With a nod, Norah’s Dad looked through the small white squares. “Half of these are for you.”
Holding up a hand, TJ motioned for them, but he was given a head shake ‘no.’
“I’ll get all of it. It’s the least I can do.” He pocketed the pages and turned one last time. “I’ll get more details when I get back if that’s okay.”
TJ didn’t meet his eyes, but nodded.
“Is there anything I can get you before I go?”
No, he shook his head, there was nothing anyone could get him.
Chapter 47
Mr. Davidson disappeared around the corner at the bottom of the steps, leaving TJ in semi-darkness, the stairwell lit only by the fading light of day. He heard the front door and an engine crank and felt everything break down.
There, on the stairs, five feet from Norah’s bedroom door, he put his head in his hands and let the flood take him. It began with shakes, brought on by images he had held at bay until now. His body rolled in on itself again, bringing him to the brink of jumping to his feet to find the nearest toilet to vomit into.
The pressure came at the back of his eyes, and his arms wrapped around his knees. Bruises assaulted him fresh every time he moved and he couldn’t get comfortable. The wooden stairs bit into his back, where apparently something was injured. He was stiffening even as he sat there.
Norah was in a drug induced semi-coma beyond the carved wooden door. His cuts and scrapes were nothing. His what-ifs consumed him. What if he hadn’t gone to the track today? What if he hadn’t caught the glimpse of her car in the rearview mirror? He hadn’t gone to look over the track again? Or not seen the single glint of light—that he now knew was likely that vicious knife—in the trees?
What if he hadn’t gone to therapy? Or hadn’t worked so hard to walk, then run?
He feared more than anything that he would find out that this was a dream—an alternate, more salvageable, ending to the day. That he would wake and find that she’d be dead, or near it.
But she was in the room behind him. He could hear her turning and occasionally making sound and he forced himself to breathe. Only then did the pressure behind his eyes release and he felt the tears on his cheeks. TJ buried his face in his hands and sobbed.
His shoulders heaved with it, and he tried to stop the voice that sought a way out of him. He didn’t want to wake Norah, but he couldn’t stop.
He didn’t know how long he stayed like that, making noises and shaking with uncontrollable cold. He only knew he heard sounds behind him, and with hurried movements tried to dry his face before she saw.
Her bare feet appeared on the step beside him and she sat down. Her voice was thinner than usual and he clenched down on the memory of the web of bruises on her throat. “I couldn’t sleep.”
He didn’t look up. “Your Dad went out to get our prescriptions filled.”
Norah ignored that. Her hands found his face and turned him to her, wiping away the wetness that she found. “Is that for me?”
His own voice was a ragged whisper. “I failed you.”
“How?” She had nerve to ask that from a cracked and stitched face.
“Have you looked in the mirror?” TJ shook his head, not meaning it the way it had probably sounded.
“Yes.” Her hands cupped his cheeks, forcing him to look up at her. “And I can because of you. You got there in time. Thank you.”
He shook his head again, both to tell her she was wrong and to rid himself of the sweet feeling of her fingers against his skin. “You fought him, Norah. Thank God you held him off.”
“Yes, I did. But I was losing.” Her arms tangled around his neck and her forehead touched his cheek. He heard a small smile in her breathy voice. “You’re my hero, TJ Hewlitt.”
He felt himself shrink, he didn’t feel like anybody’s hero. Her battered body attested to that.
The front door clicked, and with a few footfalls her father was at the base of the stairs. “Honey, you’re up.”
She nodded. “Did you bring drugs?” Her hand going to her side where that ass had put hairline fractures in two of her ribs.
“For both of you.” Mr. Davidson held up a white paper bag with a small ream of printed pages stapled to the top. “They didn’t want to let me get TJ’s, because he’s not family. So I told them you’re my future son-in-law.”
Beside him, TJ felt Norah stiffen. It barely registered. He was glad she was alive. He could love her from afar. At this moment, he would accept anything.
Mr. Davidson reappeared with two tall glasses of water and doled out small handfuls of pills to each of them. TJ swallowed each, grateful for the pain-killers and antibiotics. and not wanting to know which was the anti-HIV drug.
Norah’s stomach grumbled, and it seemed so out of place, so normal in this mess. Her voice came through the fog. “I’m hungry. I want pizza.”
“Okay,” It was his own voice, unable to refuse her anything, even a dose of normalcy. “I’ll get you pizza. I’ll get you whatever you want.”
After the words left his mouth, TJ realized that he’d crossed into bad territory. Her father was her family. TJ was nothing but some hanger-on. Probably one of a myriad of men who followed Norah home. Only he’d brought her battered and bloody. He corrected. “If that’s okay, sir?”
“I’ll get the pizza. Better tell me what you like, and in exchange you don’t call me ‘sir’ anymore. It’s Langdon. Or Dad!” He laughed a little to himself, probably to ease the tension. He didn’t know that TJ would have been glad to have good reason to call him ‘Dad.’
After the pizza was ordered, Norah took his hand and insisted they go for a turn around the backyard. Calling it a backyard was a mistake, it was huge, and even though it was fenced, horses came right up to the other side, begging for carrots and sugar cubes. Norah rubbed their noses, and cried out when one nudged her with his head.
