He responded by wrapping his big hands around my rear and bucking into me. The tempo of the springs in the bed increased, reaching a steady, fast rhythm that aligned with the sound of our flesh coming together. My dress was a bunched up mess; the back half draped across the middle of my back and the front half loosely hanging between Shane and I.
“Not too loud,” I reminded him, and the quick thrusts were replaced by slow, deep ones that felt like he was trying to fill me as much as he could. The sensation was mind-blowing.
I arched my back and pressed my breasts against his mouth. He obliged, mouthing at them as best he could through my dress.
“You want me to take it off?” I teased. The wild look in his eyes told me he did. I grabbed the thin material around the middle and pulled the dress over my head in one motion.
“Much better,” he said, and encircled his hot, wet mouth around one nipple.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on all the sensations happening at once. It was almost too much. My fingers twisted into his shirt as Shane drove on, filling me again and again. A bright tingle somewhere in my core began to grow, spinning like a star of fire, and as it did the feeling spread.
Shane wrapped one arm around me and lifted, turning us over with me on my back and my bottom on the edge of the bed. There, he took purchase under my knees and guided his member back to where it belonged. I groaned loudly as he pressed into me and, realizing how much noise I had made, I covered my mouth with one hand.
“Whoops,” I whispered and looked at Shane, who only shook his head and snickered. The moment of levity passed and the fire inside me sprung back to the front of my mind, rekindled.
Shane stretched me backwards, closing my legs together while bringing his weight down with each thrust. Soon, the tingling evolved into a delicious, burning ache inside me. My release was coming fast…I bit down hard on my index finger and tried to hold the cry inside. The muscles in my thighs stiffened and I found myself digging into Shane’s back to urge him on. A ragged breath escaped from me, torn from my lungs as the moment reached its peak. Then, with a hollow gasp I tossed back my head and felt the surge of pleasure wash over me like flooding waters. I struggled and writhed in place, trying to hold on to it forever, but in the end it escaped, just like it always did, leaving me in a washed-out, heated state of bliss.
Shane discovered his release shortly after. He was white-knuckled as he held onto my legs and his expression was one of indulgent relief. With one final, hard thrust, he buried himself into my depths and shuddered. Once he had sought out every last bit of pleasure he could, I felt him retreat. Shane’s arms went around me and his firm chest settled against my breasts.
“That was insane,” I murmured sweetly at the light feeling of gentle kisses along the side of my neck.
Shane chuckled softly and nibbled my ear lobe. “I had a lot of stress.”
“I think I can sneak downstairs and grab us something to drink. You want something?”
Shane grabbed a pillow and tucked it under his head. “Sure. Some water would be fine.”
Just as I was about to walk downstairs, the buzzing of my phone against the dresser caught my attention. When I saw my sister’s number on the cracked display, a swirl of fear made my stomach do a flip.
“Hello? Abby?” I said into the receiver.
“Kat, where have you been? Why didn’t you pick up?” she hurriedly replied. Her voice sounded full of worry.
“I just got back from the festival with Shane. Is everything ok?”
“You gotta get to the hospital in Wilmington, Kat. Momma…she…Daddy found her passed out on the floor after dinner. The ambulance came and got her.”
Shane sat up in the bed and asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Abby, is Momma all right?”
“She was talkin’ to me after they got her in the hospital, but I couldn’t understand a word of it. Then some nurses came and had to take her to run some tests. She ain’t come back yet. Her eye is all swollen up and bruised, and the doctor said he thinks she might have tripped and fallen.”
“Is Daddy there?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. He’s the one who told me to call you. Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
I looked at the screen and noticed for the first time that I had five missed calls. “I’m sorry…I…I had the ringer turned off. Listen, I’m on my way. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Sixteen
The glass double doors at the main entrance of Landover Regional Hospital slid apart for me with a smooth, automated swish. Pale green paint and varied, evenly-spaced prints of landscape artwork covered the walls. It was an effect meant to bring to mind peace and tranquility, but instead it came across as overly drab. The long bars of fluorescent lights that lined the ceiling and reflected dully in the tile floor didn’t help. There were several dozen plain, plastic chairs arranged along the sides of the lobby or in the middle forming a hallway, some of them with expressionless strangers waiting in them.
