In less than two seconds after he moved, he was replaced by a much smaller body. One that was as familiar to me as my own. One that crawled onto my lap and pressed itself against me, whimpering and shivering just like poor Mildred the cat had been when I found her.
“Are you dying?” Louie asked against my ear as he tried to bury himself inside of me, squishing my hand against my stomach, making it hurt even more.
But I couldn’t tell him to move.
I shook my head, gritting my teeth at the pain. “I just inhaled… a lot of smoke, Goo.” I coughed some more, lowering my forehead until the side of it touched the back of his soft-haired head.
“Are you gonna live?” His voice broke, and that shredded my heart and made me feel like a selfish asshole.
I nodded again as my lungs tried getting rid of more smoke. “I’m gonna live.”
He shivered and he shook even more. “Promise?”
“Promise,” I rasped out, wiggling my arm out from between us to wrap around his back.
The sirens got louder and louder, and out of the corner of my eye I could see the flashing, bright lights as they stopped in front of Miss Pearl’s house. Before I knew it, the firefighters were circling the home, and neighbors from all over the neighborhood suddenly appeared on the streets close by. Josh came back and nudged a glass of water into my hand before promptly coming up behind me and wrapping his arms around my neck, his face pressing against the side opposite of Louie’s. He held me tight.
I gulped down the water and watched as the ambulance pulled up a couple of houses down. The paramedics went straight to Miss Pearl, who I barely noticed was right where I’d left her, next to Dallas who was holding one of her hands with Jackson hovering close by. It only took a few minutes for them to put her on a stretcher with a mask over her face, and it was about that time that another ambulance pulled up the street.
“I was so scared,” Josh admitted into my ear as Miss Pearl was loaded into the ambulance.
There was no way I could tell him I’d been just as scared as he had been.
* * *
I knew it was late when I finally woke up. Too much light was coming in through the curtains when my eyes finally cracked open, my hand giving more than a gentle throb at me finally being awake and able to comprehend the pain radiating from it. It wasn’t too surprising that I was alone in bed when I remembered all three of us piling on to it in the middle of the night. The paramedics had checked me over to make sure I was going to be fine—making me breathe through a mask that had the boys both crying in a way that I never wanted to see again—and bandaging up my hand after I told them there was no way I was going to the hospital.
It was after four in the morning when we finally trudged inside, and I took a shower, coming out to find Josh and Louie waiting for me in my bed already under the covers. It had been years since Josh slept with me. Years. But now… well, I understood and, honestly, I was more than a little grateful. Last night, I had gone to bed confused about Dallas’s reaction to my toolbox, and the next thing I knew, I had run into his grandma’s burning house to get her.
I was freaked the fuck out. The entire night before had scared the shit out of me. I could admit it.
If I could go back, I wouldn’t not do what I’d done, but… I could wish it hadn’t come to it. What would the boys do without me?
Sliding out of bed, my shoulders screamed in protest at what I’m sure had been their usage when I’d helped Miss Pearl out of her house. My hand started throbbing even more painfully at the burn gracing its palm. My knees only stung a little as the sheets brushed against them. I hadn’t bothered with Band-Aids on them. They were scraped, but I’d had worse.
It took me a few minutes to use the bathroom, dab some honey on my scrapes, and brush my teeth awkwardly with my left hand. My head and throat were achy and raw from the night before.
And it was right then, as I was trying to brush my teeth with the wrong hand, that I realized what the hell I’d done.
I’d burned the hand I used to cut hair.
Flipping my hand over, I looked over the area that was covered by gauze. “Fuck. Fuck!” Most of my fingers were fine, but… “Motherfucker!”
My head throbbed. My eyes got watery. I’d burned myself. What the hell was I supposed to do? I used my right hand for everything. Everything. With so much gauze on it, I couldn’t cut hair, or even hold a brush for color. I had a feeling that anything that required me to stretch the skin on it was going to cause a world of pain.
“Fuck!” I cussed again, clenching my teeth together for all of a minute before I made myself think of Miss Pearl and what would have happened if I hadn’t intervened. My hand for a life. My hand for a life and the life of a cat. It hadn’t been for nothing.
But, I couldn’t believe I had been so stupid to touch the doorknob with my right hand. Fuck.
“Aunt Di?” Josh’s voice came from the doorway.
I swallowed hard and plastered a smile on my face that wasn’t completely fake. He was still in his pajamas from the night before, and he looked like he’d been awake for a while. “Hey. I just woke up.”
Josh glanced between the hand I was holding and my face. “Are you okay?”
I nodded, not trusting my words.
“Does it hurt?”
I didn’t like to lie to them, so I nodded again.
“A lot?”
“I’ve had worse,” I told him softly, also still not lying. It was the truth. I’d been in worse pain. It hadn’t been physical, but that didn’t matter.
He didn’t look like he entirely believed me, but he let it go.
“Did you eat already?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did Louie?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What?”
“Cereal and a banana.”
“Good.” I gestured toward him, calling myself an idiot for what had happened. “I’m pretty hungry,” I said.
