Rare (21 page)

“Yes, we know Ellie loves us; she has a big heart. It’s just unfortunate that she doesn’t trust us. We had our suspicions about her sexuality for years. We knew she was testing us when she brought you home, and then, later, Pete too. It broke our hearts when it was obvious we’d failed.”

“What about Sean?”

David sighed again. “Meg’s not fit enough to testify against him, and Ellie doesn’t want to. We filed a restraining order and I spoke with his father. I just have to hope the fear of a family scandal is enough to keep him away. Thank you, for all you and Pete did to help the kids. I’m glad they felt they could come to you.”

I didn’t really know what to say to that. Anything that came to mind was seven shades of stupid, and besides, all I’d done was give Sean a fraction of the ass kicking he deserved. I shifted uncomfortably. The conversation felt surreal, like the tables had turned somehow. I knew David meant well, but I wanted him to go now. I didn’t want Pete to wake up to him.

Perhaps sensing a shift in the air, David gathered his paperwork. He clapped his hand awkwardly on my shoulder and left.

I spent the next few hours tending to the cuts and burns on Pete’s arms. The nice nurse had given me some ointment to apply, something I suspected was more for my benefit than his. Either way, I didn’t care. It gave me something to do instead of staring. Danni had brought me a sketchbook, but I hadn’t dared pick it up. I knew my mind too well, and I didn’t want any macabre memories of this nightmare.

My mind wandered as I dabbed ointment onto Pete’s damaged skin. Despite my best efforts, Danni kept invading my thoughts. David had called her bizarre appearance in my life an impossible twist of fate, but it felt like an acid trip to me. Even when the test results had officially arrived in the mail, they hadn’t seemed real. Pete thought I didn’t think I was worthy of her, but it wasn’t that. I didn’t get it… I didn’t get
her
. The way she looked at me, like I was a present she hadn’t unwrapped yet. Fuck. She was going to be bitterly disappointed when she finally did. I didn’t know shit about family, but I knew I wasn’t the brother she’d dreamed of.

“You won’t scare me off, Ash,” she’d told me. “If you want me out of your life, you’ll have to say it. Don’t hide behind the things you think I can’t handle.”

She’d said that to me twice, and both times she’d given me every opportunity to bail. For reasons I didn’t quite understand, I hadn’t, and when the bottom dropped out of my world, who had I called? That’s right…
her
. Explain that, because I couldn’t.

I finished dressing Pete’s arms and twisted the cap back onto the tube. It slipped out of my tired, clumsy hands. I bent to retrieve it. As I fumbled under the bed, I felt Pete grab my hand. The abrupt movement made me jump. I straightened up to find him not only awake, but sitting bolt upright. He blinked a couple of times, like he was as startled as I was, then I felt a sudden pressure on my shoulder, and the next thing I knew, he was on his feet.

I caught him as he pitched forward. “Whoa, easy.”

He didn’t answer as he let me take his weight. It took a moment for me to realize he was disconnecting all the wires attached to his body. “Hey, hey, what are you doing? Stop it.”

Pete wrapped his arm around his injured body and bent over. He came upright slowly, holding out a thin plastic tube. “Hold this.”

Stupidly, I took it and watched in horror as he pulled the rest of it from somewhere beneath his hospital gown. He swayed, his hand shaking as he tossed the strange contraption on the bed and gripped the bedrail. By the look on his face, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know where it came from.

“Pete, please. You need to get back on the bed.”

“Ash, shut up. I need you to help me.” He opened his eyes. Behind the exhaustion and pain, they were surprisingly clear and alert. “Will you help me?”

“Of course. Lean on me and I’ll help you back up.”

“No, not that. I need to go to the bathroom.”

I stared at the freakishly long tube laid out on the bed. “I thought you had a catheter doing that for you.”

His malevolent stare said it all.
Damn
, so he had pulled it out of his dick. If I didn’t know he was braver than me before, I sure did now. “Bathroom’s all the way over there. Think you can make it?”

Pete eyed the closed door of the bathroom attached to his room. It was about five feet away from the bed. “Nope. That’s why I need you.”