I don’t think my pulse slowed since Abby phoned me with the news, and now it was giving me a killer headache. Marching ahead with Shane trailing, I steered myself towards the registration counter and waited as patiently as I could for the young woman on the other side to notice me.
“Can I help you, ma’am?” the girl asked when she turned around in her swivel chair.
“I’m looking for my mother, Mrs. Carol Atwater. I think she’s in the emergency room. The ambulance should have brought her in a few hours ago.” I was so preoccupied that I barely paid any notice to Shane as he caught up and stood by my side.
“Hang on,” the girl answered. She typed something into a computer, nodded, and then said, “She’s in the ER. Let me tell the nurse you’re here. How many are going back?”
I felt Shane’s hand wrap around mine and answered, “Two.”
The wait was not long. A nearby door opened and a raven-haired woman in pink nursing scrubs called out my last name. Shane and I quickly stepped over to her and almost ran into Abby and my father as they were coming out.
“Daddy,” I said and wrapped my arms around his neck. “How is she?”
His frown grew even more severe than it already was. “Well…she ain’t farin’ so well, Lil’ Bit. Doctor said her head is all right. They did one-a them CAT scans to make certain. She’s got the pneumonia, too, but the real problem is more serious than that.” He turned away and rubbed his forehead tiredly, causing the brim of his favorite old hat to sit crooked. “I’d…reckon I’d better let your Momma tell you the rest.”
“Serious? The cancer’s come back?” I asked.
“I don’t want to talk for her, Lil’ Bit. She was spoutin’ out gibberish at first, but now she’s talkin’ so you can understand her. Go on in and sit for a while. Nurse said only two people back at a time anyways. Me and your sister will be out here in the waitin’ room.”
The nurse led me and Shane through the emergency department, which was one ‘L’ shaped hallway lined with rooms covered by sliding curtains.
She pointed her finger towards a room with a portable x-ray machine parked right outside and said, “Take a right down there, near the end of the hall. Room number thirteen.” Then, without another word, the nurse turned her attention to the stack of papers in her hand and walked back the other way.
I could hear the slow beeping of mother’s heart monitor before I even moved the curtain aside. When I walked in, I found her lying on a stretcher, asleep, and wrapped snugly under several blankets. The entire right side of her face was swollen, the eyelid far more than the rest, and in the center of the swelling the skin had turned a bright, disturbing purple. Her hair, always in place no matter what, was tangled under her head and speckled around her temple with dark, dried crimson. She looked like a shell of her former self. The buoyant life and spitfire energy that could always be found on her cheeks in the heat of an argument or just a spirited conversation was drained away, leaving them a pale, sickly white.
; The compulsion to perform as a nurse and check her vitals drew my attention to the screen above her bed which listed them. Blood pressure was low. Respiration, low. I examined the clear plastic bags with tubes that ran down into a medication pump. Saline, for hydration. The smaller bag contained vancomycin, a powerful drug used to fight off resistant infections. Her nurse had left stickers on the pole which indicated that two large doses of morphine had already been administered since her arrival.
While I was turning the stickers over in my hand, Momma stirred a bit and then went into a fit of hoarse coughing. When she recovered, she held one hand over her chest and looked up at me with drug-glazed eyes, almost like she didn’t recognize me at first, and then relaxed back onto her pillow.
“I see…you brought Shane with you. That’s…real nice,” she said between wheezes and then gave Shane a weak nod.
“He drove me here after Abby called. What happened?”
