by Various
But he didn’t hear. He remained silent and still, only moving to flip the steaks with the arm not around her. She relaxed against him, enjoying the peace of the moment.
Inside, the microwave beeped. Derek said, “Going to move, now, sweetheart.” Then he slowly did, giving her a chance to slide away before he put the sizzling steaks on a platter to bring inside. She watched as he fixed up their baked potatoes, and followed him back to the bedroom. The smells of medium-cooked beef, butter and sour cream made her salivate. She couldn’t wait to dig in, even if she didn’t technically feel hungry.
He set the plates and utensils on the bed, and she climbed up, careful not to disturb them.
She barely had a chance to turn to face him before his arms were around her and his lips were on hers.
“I missed you,” he said when he’d finished kissing her stupid. He was standing at the edge of the bed and had hauled her up against his chest. “Did you see the moon?”
“It was beautiful. And this smells amazing.” She waved her arm over their plates.
“I’ll be right back.” He let her back down until her knees sank into the comforter, left, and returned a few minutes later with a bottle of California merlot and two fish-bowl wine glasses with red ribbons tied around the dainty stems.
“I didn’t take you for a wine person,” she said, taking a glass from him and pulling off the bow.
“I’m not. This was a housewarming present from Deidre. It’s the only bottle of wine I own.” He pulled a corkscrew from the pocket of his apron, which read, Kiss the chef, only chef had a slash through it, and stylized writing above it read CHIEF. “Knowing her, it’ll be good.”
He filled her glass to an inch below the rim.
She raised her eyebrows.
“What? Too much?”
“Not if you’re trying to get me drunk so you can have your way with me.”
“I don’t need to get you drunk to have my way with you,” he said without a trace of boasting.
To hide her blush, she sniffed the wine. The nose was bold and fruity and tight. “It needs to breathe,” she said. She must have liked wine before.
“Well, la-tee-dah,” he said with a crooked grin. “Look who’s the wine connoisseur.” He clinked glasses with her. “Where I come from, when you’ve got a glass of alcohol in your hands, you say bottom’s up.” He took a sip. “Hmm. Not bad.” He took another, then put his glass on the bedside table and climbed onto the bed.
She laughed, and it felt ridiculously good. The wine wasn’t bad, either. Rich, dark, grapey goodness exploded on her tongue. She rolled it around, letting every taste bud have a go at the flavors. Finally, she swallowed, and it hit her stomach with a trickle of warmth. “Delicious.” She reached for her plate.
She sat against the wall with Derek, talking, sipping wine and savoring the best meal she’d had in her life, which also happened to be the only meal she could ever remember eating.
She’d been dubious about the microwaved potatoes, but slathered in butter, sour cream and shredded cheddar cheese, they tasted like a creamy, salty paradise. Pink in the middle and slightly charred on the outside, the steak practically melted on her tongue. She moaned in utter culinary ecstasy.
“I’m jealous,” Derek said. “I thought only I could get you to make those noises.”
Her face flamed as she swallowed the delicious mouthful. “Yup. You and steak. My two guilty pleasures.”
“If I’m on par with grilled meat, I think I’m going to have to try harder.”
If Derek tried any harder, she’d lose her mind. He had only to glance at her with those intense eyes to rev her engine to the point of overheating. She couldn’t wait until they finished eating and got back to the kissing.
Unfortunately, Derek kept urging her to slow down.
“Easy, sweetheart. Take it slow. Small bites. Give that stomach a chance to adjust.”
She did her best to comply, even though she wanted to inhale everything on her plate.
While she chewed slowly and took tiny sips of her wine, Derek talked about Haley, his work, and his past. He touched on his marriage to Deidre, making ten years seem like a footnote.
Her chest felt empty when he encouraged her to try and remember anything personal. “It’s just a blank,” she said, hands cupping her half-full wine glass.
“Okay, so you can’t remember anything. What about what you want, what you hope for?”