His sudden lucidity had caught me unawares, but I couldn’t say no to him. If there was even a shred of the Pete I knew behind his tired eyes, he would probably try it without me.

I took his weight. “Tell me if you need to stop, okay?”

Pete wasn’t a heavy guy—he only weighed a few pounds more than me—but manhandling him across the room was hard work. His balance was shot, and despite his best efforts to hide it, moving caused him a lot of pain. I was relieved when I kicked the bathroom door closed behind us. Shame he couldn’t remember why he wanted to come in there in the first place.

I watched him stare quizzically around the small space. “I thought you needed to piss?”

“No.”

Fair enough. Lacking any better ideas, I sat him on the closed toilet and crouched in front of him. “Is there anything else you need while we’re in here?”

His gaze flickered around the room again before it came back to settle on me. He stared hard at the shirt I was wearing: another one of his. “Clothes?”

I left the bathroom and retrieved the bag of stuff Danni had brought from our apartment the day before. I allowed myself a rueful smirk as I rummaged through it. The contents were pretty much identical to the bag Ellie had brought for me.

Pete was yanking on his hospital gown when I stepped back into the bathroom. Under different circumstances, his irritation with the tie at the back of his neck would have been funny, but the grimace on his face was anything but. I put the bag down and helped him out. The gown slipped down his torso and gave me an eyeful of the hideous bruise spread over his skin. I swallowed hard, looking away before I got caught in the thrall of the dressed incision, and bent to find him a T-shirt. After a brief, silent standoff, he allowed me to ease it over his head. Socks and his beloved sweats followed, and once he’d brushed his teeth and run his hands through his hair, it was clear he felt fractionally more human.

“Which hospital is this?”

“St. Mark’s.” I zipped up the bag and stashed it under the sink. The nurses had told me he needed to start eating and drinking more before he’d be allowed to go home, so I filled a glass and handed it to him.

Pete took a tentative sip. “Not so far from home, then. You should go back to the apartment and get some sleep. You look like crap.”

I looked up. What the hell was he talking about? St. Mark’s was the closest hospital to his firehouse; it would take me over an hour to get home. He knew that, because he commuted the route every day. Unless….

Shit.

“Pete, we don’t live in Lincoln Park anymore.”

“What?”

He frowned, and the thud of my heart picked up pace. Was it really possible that he didn’t remember? I took a shaky breath. “We moved a few months ago. We live in Edgewater now.”

The silence was deafening. Pete blinked a couple of times, his confusion clear, but nothing changed. He didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. A rush of panic swept over me. I felt hot all over, and the small bathroom felt like a cage. A full-blown panic attack hovered at the edge of my consciousness. I fought to beat it back.

Pete took my hand, his palm cool and smooth as he shrugged, like it was the most normal thing in the world. “You live there too, right?”

“Yes.”

I was so tightly wound, the single word almost choked me.

Pete leaned forward. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Sure? You look like you’re going to be sick.”

“You don’t remember our new place in Edgewater?”

The crease in his forehead deepened as he tried to piece together the fragmented parts of his brain. I crouched in front of him again, putting my hands on his knees to steady myself as much as to comfort him. “Close your eyes,” I said. “Close your eyes and tell me what you can see.”

He looked at me like I’d grown horns, but he covered his face with his hands and thought hard. I worried briefly that the strain would cause him more damage, but I knew Pete. For him, nothing could be worse than this, even if he didn’t know it yet.

After an endless few moments, he blew out a shaky breath and opened his eyes. “All I can see is that big-ass bed.”

“What color is it?”

“What?”

“The sheets. What color are they?”

“Black?”

He sounded unsure, but relief washed over me, and it was all I could do not to drop my head in his lap and cry. “There you go. They were gray in the old place. Ellie sent us a new set.”

“I remember that,” Pete said thoughtfully. “White walls, right?”

“Yep. Except the kitchen. Joe made me paint it purple.”

“Purple? Why?”

“I don’t think he thought I’d do it.”

“Where is he?”

“Joe? He’s around here somewhere. I think he’s with Danni.”

“Danni?”

