“Yes. He is. He’s under observation and will come home tomorrow most likely.”
“Okay. Okay.” I repeat the words over and over, almost as much for me as for her. Almost as if I need to talk myself into believing that everything is going to be okay when I know at some point it’s not.
“Your father’s heart,” she murmurs almost in the same fashion as I just said okay.
Two people lost in the miserable grief and confusion we know is coming but want to deny.
“Yes, I know. His heart is okay?”
The same heart that went into cardiac arrest the night he found out about Jonah’s accident. The heart that never fully recovered, but that only sparked to life when he pulled me onto the ice so he could somehow do something—boss someone else around and drive them into the ground, make them be what he thought Jonah was going to be—to save himself.
And I let him. Night after night. Day after day. Hour after hour. I let him break me down on the ice to punish me for what I’d done—for ignoring Jonah’s request, for being the reason Jonah got behind the wheel drunk, for killing the innocent driver he hit. I cried and burned and prayed . . . with no idea if my brother would die that next day. My other half was gone. I was alone. In agony, I begged and bled and sucked it up because coaching me was the only thing keeping him going. Punishing me was the only way he knew how to manage the dreams he had for Jonah. Dreams he’d never had for me.
“I don’t know what to do,” she whispers. “What am I going to do?”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
I find the exit just as I end the call and shove through the doors so they slam back with force.
I welcome the cool night air as it fills my lungs. As it burns my lungs and assaults my skin with its temperature and its indiscrimination. Taking huge gulps, I try to catch my breath from the thoughts that rob it.
Jonah’s time is running out.
I felt it tonight. I felt him tonight.
That’s why my game was off.
The other half to my whole was coding.
Struggling to breathe.
And I can’t fix him.
I can’t fix anyone.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
DEKKER
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
DEKKER
THE KNOCK ON MY FRONT door startles me. The papers on my lap from when I fell asleep on the couch flutter to the floor with the jolt of my body.
I’m in that just-woken-up, confused and freaked-out phase where I wonder who in the hell is knocking on my door at one in the morning.
Who the hell did the doorman let in on my list that would come at this time of night?
Chad? My sisters?
Oh my God. Something is wrong with my dad.
My pulse pounds wildly as I run to the door, every horrible scenario playing out in my mind in those thirty feet. It’s when I look in the peephole though that every part of me stops and freezes.
Hunter.
I almost want to laugh at the sight of him. I put him on my approved visitors list three years ago with the hope that one night he might make his way to my place. To fight for me.
I never took him off.
When I open the door and come face to face with him, my smile falls.
His shoulders are slumped, his face pale and hollow, and his eyes troubled.
“Hunter? Is everything okay? What are you—?”
He steps into me and holds on for dear life. His arms go around me, his face is buried into the crook of my neck, and his body shudders with an emotion I can physically feel.
“Hey. What happened?” I ask. His actions have taken me by surprise—especially from him, his need so palpable that I immediately slide my arms around him, hands running up and down his back, and my lips pressing a kiss to the side of his head.
We stay like this as he holds me, and I feel helpless.
“I just needed you.” Those four words said in his broken rasp as the heat of his breath hits my shoulder, are all I need to hear for my heart to constrict. There is much more between us than just sex. So much more shared than a physical act meant to bring two people together.
“I’m here,” I murmur to him. “I’m here.”
My mind races over scenarios—he was cut from the team, something happened to his family . . . over and over—as we stand there in this silent desperation.
“Christ, Dekk.” He runs a hand through his hair as he walks to the windows and then back to me. His shoulders sag. He stares at me with total defeat.
“Are you okay?” It’s one of a million questions on my mind and the safest of them all. He’ll talk when he wants to.
“Yeah. I think.” Tears well in his eyes and the sight of them—of a man completely vulnerable when I’ve never seen him that way before—undoes me in ways I can’t quite fathom.
They say he trusts me.
They say he needs me.
It’s a poignant thought that gets thrown to the wayside to be thought about later when he’s gone and I’m alone . . . but right now, he needs me.
“I was going to go home . . . but . . . it’s just. I didn’t know where else to go.” His voice is barely audible, his admission mixed with the confusion in his eyes, enough in itself to tell me what he needs. To remind me out of the blue of something my mom used to say to us when we were at a loss for words. “I needed you.”
Those three words slide around my heart and embed themselves in my soul.
He came to me.
He needs me.
“Come with me.” I reach a hand out to him and even though he stares at it with question in his eyes, he takes it.
I lead him down the hallway of my apartment toward my bedroom. If I’d told anyone I was taking Hunter Maddox to my bedroom with no intention of taking my clothes off, they’d think I was mad.
But I am.
And he’s so lost in his own head, in the heartache overwhelming him, that he doesn’t think twice when I turn the covers of my bed down, climb in, and pull his hand for him to join me. With his eyes on mine, trying to relay a story his lips won’t yet speak, he toes off his shoes and climbs in with me.
His arms go around my abdomen, he lays his head on my chest so I can rest my chin on it, and he holds on.
We lie like this without saying a thing, just me providing comfort and him taking whatever it is he needs, until his breathing evens out, and eventually he falls asleep.
With my hand running up and down the length of his back and the realization of how damn good it feels to be needed, I slowly drift off to sleep too.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
DEKKER
I WAKE WITH A START.
The sun is streaming through the blinds I never closed last night and the bed beside me is still warm, but I remember everything about what happened.
There’s a thump in my living room and I slide out of bed, groggy, still sleepy, and still concerned for Hunter.
“Hunter?” When he doesn’t answer, I head down the hallway just in time to see him walking toward my front door. He looks back over his shoulder and our eyes meet. “What are you doing?”
He still looks like hell—eyes red, brow furrowed, like he hasn’t slept in years, when I know for a fact he just got a solid seven hours.
“I—uh—I’ve got shit to do.”