Stepping back beyond the reach of the horses, she rubbed at her side, and TJ watched, helpless. She moved like an old woman, each step careful and precise. She kept walking out of necessity, telling him she was certain that if they didn’t it would be worse tomorrow.
TJ couldn’t imagine tomorrow being worse. Any amount of physical pain would be better than what this day had brought.
They walked a circle around the yard until the pizza arrived, then beat a slow retreat into the house, with Norah goading him. “Race?”
He wanted to laugh, but the end of the word was slurred due to the damage the side of her face had taken. Still, she made him smile.
He watched as she ate one slice of pizza as slowly as humanly possible, then declared herself full. At her father’s concern, TJ mentioned that she’d had three bags of saline and a lot of drugs earlier in the day. Then he jumped on that bandwagon himself. “You’ll have to eat more tomorrow, Norah. You need to stay as healthy as possible.”
She snorted at that, then added a “Yes, sir” before heading up the stairs to bed.
TJ finished his last slice of pizza, knowing that it tasted good, but unable to distinguish the flavor. While he chewed he wondered how he was going to convince Mr. Davidson that he couldn’t go to his own house. He’d never sleep if he was there and she was here.
Mr. Davidson took the conversation on his own shoulders. “Well, I can drive you home. Or you can have the couch. Or Norah’s bed is double-sized.”
TJ almost choked. “Did you just offer me the other half of your daughter’s bed?”
The man simply laughed. “You’ve already taken good care of her. And I don’t think you’re going to lift a finger to try anything with the shape the both of you are in. You both might sleep a little better.”
He could not believe he was hearing this. So he sat still, digesting what he’d heard.
Mr. Davidson picked up the thread, “You put yourself out there for her today. And you stayed and took care of her. I’m impressed.”
“I’m not.” He hadn’t meant to say it, the words had just fallen out.
>
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. She’s beat-up, but she’ll come out all right. You saved her from a far worse fate.”
“Shouldn’t Norah decide who sleeps on the other side of her bed?”
Her father nodded, “Trust me, she’ll say something.”
TJ laughed, and winced, holding his side. He, too, had cracked ribs. His only satisfaction was that the bastard most likely couldn’t use his right hand. TJ had felt and heard bone crack. “I’m sure my reputation has preceded me. Doesn’t that worry you?”
“I followed your career, having known you as a kid, but it looks like you aren’t living that life any more. Are you going to screw around on her? Break her heart?”
That brought his head up, sharply enough to cause pain. But he met the man’s eyes. “Never.”
“That’s what I thought.” Leaning back into the corner of the couch with an ease TJ now envied, Mr. Davidson continued. “You seem like a very determined young man. You’ve made it into, and then survived, a business that eats people for lunch and spits them out. You walked again when people weren’t sure you would. Seems to me if Norah’s what you want, then a little slip of a thing like her shouldn’t stand in your way.”
“This is the strangest conversation I have ever had.” TJ rolled his neck, both to keep it from stiffening from the tension he felt speaking to this man and for something to do. “Before my accident, I was an arrogant ass.”
No one contradicted him.
“After my accident, I was less of an ass, but my arrogance still knew no bounds. And today . . .” His hands spread out in front of him and he could almost watch everything slide away.
“I wasn’t there for her today, but I’m glad you were. Norah will get back up. So will you. Might help if you two lean on each other.”
Only half of his mouth twisted, the other half was getting sore and he wasn’t sure why. “I’ve been leaning on Norah a lot lately.”
“I’d say any debt has been repaid.” He paused for a minute, but TJ didn’t fill the space. “You know, I love having her here, but having her to myself is bittersweet. I want her to be loved and love someone in return. She was happy before, and this summer was as happy as I’ve seen her since. She was excited about something and she was proud of what you did.”
“Are you trying to tell me something? Do you know something that I don’t?” Was her father saying he knew how she felt? Was that why he was pushing the two of them together?
“I’m not saying anything of the sort. I’m saying if you want something just don’t let it go by.”
Chapter 48
Norah jerked again. The world was hazy around her, and she was just drugged enough that things slid a little when she looked. It didn’t help that the room was dark or that she’d fallen asleep a dozen times only to jerk back awake.
The drugs were supposed to help her sleep, but every time she started to fade away she saw arms reaching around her and had that moment where she realized that things were terribly wrong. Sometimes the image she saw was on the track and him standing back up with that green-handled hunting knife in his hand.
She had known then that he was hunting her.
This time had been the worst. She had been pressed into the earth, with her hands held above her head and her struggles useless. She could still hear his voice saying what he was going to do to her.
Each time she woke up, not having slept.
The scrubs were soft, but not what she wanted. So she slung her legs over the side of the bed letting her feet dangle until they brushed the soft rug. The room was too dark to navigate in her slightly altered state. Norah headed for the light switch, briefly entertaining the thought of missing her goal and falling through the doorway.
But her hand reached out, and for a moment it startled her. Much of it was swathed in white gauze, bright in the near dark. She remembered all her cuts and bruises, remembered that actually laughing at the thought of falling through the doorway would just cause pain.
