredulously.