Playing it Kale (The McCain Saga Book 4) (22 page)

He’s burned, and swollen.
 
But he’s still beautiful.
 
He’s still the man I love.
 
The one I love so much that it’s making my
heart break.

It was a bittersweet reunion with Kale’s
family when I got to the hospital.
 
Everyone was there, except for Drake’s kids, who were with Kaylee’s
friend named Armando.
 
I hugged them all,
and they all tearfully hugged me back.
 
They were all glad to see me.
 
I
wasn’t sure if they would be or not.
 
I
keep butting into their family personal lives.
 
But none of them seem to mind.

I appreciate them giving us this time
alone.
 
Just me and
him.
 
I don’t think or feel
much.
 
I’m a numb ball of pain and
worry.
 
So I just hold his hand for a few
hours.

At one fifty-six, Calvin walks into the
hospital room.

“Shit,” he breathes the second he sees
Kale.
 
He crosses over to the bed without
looking at me.
 
He sits on the chair on
the other side of the bed and stares hard at Kale.

“I told him to stay away from that
punk,” Calvin says, anger and fear in his eyes.
 
“I told him that lowlife was going to cause Kale nothing but trouble and
drag him down.
 
And now look at him.”
 

And to my greatest shock, Calvin’s voice
cracks.

He takes Kale’s other hand and presses
it hard against his mouth.
 
He just
stares at Kale.
 
And I stare at Calvin.

Kale’s agent has always been business
and acted the hard, uncaring manager.
 
He’s bossed Kale around and controlled his life for the past three and a
half years.

But that’s three and a half years that
they’ve been a major part of each other’s life.
 
Calvin has been there since the beginning, when Kale was just doing catalog
shoots and romance book covers for fifty bucks at a time.
 

Calvin has been there as Kale grew.
 
He guided Kale, gave him direction, and
showed him what paths to take.

In a way, Calvin has been like a father
to Kale.
 
And Kale his
son.

Of course it would break Calvin when
Kale was broken.

So, without saying anything, the two of
us just sit there, holding his hands, and praying that Kale will be okay.

The family may have said they all wanted
me here, but in the
end,
it is me out in the hall and
them in there when it’s time to wake him up.

The three of us sit in the chairs down
the hall from his room.
 
Me, Calvin, and Tony.
 
I gather my knees up to my chest, resting my arms across them, and stare
at a blank spot on the wall across from me.

“Hey, you’re Whitney Ford,” a young
voice says.
 
My eyes shift over to find
an eighteen-year-old-looking girl on crutches making her way down the hall.

Tony stands, instantly putting himself
between me and her.
 
He mutters something
quiet and low that I can’t hear.
 
The
girl glances once back at me as she hobbles away, concern and a hint of offense
in her eyes.

I feel bad.
 
I don’t want to be rude.
 
I don’t want to be mean.
 
But I just don’t have it in me right now to
be anything but scared and worried.

How long is this going to take?
 
How long is it going to be before I can see
him?
 
Before I can talk to him?
 
Before I can touch him and tell him that I
love him and that I’m still here?

But I know
,
I’ll let him take as long as he needs to take.
 
His family is his family, and he is their baby brother.
 
They had him long before I did.

What feels like an eternity later, Sage
opens the
door.
 
Everyone starts filing out.
 
And
then Sage waves me forward.

I feel my heart beating faster and
faster as I walk down the hall toward that door.
 
And just before I’m about to go in, Sage
grabs my arm, stopping me.

“He’s not good right now,” she
warns.
 
“Just…
be
patient.”

I press my lips into a tight line, and
nod.

When I walk in, Kale is staring up at
the ceiling.
 
I walk quietly, on
eggshells.
 
My heartbeat is rocketing,
threatening to launch right out of my chest, hitting someone with blood and
squish.

I try to pretend my eyes aren’t
welling.
 
I don’t want to cry in front of
him.
 
I need to be strong and supportive
right now.
 
Not a blubbering mess.
 