She sipped her wine. She could have said a lot of things. Family, happiness, a successful career…him. But what did it all matter? She was dead. She’d had her chance. Even if she couldn’t remember what she’d done with it, it was over. “All I want is for you to be happy.”
He kissed her forehead, his breath smelling deliciously of garlic and butter and wine. “How does it feel?”
“How does what feel?” she asked.
“Having everything you’ve ever wanted.” He surrounded her with his arms and his scent of clean, warm, well-fed male.
“Oh.” It felt heart-meltingly amazing. Maybe happiness wasn’t out of the question. But she didn’t have a chance to say it, since her stomach cramped painfully. “Oh,” she said again, this time in a whimper.
She doubled over, pressing one arm across her abdomen. When the pain backed off, she reached to put the wine glass back on the bedside table, but her stomach twisted again. She cried out and let go of the glass too soon. It shattered on the floor.
“What’s wrong?” Derek’s hands were on her shoulders, guiding her to sit back against the wall. “Jesus, you look pale.”
“I think I ate too much.” Nausea joined the cramping, and she pushed away from him to jump off the bed. She needed to throw up.
“No!” He grabbed at her hand. “Don’t go.”
She was beyond words. She yanked out of his grip and launched herself across the hall to the bathroom. Waves of cold licked up her chest and face. It was coming, and the toilet lid was down. Why did he have to be a lid-down kind of guy? Desperate, she turned to the tub. The curtain was drawn. She tried to move it aside, but the fabric didn’t budge. She might as well have been shoving at steel.
Argh! She fell to her hands and knees on the tile. Time was up.
“Sweetheart? Are you in here?” He sounded panicked. He came into the bathroom and stopped short, maybe realizing that if he rushed in, he might step on her. “I’m going to open the lid for you.”
He skirted the wall and sink until he reached the toilet too late. Her stomach squeezed like a fist. The dinner he had thoughtfully prepared for her splatted onto the floor in a wash of chunky crimson.
“Oh, God, DG!”
The clink of the lid opening punched through her haze of nausea. She dove for the toilet just in time for round two. Derek groaned behind her as her body attempted to turn itself inside out.
When she finally stopped heaving, sweat drenched her from head to toe. She was shaking and didn’t think she could stand up if her life depended on it. She rolled her head on her arm to see Derek standing by the sink, staring down at the evidence of her sickness with a stony expression.
How appalled he must be. And she couldn’t offer to clean up what had landed on the floor, since she couldn’t hold a towel or a dustpan. Not bothering trying to flush, she got up on her shaky legs. Leaning on the sink, she stepped close to him.
“I’m sorry,” she said, knowing he couldn’t hear her. She squeezed past him and shuffled across the distance to the bed. With each step, she began to feel better. By the time she lowered herself onto the edge of the mattress, she was almost back to normal, but she still nudged the dirty plates away. Looking at them threatened to make her sick again.
Derek was still in the bathroom, standing with his back to her like a marble column. She felt horrible. He must be worried about her, and overwhelmed with the carnage before him, maybe even upset with himself for suggesting she try to eat.
She took a breath to let him know she’d made it to the bed again and felt better,
but his voice stopped her.
* * * *
Horror slammed into Derek as he watched wine-colored puke hit his bathroom floor and splash into the toilet bowl from out of nowhere. This was his fault. It had been his stupid plan to see if DG could eat, and she could—his confidence that she couldn’t possibly be a ghost had grown with her every bite. But apparently, she couldn’t digest anything. That realization struck him deep. She might not be dead, but she wasn’t truly alive either.
He’d learned something, but at what cost?
What a shithead. He’d encouraged her to eat when he didn’t know what harm it might cause her. He might have killed her, for Christ’s sake.
The bathroom fell silent. His heartbeat thundered in his ears. He was worse than useless.
He couldn’t even lift her in his arms and carry her back to bed. He’d done this to her, and had no way to fix it.