She shakily reached for the button on her guardrail to raise the head of the bed, but gave up. There was another control button on my side, so I did it for her until she held up a hand for me to stop. “Not too high. Makes me dizzy. There. That’s it. Did ya’ll go to the…the festival? I remember you leavin’ before…well…all this happened.”
“We did,” I answered curtly. “Wish you could’ve come with us, Momma.”
“Oh, phhhtt…ain’t for me. Never was, ‘ceptin’ the night your Daddy and me was there so long ago.”
I stepped around the bed, satisfied that I’d gleaned all I could from the machines and bags of medicine, and took a seat in a padded visitor’s chair.
“So, what did the doctor say, Momma?”
“He said I got a touch of pneumonia, Mary Katherine. Reckon it was more than just the weather after all.” She turned and coughed once before cracking a small grin. “Don’t tell your father he was right…or I’ll never hear the end of it.”
I wrung my hands together, a nervous habit I thought I’d broken back in the sixth grade. She was obviously much sicker than she let on, and had been for some time. “Momma, what else aren’t you telling me? I know something else is going on with you. This isn’t just pneumonia, is it?”
“Shane, honey…step out in the hall for a minute,” she said, and Shane silently obliged, parting through the curtain with a lingering glance back at me.
“Momma, I know you haven’t been eating like you say you have. You toss and turn in your sleep like you’re in so much pain that you can hardly stand it. Please, be honest with me…has the cancer come back?”
Her eyes seemed to slip from mine and stare out at nothing. “It never left, Mary Katherine. Been there since the start and I s’pose it’ll be there at the end, too.”
“But you told me…” I could feel the tears welling up. “You said you were gonna be fine, Momma. After your last appointment, the one you wouldn’t let me take you to. Why didn’t you tell me what was really going on? Did you already know and didn’t want me to find out? We could have helped you, we could have done something-”
“No you couldn’t,” she said, shaking her head somberly. “Won’t nothing anyone could have. It done spread all over, to my lungs, my brain...my liver. Got in my bones. They found it in the last scan. Doctor told me I was riddled with it. Said they could put me back under that ol’ surgeon’s knife again, do some more chemotherapy, that they could get more aggressive with it…but he knew it, just like I knew it. It was written all over his face.”
I felt the first wet tear drop from the corner of my eye and run down the side of my nose. Holding it back was not an option. The woman that I could always ask for advice, the one that kissed away my scraped knees and tanned my hide when I’d done wrong, the one who sacrificed every meager dollar she could for us…she was lying there and dying right in front of me. She’d been dying the whole time and I’d barely seen it.
I went to her then and put my arms around her, feeling at once how fragile and thin she’d really gotten. Her body radiated with feverish warmth. My sobs resounded in my own ears and the tears running down my cheeks stained her hospital gown with dark spots. Her hand glided smoothly down my back to comfort me like she did when I was a child and I wished that there was something, anything I could do to lift her out of that stretcher and make her well again. I held her for a long time, afraid that I might lose her if I dared to let go.
“Now, now,” she cooed when I finally slinked back into the chair, wiping my eyes. “There ain’t no need to spend no more time cryin’, child. It’s in the Lord’s hands.”
“I-it’s not fair.”
“It ain’t about what you or me think is fair, honey. It’s God’s way. He’s got his reasons.”
“You were supposed to have more time, Momma. For weddings, and babies…grandchildren. Abby’s not even finished with high school-”
“When it’s time, it’s time, I s’pose,” she said matter-of-factly and lifted her chin.
“Did they say how long? The doctor at the cancer clinic?”
“That doctor didn’t act like I’d make it out the door that day, but here I am. Reckon I’ll keep on kicking for a little while longer just to spite ‘em.”
It was Thanksgiving, five days later, and mother was sitting up and talking from her bed in the intensive care unit like nothing bad had ever happened. She still had a bit of a cough, but when the fever finally broke most of the hacking and wheezing went right along with it. The food they brought to her disappeared in short order, especially the chocolate pudding. It was like she’d never been sick at all. As much as it pained me to think about it, I’d seen such things happen myself a few times and it never lasted.