But I just can’t right now.
 
My eyes burn, despite my
telling them not to.

Kale doesn’t look at me as I sit very
carefully on the edge of his bed.
 
He
only takes a slightly deeper breath when I take his hand in mine and press it
to my cheek.

We sit there in silence for far too
long, and every second that passes kills me.

“It’s good to see you,” I finally
say.
 
Because it is.
 
And my heart is breaking in a million
complicated ways.

Still, the silence stretches on.
 
Ten, twenty, forty, sixty seconds too long.

“Please say something,” I whisper, my
voice shaking.
 

Kale takes a shaky breath.
 
And his eyes stay glued to the ceiling
tiles.
 
“I can’t.”

The sound of his voice chips off a big
piece of my heart.
 
“Why
not?”

He presses his lips together
tightly.
 
His eyes grow red and they
well.
 
He shakes his head.
 
What the shake is for, I’m not exactly sure.
 
But the motion causes a tear to leak out onto
his cheek.

“I’m here, Kale,” I say.
 
I turn my head and press a kiss into his
palm.

And his face crumples.
 
More tears roll out onto his face.
 
That’s all it takes for my own to emerge.

I hold him as carefully as I can while
he
sobs.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

I thought that Kale finally letting me
hold him, him finally crying with me, would be a turning point.
 
That once he got it all out, he’d open back
up and let me in.

It was the opposite.
 
Kale wouldn’t talk to me more than one or two
words.
 
It was similar with everyone
else.
 
But it felt especially harsh to
me.
 
Cause
it
was just as cold as he’d been the last week.

Saturday is a very long day.

On Sunday, the phone calls won’t
stop.
 
My phone is constantly
ringing.
 
Tony’s is constantly
ringing.
 
People even start calling
Julian, and Sage, and Lake, and Drake.
 
How they get all their numbers, I have no idea.

But I refuse all the calls.
 
I’m already facing Kale’s rejection.
 
I can’t face the labels wrath right now, too.

I am, after all, only human.
 
And there’s only so much I can process at a
time.

But the longer I sit in this chair, the
longer it is that Kale is in that room, the more terrified I get.
 
Bad thoughts are rolling around in my
head.
 
Thoughts that are insensitive and
angry, considering what Kale is going through.

But I’m only human.
 
I have emotions.
 
I have feelings.

My phone rings again and I look down at
it.
 
Hadley.

I shove it back in my pocket.
 
I stand from my chair.
 
And before I can give them permission to do
so, my legs are moving me down the sterile halls to his room.

I walk into the room just as a nurse is
leaving.
 
She gives me a small smile as
we slip around each other.
 
There’s no
one else inside Kale’s room.
 
I close the
door behind me.
 
It’s just me.
 
It’s just him.

His eyes dart to me and then back to the
ceiling.
 
“I’m tired,” he says
flatly.
 
“They said I should probably get
some sleep.
 
They just gave me a lot of
drugs for the pain.”

“Okay,” I say as I stand to the side of
his bed.
 
“But first, I need to know
something.”

“What?” he says without looking over in
my direction.

I hate this.
 
I hate crying and the fact that my eyes keep
welling up every hour on the hour lately.
 
But I can’t help it.
 
When your
heart is breaking, you break.

“Do you still love me?” I ask with a tremor
in my voice.

And this does bring his eyes to mine.

Except that I can’t read his
emotions.
 
Usually they are quite
clear.
 
As he once said, he’s either sad
or happy.
 
He’s up or down.
 
And right now, I have no idea what is going
on behind those eyes.

“What kind of question is that?” he
asks,
a hard edge to his voice.

My lower lip threatens to tremble, so I
bite it, and take a moment to compose myself.
 
“The kind I need answered.
 
Cause
I don’t know the answer to it.”

Now his eyes do grow hard.
 
His fingers roll into fists.
 
“I just lost everything, Whitney.
 
Everything.
 
And you come in here demanding answers about
love.
 