Pressure kicked at his lungs. Hate and guilt collided like stone on flint, and something in him caught flame.
He hadn’t asked to be this woman’s tether to the world. Whatever force had thrown them together had done her an unspeakable disservice. When it came to the women in his life, he was a hopeless fuck-up. DG deserved someone smarter than him, someone gentler than him. His lungs tightened until he felt like a pressure cooker about to blow.
“Why me, goddammit?” Pulling at his hair with his fists, he surveyed the carnage in his bathroom. “What the hell am I supposed to do with you when I can’t even take care of the real females in my life? I didn’t ask for this!”
Chest heaving and hands shaking, his words registered with his brain five seconds too late. Dread cooled his temper like a bucket of ice water. “DG?” he asked, looking down at the toilet. Was she still there? He glanced over his shoulder to check the bed across the hall.
There she sat, hands on her lap, lower lip trembling. He turned to face her and watched her eyes fill with tears. Then she disappeared.
“No! DG, baby, I didn’t mean that!” He ran to the bed. “Come back, sweetheart. Please.”
Please let her have just gotten off the bed. He climbed on the mattress. “Come back up here.” But the clock read 5:01.
She was gone. Back to the fog that frightened her.
He punched the mattress. “Mother fucker, Derek! You fucking asshole!”
Chapter 10
Fog closed around DG, wiping Derek from sight. “No! Just give me one more minute with him!” She flailed her arms and legs, trying to clear away the thick gray, but it only grew thicker. “Derek!” The fog absorbed her cry. She screamed with frustration.
She would have given anything to be able to tell him the tears in her eyes weren’t because of what he’d said but because she ached for him. He might have raised his voice at her, but she saw the helplessness underneath the anger. He obviously felt guilty over her getting sick. On top of his earlier fight with Haley and far too little sleep, any man would have reached his limit. She didn’t blame him for needing to vent. She only wished she could hold him and tell him everything would be okay.
She had to get back to him.
She was sick of this fog. “I’m done with this. Do you hear me? I’m done!”
Physical movement did nothing to dispel the fog, but she hadn’t tried using her mind.
Focusing her concentration like a laser beam, she thought of Derek. She pictured his serious face as it opened up in a smile just for her. She imagined his hands on her skin, his mouth on hers, him whispering, “Sweetheart.” She thought of him until her stomach fluttered and places low inside her pulsed with need. She thought of him until her heart ached.
“Bring me back to him. I’m not asking. This is me telling you to bring me back. Right now.”
A faint noise made her suck in a breath of surprise. She strained her ears. Barely audible but there, the noise rose and fell with rapid, random modulation. A voice. She heard a voice!
“Derek?”
The voice faded away as if hers had chased it back into the fog. She bit her lip. Please, let me hear him again.
She poured all her concentration into remembering Derek. The effort had every muscle in her body clenching to the point of fatigue, but she pushed through it. Discomfort was nothing compared to the need to see her dream guy again.
There! She heard the voice again. She strained to make out the words until her head throbbed.
“Come back to me, sweetheart. Please, come back.”
Her heart jumped at “sweetheart,” but the voice belonged to a female. Definitely not Derek. Disappointment crushed her concentration. The voice floated away.
“Come on! This is so unfair!” Panting with exhaustion, she set herself to trying again. She’d get back to Derek if it killed her.
* * * *
Attila the Hun had nothing on a sleep-deprived Derek. He yelled his way through his morning at work, and when he wasn’t yelling at somebody, he internally berated himself. There was no excuse for how he’d unleashed on DG. He hoped for her sake she never had to see his sorry ass again. But a selfish part of him planned on being there to greet her with open arms and a huge apology as soon as dark fell tonight.