Sometimes terminal patients will regain their strength and vitality for a few days near the end. From the outside, you can’t tell anything is wrong. It seems to come on as if by grace. It gives families something to hope for – a miracle, a last-hour spontaneous recovery…whatever you want to call it. Unfortunately, the most I’d ever seen them get was a few more precious days with their loved one.
Despite that, I was full of hope. Such a thing is natural, even for a person that thinks they know better. So I sat with her and enjoyed every moment, fear resting at the back of my mind like a constant companion; a reminder that the dark hour might soon come and take her away.
“Lookit there, Mary Katherine! He done hit the one dollar mark two times in a row! Can you believe that?” Momma said excitedly. She held the corded remote control that was hooked into her bed and waved it around while she spoke.
I smiled at her, but couldn’t for the life of me join in with the same enthusiasm.
She went on, “First time I ever seen somebody hit two in a row like that. Twenty-six thousand dollars! My word. Bet that young feller is gon’ take it all in the showdown. He’s on one good streak of luck, you watch.”
“I didn’t think you liked television,” I said, and she pretended to glare at me, one eye making a better show of it than the other from underneath the fading bruise on her eyelid.
“Reckon I got to liking this here show while sitting around at the clinic all day. Not much else to do, ‘sides read them magazines and try not to get sick.”
“Oh, Miss Pauline called while you were still asleep this morning. I almost forgot, Momma. She said she would be by again after lunch.”
“That woman,” Momma began and shook her head. “Ain’t never known anyone else like her, that’s for sure. It’s amazin’ how she does it all and still has time to tend her own house and that husband of hers. Some people spoke bad about havin’ a integrated church with black and white folks worshipin’ together back, ‘fore you was born, but don’t nobody know what our church would be like without Miss Pauline.”
The cheers of a studio audience blared from the television. One look confirmed that, indeed, the young man who had spun the big wheel and won twice had taken home not one, but both showcases. I wondered how he had to be feeling at that moment. On top of the world, probably.
“Tol’ y
ou he’d win it,” Momma said, grinning from ear to ear.
“Did I tell you Shane and I saw Miss Pauline at the festival the other night? There she was, running one of the rides, and dressed up like some kind of diva in an elf outfit.”
Momma let out a sharp laugh and slapped her leg and said, “No wonder she tol’ me to stay at home and rest. Now I know why.”
“She was definitely working that costume, though. She downright refused to let it ruin her style – it looked like she was ready to either head to the North Pole or the dance club, but couldn’t decide which.”
Momma bobbed her head and stared down at her wrinkled hands. “Hard to believe she’s older’n me by near ten years. All her youngins moved away long ago. Maybe she’s got less worries now and that’s what keeps her lookin’ and feelin’ so young.”
“She had some worries when I talked to her,” I said.
The background noise of the television switched from yet another commercial about reverse mortgages to the theme music used by the local news.
Momma tilted her head and replied, “Probably wonderin’ who in the congregation’s been spending too much time at the gamblin’ house, knowin’ her. Stuff like that gives her a fit. Poor woman just can’t help herself when it comes to everybody else’s business.”
“No, she was talking about the phosphate plant where he husband works. She was scared that it might get shut down because of the lawsuit and he would be out of a job. Shane tried to tell her that wasn’t what he wanted to happen, but I don’t know if she believed him or not.”
“She ain’t the only one with that on their mind, Mary Katherine. That reminds me – why’re you sittin’ around here tendin’ to little ol’ me instead of out and about with Shane or helpin’ your Daddy with the house?”
“Daddy’s coming by again after Abby gets home from school. You know, she gets out for Christmas break in another few weeks, so at least there won’t be school to worry with. Shane is busy with the case and all. No use in bothering him until after the trial wraps up for the day.”
Ultimate Alphas: Bad Boys and Good Lovers (The Naughty List Romance Bundles) Page 28