Josh walked alongside me toward the kitchen, watching as I put my slippers on and watching even closer as I cradled my hand to my stomach again. But he didn’t say anything. Louie smiled at me when I spotted him in the living room sitting on the couch in front of the television playing video games. If he wanted to act like yesterday hadn’t happened, so be it. The last thing I’d been thinking about before I’d fallen asleep was what I would tell my parents and the Larsens when they saw my hand. I thought I could just not tell them, but with these two big mouths, it was going to come out at some point.
I was already dreading the comments they’d make.
“Morning, Goo,” I greeted him, taking two steps forward before I stopped in place directly in front of the television and glanced back at him.
He’d been sitting pretty high up in the air, but as I gave him another good look I realized why he seemed to be taller on the couch than usual. It was the Iron Man blanket under him that hadn’t made me look too closely at the couch, but now that I did… I realized he was sitting on something.
Sitting on someone.
It was a long man with short, dark hair, asleep faced down on the couch with a bicep covering the side of his face. And Louie was sitting on what I could only assume was his butt as he played video games.
“Are you sitting on Dallas?”
The five-year-old smiled and nodded, whispering, “Shh,” at me. “He’s sleeping.”
I could see that. When the hell had he gotten into the house? I didn’t care that he was over—of course I didn’t—but I was confused. I figured I would just ask Josh but told Lou instead, “Get off him, Lou. He’s sleeping.”
“He told me it was okay,” he argued. “Stop talking so loud.”
Oh my God. Was this kid telling me to be quiet? I opened my mouth and closed it again, taking in the sleeping man beneath him. Shooting Lou a look he didn’t see because he’d turned his attention back to his game, I kept going into the kitchen where Josh had disappeared to.
He was already waiting for me, immediately
handing me the box of my favorite strawberry cereal and peeled my banana for me as I got out the milk, watching me with those brown eyes so much like Rodrigo’s and mine.
“When did Dallas get here?” I asked him in a quiet voice.
Josh hesitated for a second before reaching to take the gallon of milk out of my hands, going to pour it into the bowl for me. “Around eight. Louie woke me up when he heard the knocking.”
“Did you check to make sure it was him before you opened it?”
He shot me a look as he put the cap back on the milk. “Yeah. I’m not a baby.”
“I’m just making sure,” I muttered back. “What did he say?”
“He came inside and asked if you were okay. Then he said he was really tired and was gonna take a nap on the couch.” With his back to me as he set the milk back inside the fridge, he asked, “Are you mad he’s here?”
Plucking a spoon from the drawer, I stuck it in my mouth as I moved my bowl of cereal to the edge of the counter. “What? No. I was just surprised… he was here. Did he say anything about Miss Pearl?”
“No.” Had Josh’s tone gotten husky or was I imagining it? He seemed to think about something for a second before adding in a weird voice, “He called you stupid last night.”
With the spoon in my mouth, I realized he was right. He had called me stupid and an idiot. A stupid fucking idiot or something like that. Huh.
“You were dumb,” Josh whispered, his words making my head snap around to tell him not to talk to me like that. But the expression on his face made me keep my comments to myself. If rage and grief could have a child, that was what would have been reflected on my nephew’s face. It made me want to cry, especially when his eyes went wide as he battled the emotion inside of him. “You could have died,” he accused, his eyes going shiny in the time it took me to blink.
The scare from last night seemed to swell up inside of me again, the possibilities fresh and terrifying. My own eyes went a little watery as I shoved the bowl away from the edge of the counter and faced Josh head-on. There was no point in lying to him or attempting to play off the situation as anything less than what it had been. It was easy to forget sometimes how smart he was, how mature and sensitive this eleven-year-old could be.
So I told him the truth, our gazes locked on each other. “I know, J. I’m sorry I scared you. I was scared too, but there was no one else out there—”
“We have neighbors,” he declared, his voice uneven and low so that I knew he didn’t want to let Louie hear what was going on between us. “They could have gone in so you didn’t have to.”
“Josh.” I reached out and tried to take his hands, but he hid them behind his back, making me sigh in exasperation. “No one else was out there. I didn’t want to do it, but I couldn’t leave Miss Pearl in there and you know it.”
His throat bobbed and he squeezed his eyes closed, killing me a little inside.
“I love you and your bro more than I love anything, J. I would never intentionally leave you,” I whispered, watching his face as I pressed my good palm against my thigh. “I’m sorry that I scared you, but there was no other choice for me but to go in there and get her. You can’t always wait for someone else to do the right thing when you can do it yourself.”
Josh didn’t say anything for a long time as he stood there in front of me. His eyes stayed shut. His hands stayed balled at his sides.
But finally, after what felt like forever, he opened them. They weren’t glassy. They weren’t pained or angry. They looked more resigned, and I wasn’t sure how that made me feel.
“Bad things happen all the time, and we can’t control them. You’ll never know how sorry I am that you’ve had to learn that the hard way. But I love you, and we can’t be scared of shit we can’t do anything about. We can just be happy to be alive and enjoy what we have. I don’t know if something bad will happen to me now or fifty years from now, but I would do anything to stay with you two.” I touched his cheek and watched him let out a shaky exhale. “And like my grandma used to tell me, the devil will probably kick me out of hell the day I die. I won’t go anywhere without a fight.”