There were feet out in the hallway just beyond her, lit by the pale light coming from the bathroom where the door had been left wide. The feet didn’t bother her. They were TJ’s, though she thought he would have taken the couch. Norah knew she was frowning, only because she could feel the right side of her face pulling.
Making a conscious effort to smooth out her expression, Norah looked out to see TJ curled into the corner of the hallway with just a pile of bedding. Silly man was going to hurt in the morning. She would have woken him, but he looked peaceful, and this night she wasn’t interrupting anyone who found sleep. No point in all of them suffering.
She pulled the door shut softly, then felt along a swath of wall, unable to find the familiar light switch. Eventually her hand made contact in a place that she was fairly certain had been flat wall on the two previous passes. At least she was sober enough to know that light switches didn’t move. Sober enough to know that she was drunk, more like.
She had to get out of the scrubs. She felt irritable and for some reason blamed the clothing. If she could just change she was sure she would feel better.
Slowly she picked at the top, taking it straight off in an effort to move as little as possible. She was used to lithe movement, now she had gauze to watch out for. It just clung around her—her left arm, her torso, her right leg in two pieces and left in one, and around her right wrist with a hole cut for her thumb.
She untied the string at the waist of the scrub pants, feeling freer even as she did it. As she stepped out of the pants she realized that she was wearing no underwear.
Slowly she picked her way over to her armoire, and pulled open the left side using both hands as neither worked particularly well right now. She rifled through finding several of what she was looking for—the boxer briefs TJ had teased her about. She chose the softest ones in her favorite color, just because they made her feel a little better, and she was taking every ‘little better’ she could find.
Norah was starting to step into them when she felt the room spin. She stood, and felt fine. Then tried again, and again watched the wall slide past her. Blinking a few times somehow helped her realize she’d been swaying. Apparently former world-class ballerina Norah Davidson could no longer balance on one foot long enough to get her leg through a pair of men’s underwear.
She sat on the bed and pulled them on. Carefully, she held them out away from her skin, pulling them up and over the gauze that coated her midsection and laid the waistband flat on her back and belly.
Ahhhhh.
Maybe now she would sleep. She needed a t-shirt, which was on the other side of the room. Standing, Norah turned and cracked her elbow on the armoire door she had left open. “Ahhhh!”
This time it had sound. It sounded like she had sucked the air out of the room. Pain radiated up her arm bringing tears to her eyes and TJ into the room.
“Baby, what’s wrong?”
She gulped the whispered sound out. “Elbow.” She pointed at the offending door, the pain keeping her relatively sober.
He frowned, “Did you hit your funny bone?”
She nodded, “It’s not funny. Hurts like hell.”
He took her hand away from her elbow and examined it. “It doesn’t look like you broke the skin. I know that doesn’t make it hurt less.”
Only then did she realize that the pain had not made her sober. Her groggy mind had not pushed him out of the room or even motioned to cover herself. She was standing there in only the maroon men’s underwear with the little squares.
TJ seemed to realize her nakedness then, too. His breath sucked in.
She looked away. It wasn’t the ‘oh my god, you are so beautiful’ gasp that a man could give. It was the ‘oh dear god that looks bad’ kind.
His fingers reached toward her as she watched his eyes trace her body. She considered covering herself, but he’d seen her before, and he wasn’t looking sexually, that was for sure. She figured she’d have made a different decision if she hadn’t been drugged.
The best part of the medication was that it made you not care. And she wanted to know what he saw when he looked.
His mouth curled, and she decided maybe she didn’t want to know after all. But he told her, in a low whisper that was close to a growl. “Handprints. That bastard left handprints on you.”
Norah looked at her arms with new eyes, seeing that some of the darkened areas did indeed look like fingers wrapped around her arms, there was another on her leg. The rest was too much of a mess to distinguish anything, and she was tired of examining her cuts and scrapes. “I need a t-shirt.”
“If it’s what you want.” TJ reached out and closed the armoire door before she could bump it again.
She nodded and found her way over to the dresser. She pulled out the oldest, softest shirt she could find then started to slip into it, only to find that hands had found the shirt and were behind her, holding it up over her head, helping her get her sore arms through.
The nurses had been right. The second day was worse, and she hadn’t even gotten there yet.
“Thank you.” She turned to see him nod.
“You look sleepy, you should go back to bed.”
She wanted to laugh, but couldn’t muster it. “I don’t need to go to bed. I need to go to sleep. I’m discovering there’s a difference.
TJ nodded and turned away. “Good night.”
Only then did she realize that he was wearing a white t-shirt but was still in the scrub pants.
Her voice got ahead of her brain. “Are you wearing underwear?”
Turning, he raised his eyebrows. “It’s important?”
She shook her head as though that might clear it, but it only made her thinking worse. “I didn’t get any from the hospital. I thought maybe you hadn’t either.”
He nodded. “I trashed mine. I bled on them.”
That was all that needed to be said. “Do you want some?”
“I’m already wearing a shirt I borrowed from your father.” He plucked at it. “I don’t borrow underwear.”
Love Notes Page 25