He had a mountain of work in front of him, all of it time-sensitive, with Friday’s walkthrough barreling down on him, but he couldn’t focus on anything except convincing the two most important women in his life to forgive him. That and getting some much-needed shut-eye. If he got home by four, he could get three hours of sleep, take Haley out for ice cream, and be back in time to see DG if she had the misfortune of getting dumped in his room again. He’d need to have a big lunch, since that didn’t leave any time for dinner, and he’d be damned if he’d eat in front of DG when he knew she couldn’t join him. But he had several emails to address before he could think about lunch.
He leaned forward in his chair and stared at a memo from the project architect. After reading the thing three times, he still hadn’t processed it. He pinched the bridge of his nose, feeling a headache coming on. When his hands returned to the keyboard, he found himself typing How to help a ghost move on in a Google search.
He had a dozen things he should be doing instead of this, but he couldn’t help himself. DG didn’t deserve whatever was happening to her. He didn’t want to believe she was dead, but in the hour between when she’d disappeared this morning and when he’d left for work, he’d racked his brain for some other explanation. As much as he hated to admit it, there was none. And if DG was truly dead, she deserved to be in heaven, not stranded in some nebulous fog by day and stuck with the likes of him by night.
He browsed suggestions like, Stand up to them, don’t show them fear and have a priest bless your house. He scoffed. The internet made it sound like having a ghost was a bad thing. DG was the exact opposite of a bad thing. Besides Haley, she was the best thing in his life.
And he wanted her to leave. Was he nuts?
“It’s for her own good,” he said, wiping a hand down his face.
“For whose own good, boss?”
He looked up to see Felipe, one of the construction laborers, pulling his paper-bag lunch out of the fridge. He hadn’t heard the squeak of the trailer door.
He cleared his throat. “Uh, nobody. Just talking to myself. Ignore me.” Shit. Now he was missing things and talking to himself? Caffeine. He needed caffeine. And to put DG out of his mind until he clocked out.
“Whatever you say, boss.” Felipe shrugged and headed down the hall.
Derek rolled his chair back and stretched, willing energy into his muscles.
The trailer was a long, narrow, wood-paneled, air-conditioned haven from the California-summer heat and humidity. At one end, he had a plans desk and a work station with an outdated computer and fax machine. At the other end was a bathroom and locker room accessed by a hallway exactly as wide as a man’s shoulders. In the middle of the trailer, a kitchen counter held a coffee pot and a microwave. Across from the counter was a First-Aid station and a chipped, mustard yellow restaurant tabl
e some of the guys used for lunch when it was too hot outside.
He grabbed the ground coffee out of the fridge and started a new pot. Then he followed Felipe to the back room to get his Thermos out of his locker and use the john. His personal cell phone rang in his pocket. He looked at the display as he walked down the hall. Deidre. Good.
Haley must be ready to see him. The promise of getting to hug his little girl tonight would get him through the rest of the day. He answered as he rounded the corner into the locker room.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
He instantly knew something was wrong from the way her greeting wavered.
“Um, I don’t want to worry you, but Haley had an accident at soft ball camp.”
His heart did a flip-flop. “What happened? Is she okay?”
“I think her arm’s broken. I’m in the ambulance with her now. They’re taking her to Children’s Hospital.”
He heard the siren on the other end of the phone. “I’ll be right there.” He was already pounding down the stairs of the trailer and fishing his keys out of his pocket.
Deidre was silent.
His lungs filled with pressure. If she dared tell him to stay away, he would say many, many things he would probably live to regret.
“Okay,” she said on an exhale. “See you soon.” She hung up.
Normally, her easy acquiescence would make him feel like pumping his fist in victory. Not today. His little girl was hurting. He had more important things to do than gloat.
* * * *
The triage room at Children’s was quieter and more colorful than a regular ER. Not that Derek had been to the ER a lot, but most guys on a construction crew had seen the inside of one or two, and he was no exception. Primary colored curtains divided the triage bays, the nurses wore brightly patterned scrubs and a clown with a big red nose handed out balloon animals to the children.