He eyed me quietly for a moment before asking, “You swear?”
“I swear.” I touched his head, and he didn’t move away from me that time. “I’m sorry, okay?”
“Me too. You’re not really dumb.”
“Sometimes people say crazy things when they’re upset that they don’t mean. I get it.”
He ducked his chin but kept eye contact with me. “You do that sometimes.”
“When?”
“When you’re… you know…” His cheeks turned pink. “That time every month.”
I was never going to forgive myself for having to break him into the female period so early in his life, but it had happened, and there was nothing I could do to change it. It was him either thinking I was dying, thinking I was a vampire, or knowing the truth. I’d gone with the truth. I’d started making sure I locked the bathroom door after that one incident of him busting in and finding me in the middle of wrapping up a used nighttime pad. It had taken us like two weeks until we were finally able to look each other in the eye again after that.
“Mind your own beeswax. I’m always nice.”
That had him snorting.
“What? I am.” I smiled at him.
“Sure, Tia.”
I stuck my tongue out at him, pleased every single time he called me tia since he did it so rarely now, and he stuck his out right back.
“Morning.” Dallas’s voice made us both jump, the sound of it about fifty times raspier than normal.
I turned to look at him, suddenly remembering how angry he’d been hours ago and feeling uncertain. The expression on his face as he moved into the kitchen and rested his hip against the counter didn’t help any either. In fact, Dallas looked more pissed than I’d ever seen him. How could someone wake up that mad? Those clear hazel eyes flicked down to Josh’s for a moment, a brief smile flashing across his mouth. “Hey, Josh.”
“She just woke up,” my nephew explained quickly.
Dallas’s eyes swung back up to me, the slight smile on his face melting off before he glanced at the forearms I had crossed over my breasts. I’d changed from the night before, and the baggy T-shirt I had on hid everything. “I can tell.” He looked back at my face, and I took in the tendons popping out along the column of his neck. Did his jaw jut out more than normal or was I imagining it? “J, can I talk to your aunt alone for a minute?”
The little traitor nodded. “Okay. I’m gonna take Mac for a walk then.”
“Don’t go far,” Dallas and I both said at the same time, watching each other carefully.
Josh gave us a horrified expression, but just like that, he disappeared.
My neighbor tipped his head toward the kitchen door that led to the backyard, and I followed after him, trying to decide whether to tug my shirt down or not. He’d already seen me in just a tank top and underwear the night before, at least I hadn’t worn a thong to bed.
Out on the back stoop, Dallas took a step down to give me the top and watched me with that intense gaze, his lips pinched together. Even with him giving me the advantage, he was still taller than me.
I raised my eyebrows at him, remembering briefly that he’d called me things last night that hadn’t been okay. “Is Miss Pearl all right?” was the first thing I asked.
“She’s fine,” he answered in a cool, calm voice. Carefully, he said, “You saved her life.”
And risked mine. Just thinking about it sent a shiver up my back. “I couldn’t leave her in there. Anyone would have done it.”
Dallas bit his lip again, that pink stretch of flesh turning white with pressure. “No, they wouldn’t have.”
“Any decent person would have.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” he grumbled, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I can never pay you back for that.”
I frowned. “You don’t have to.”
His lip
s moved but no sound came out, and he took his attention to something above my head. “I went to bed and didn’t hear anything until Josh came pounding on the door.”
Josh did that?
“I don’t know what I would’ve done if something happened to her...” Dallas kept going, his attention still away from me. “I owe you everything.”
Oh God. I was getting uncomfortable. “It’s fine, really.”
And then, he turned those hazel eyes on me once more and he blinked. But it wasn’t a normal blink. It was the kind of blink that changed your life. The kind of blink you noticed enough to earmark this moment in history. It was a preparation. A buffer. It was everything. And then he slashed his hand across the air, angry. “But if you ever do something so fucking stupid ever again—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I cut him off, caught off guard by the fury in his tone.
He held up a finger, silencing me. “What you did last night was the stupidest fucking thing anyone has ever done, do you hear me? I get that you went in to get her, but you’re a goddamn idiot, and you’re a bigger fucking idiot for going back to get the fucking cat.”
My bottom lip dropped open for a moment before I shut it. “You wanted me to let the cat die?” I asked, slightly outraged.
The exasperated look he shot me sent the hairs on the back of my neck to standing position. “The cat’s sixteen years old and you have two boys and your entire life ahead of you. Are you fucking kidding me? You’re going to risk your life for Mildred?”
While I recognized he had a point—and that I’d had that exact same thought when Miss Pearl had pleaded for me to save her beloved cat—I didn’t like the brutal honesty in his tone. I wasn’t a fan of the accusation and possibility he raised to the forefront of my brain once again either. I did have two boys. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t be fine without me, but it was… well, I couldn’t do that to them. I couldn’t be the third person in their lives to leave so unexpectedly. I had never taken a single sociology or psychology class, but my inner guts screamed that chances were, two little sponges so early in their lives couldn’t handle those kinds of losses and move on from them very well.
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