He muttered her name again under his breath, and it belatedly occurred to me that if he didn’t remember moving, he might not remember her either. A flicker of apprehension ran through me. Perhaps I should’ve kept quiet and gone for help when he first woke up. Maybe pushing him
was
doing more harm than good.

“How do you feel about that?”

“Hmm?”

“Danni,” Pete clarified. “I can hear her talking to you sometimes. It’s like she’s always been here.”

The insight of the simple words, coupled with the sweats and T-shirt he now wore, were nearly enough to convince me he was all right, that everything was as it should be. Then he blanched and his hand flew to his head.

“What? What is it?”

He groaned and doubled over. I caught him as he lurched forward. “Hey, come on, let’s get you back to bed so I can get some help. Can you move?”

“I don’t… want to go back to bed.”

“You can’t stay here.” I glanced desperately at the closed bathroom door, worried about the stiches in his abdomen. The pressure of being bent double had to hurt as much as the obvious pain in his head. “Pete, please.”

“I’m okay. Give me a minute.”

I stayed on my knees while he leaned on me, letting my hand roam over his back until he encouraged me to move higher, to the base of his skull. As I rubbed the tight muscles there, I felt some of the tension in his body ease.

An unknown amount of time had passed when he raised his head. I helped him upright, surreptitiously checking his stomach for blood. There was none, and as his gaze locked on me, I was lost. For days, his right eye had been a horrifying, vicious red. Now it was only slightly bloodshot, and the warmth that defined him was just about detectable.

“Can I ask you something?”

It took considerable effort to break the spell his recovering eyes had cast on me. “Sure.”

“What happened to Tim? Is he dead?”

It shouldn’t have, but his question caught me off guard. In the brief moments he’d been awake, he’d shown no sign of remembering the accident, let alone the devastating consequences. Mick told me he probably didn’t know the firefighter who’d died in the train car, but he’d spent weeks training the rookie medic. There was every chance they’d become friends. I didn’t know what to say. The doctors said it was important not to overwhelm him, but lying to him wasn’t something I could live with.

“Yes,” I said cautiously. “He died when a runaway train car hit the one you were working on. It detached from one of the stationary trains further up the line.”

“Was he next to me?”

“I don’t think so. They said he must have been at the other end of the
car.”

He began to shake his head, but he winced as he thought better of it. “That doesn’t make any sense. He’s new. I wouldn’t leave him on his own.”

“You didn’t. Mick said you stopped to check a dead body. It was the last radio contact Tim made before the train hit.”

“She wasn’t dead.”

His words were whispered, almost to himself as much to me. I didn’t know what to say. People kept trying to tell me more about the accident, like they thought I needed to be told how brave Pete was—like I didn’t already know—but I’d blown them off. I was beginning to wish I hadn’t.

“Fuck!” Pete grimaced. “I feel like my brain is upside down. Why can’t I figure this shit out?”

I found his hands and squeezed them. “You hit your head pretty hard.”

“Hit it on what?”

I didn’t know the answer to that either. Lucky for me, though, it seemed his period of alertness was over. His eyes drooped, and it was all he could do to piss while I held him up.

Relieving himself seemed to cause him an entirely different pain than the one in his head. He muttered something about razor blades, and his eyes watered. I didn’t have the balls to ask what he meant, and after a slow, painful trip back across the room, he passed out like he’d never been awake at all.

Mick put his head around the door a few minutes later. I waved him in. He approached the bed, stopping to retrieve something from the floor on his way. “I take it you didn’t pull this out?”

“No, he did.”

“He must be feeling better.” Mick covered a snort of laughter with a cough and set about fixing the mess of tubes and wires Pete had tossed aside.

I watched his deft hands as they worked. Pete and Mick were quite similar, strong and capable, and they were good friends. Pete mumbled something as Mick reattached the wires to his chest and pulled his shirt back down.

Grinning, Mick leaned over him. “You awake down there?”

Pete muttered something else. It sounded like he’d called Mick a bastard, but Mick didn’t seem to mind. He laughed, put the oxygen tubes on Pete’s face, and pulled up a chair. With them sharing an in-joke I didn’t understand, I took my cue to slip away.