This isn’t about you, doll face.”

“No, this isn’t about me,” I say, my
voice
rising
an octave.
 
“This is about
us
, Kale.
 
And no, you
haven’t lost everything.
 
I’m here, your
family’s here.
 
Even Calvin and Tony are
here.”

“
Calvin
just told me that
Shurrock
has fired me, Whit!” Kale
yells.
 
He winces, holding his hands over
the worst of the burn.
 
“I’m done!
 
I’m done modeling.
 
Just look at me!
 
Hell, you think anyone will ever want me in
front of their camera again?
 
It’s
over
for me.”

That knocks me back a step.

I hadn’t thought about that.
 
But, of course.
 
Kale has a career because he has flawless
skin.
 
Because he’s
beautiful.
 
And to me, he still
is.
 
But those burns?
 
They’re going to leave scars.
 
For the rest of his life.

“So don’t come in here, demanding
affection while I’m lying here looking and feeling like a monster,” he
says.
 
His eyes burn.
 
And it kills me that they’re pointed in my
direction.
 
“This isn’t about you, and
right now, how could I ever think about
an us
?”

“Kale,” I whisper.

“You know what,” he cuts me off before I
can say another word.
 
“I’ve been doing a
lot of thinking this past week.
 
I am
twenty-two.
 
I don’t know anything.
 
I don’t know what to do now that my dad’s
dead.
 
I sure as hell don’t know what to
do now that I’m crispy fried chicken.
 
So
how the hell do I think I know what I’m doing with us?
 
How the hell do I think I actually know what
love is?
 
I’m twenty-two, Whit.
 
You’re twenty-two.
 
What the hell do we know?”

“Kale,” I say as I shake my head.
 
“You don’t mean that.
 
What this is between us, it’s real.
 
It is everything.
 
And you know it.”

“I don’t know anything!” he yells.
 
“We’re living this fantasy of being big and
famous.
 
It’s all inflated with hot
air.
 
How could any of it have real
substance to it?”

“Don’t say that!” I actually yell.
 
Tears are streaming down my face.
 
“Don’t say that, cause I love you, damn
it!
 
I love you, Kale McCain.”

And for a minute, his expression
falters.
 
His eyes soften for just a
moment.

“We are not broken, just because you got
hurt and your dad is gone,” I say, my level coming down.
 
“We are still us.
 
We’re still Kale and Whitney.
 
None of that hot air matters.
 
Cause it’s here.”
 
I place my hand over my heart.
 
“I know it, and you know it.”

But his eyes harden again.
 
“No, you don’t.
 
We don’t know anything.
 
We’re not playing house anymore, and I’m not
going to be jet setting around the country on a whim.
 
Take away the man who always told me what the
right thing was my entire life.
 
Take
away the one thing I was good
at,
and hell, it was
just standing in front of a camera; and I have no idea who the hell I am
anymore.
 
How can you love someone who
doesn’t know who he is?
 
How can I love
someone else when I have no clue
who
I am?”

Tears stream down my face now, free and
hard.
 
My phone rings in my back pocket,
but I don’t even hear it.

“You should go on that tour, Whitney,”
he says as he lies back on his pillow and looks back up at the ceiling.
 
“Go and get world famous, and go live the
life you were supposed to live.
 
Enjoy it
while you’ve got it.”

“But I don’t have it without you,” I
say, feeling desperate and pathetic.
 
“You can still come with me.
 
Meet
me in London, come with me to Sydney.”

“Just go, Whitney!” he yells, his eyes
once again hard on me.
 
“Just bloody go
and move on!
 
You still have everything
you want, so go and enjoy it and just go!”

It’s a knife to the chest, and I can’t
catch my breath.
 
I try to draw one in,
but I can’t.

My phone rings again.

I take a step back, still holding Kale’s
angry and hard eyes.

I feel the door behind me.
 
My hands pull it open.

And finally, my eyes locked on his for
one last time, I turn, and I go.

Just like he told me
to.