Always You

by Roxie Noir

  “Yeah.”

  “That’ll be eighty-five forty-four.”

  I almost shout for this shit?! but I own a house in the Hollywood Hills with a pool and two luxury cars, so I pay for the fucking flowers.

  “Thanks,” I say, and get the hell out of there.

  They moved Darcy from the emergency room to the regular hospital a little while ago, but they wouldn’t let me see her yet. Said she was resting, so I sit myself and my huge fucking flower display in the waiting room.

  And I wait. In the hospital. With a hole in my jeans, a torso still covered in dirt even though I did put a shirt on, and a lip that feels like it’s the size of a softball.

  It’s excruciating. The waiting, not the injuries. The injuries I got used to a long, long time ago.

  Gavin’s not even there, because once we heard that she was all right but it would still be a while, he went back to the venue to deal with that mess. Someone had to and there was no way I was leaving the hospital. And God only knows where Eddie is.

  After forever, my phone rings with a number I don’t know, so I jump to my feet and answer it.

  “Trent Ryder.”

  “Hi, Trent, this is Tallwood Memorial Hospital. You’re listed as the emergency contact for Darcy Greene?”

  I’m out of my chair and at the waiting room door, flowers in hand, before she finishes Darcy’s name.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but she had an incident today, and—”

  I round the corner to the nurses’ station. There’s a woman on the phone with her back to me.

  “I know all about it,” I say, and she turns around.

  “Oh,” she says, putting down the phone.

  “She awake?”

  The nurse gives me a long, slow up-and-down, and I can’t tell if she’s checking me out or wondering what the hell I’ve been up to. Probably a little of each. It’s a look I get a lot.

  “Are you family?”

  “I’m her emergency contact,” I say, avoiding the question. I’m technically not family, but I’m what Darcy’s got, so if the nurse wants to fight about this I’ll fight about it.

  But she glances over my flowers, then over my ring finger, and shrugs.

  “Room two-thirty-one,” she says, and points down the hall.

  I’m strangely nervous. I can feel everyone’s eyes on me, and I try not to think about what this looks like: huge guy with a swollen lip taking an enormous flower bouquet to a badly hurt woman. My mom used to get huge bouquets, too.

  Everyone here knows what happened, I remind myself. It’s been running on the news for hours. They know it was nothing to do with you.

  Her door’s partly open, and I knock softly before I push it open.

  Chapter Six

  Darcy

  The door to my hospital room opens, and an enormous flower display walks in. For some reason, even though for a moment I honestly think that flowers have learned to ambulate and are coming directly toward me, I don’t panic.

  Drugs are great.

  “Yeah?” I ask the flowers, because it seems as good as anything else.

  But then the flowers lower and Trent’s head pops over the top, and now this makes sense.

  “They wouldn’t let me in while you were asleep, so I wandered to the gift shop and got you something,” he says.

  I’m pretty sure he means I paced restlessly to the gift shop and glared at everyone and everything until I bought something and finally left, but I don’t argue.

  “Are there any flowers left down there?” I ask, still feeling kind of sleepy and hazy, but at least my back mostly stopped hurting. “Jesus, Trent.”

  He half-smiles, which is pretty good for him.

  “There are, but I can fix that if you want,” he offers, looking around for a place to put the gargantuan display down. “Just say the word.”

  He puts the flowers on the sink, then brushes his hands off, comes over, and sits by the bed. His lip is all fucked up, and I frown.

  “The hell happened to you?” I ask.

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “You know what the hell happened to me.”

  “Do you know you have a black eye?”

  I sigh. I’m on my stomach, propped up on some kind giant foam pillow wedge, and while it’s better than lying on my back my face is all squished, my boobs are squished, and the whole thing is kind of uncomfortable. Plus, I’ve got the constant sensation that, despite the sheets being adequate cover, everyone is looking at my ass.

  “Yeah, my face got banged up when I hit the floor,” I say.

  My left eye’s swollen nearly shut and there’s a big scrape down the side of my face, but it could be way worse.

  “Sorry.”

  I just start laughing, or at least, I kinda try even though that also somehow makes my back hurt. Turns out you use your back for a whole lot of things.

  “Yeah, you’re a real asshole,” I say. “You should’ve let me keep burning.”

  “Next time I’ll make sure I ask first.”

  I take a deep breath and try to re-adjust myself a little. Trent sits up straighter, his hands on his knees.

  “You need help?”

  “No,” I say grumpily. “This sex wedge is gonna be uncomfortable no matter what, I’m just moving to a different uncomfortable spot for a while.”

  I thrash a little while he looks on, half worried and half amused. My new position isn’t much better than the old one, but at least it’s new.

  “Sex wedge?” he finally says. “That what the hospital calls it?”

  “It looks like one of those fuck pillows,” I explain.

  Trent just leans back in the chair, crosses his thick arms in front of himself, and looks at me, waiting.

  Shit.

  “You know those kinda triangular pillows that they advertise on late-night TV, and you can fold them and flop them in all these different positions and, I don’t know, accomplish the whole Kama Sutra at once?”

  “I don’t,” he says.

  “Yes you do,” I say, even though I wish I would just shut up. “They’ve got a shirtless guy in weird boxers and the woman in, I think, a black bikini and she’s got huge tits and they simulate sex on the fuck wedge really slow while she makes a crazy-ass O face?”

  Both of Trent’s eyebrows are raised.

  “I’ve never seen this,” he says.

  “Well, you should have,” I say, giving up. “And anyway, this looks like a big version of the Fuck Wedge. But less sexy, because I’m pretty high and my back hurts and I keep saying fuck wedge.”

  “You look kinda like a beached mermaid,” he says. “Do mermaids use fuck wedges?”

  I sigh and bury my face in the fuck wedge. My puffy black eye complains, and I wince.

  “I’m sorry I brought up the fuck wedge,” I say, my voice loud but muffled.

  God, am I sorry I brought up the fuck wedge, and I don’t think I would have except, you know, extenuating circumstances.

  Trent’s my best friend. I’ve told him things that I’ve never even dreamed of telling anyone else, from my deepest, darkest secrets to the fact that my very first crush as a kid was on Robin Hood from the animated Disney movie.

  Robin Hood was a cartoon fox.

  Trent makes me laugh. He hugs me when I cry, he talks me down when I get upset, and when I can’t find something in my kitchen I call him because he usually does know where it is. And that all works in reverse, too. I’ve driven to his house at four in the morning, still in pajamas, because he had another nightmare and called me.

  For fuck’s sake, he’s my emergency contact. I’m his. He doesn’t know this, but after Dirtshine hit it big and then Gavin and Liam nearly fucking died, I made a will and put him in it.

  But we don’t talk about sex, or dating, or our love lives, or any of that stuff. The most we talk about that stuff is casually mentioning dates that we’ve been on in passing or something, but honest
ly, I hate even that. Hearing another woman’s name in Trent’s mouth gives me an uncomfortable, squirming feeling that I can’t stand. And having to imagine him smiling and laughing with someone else or kissing them or anything makes me a little nauseous.

  Likewise, I go on dates and shit and don’t tell him. I mean, not often, and it has been a long time since someone got invited into Darcy’s Special Cavern, but if I so much mention a guy hitting on me Trent gets grumpy and sullen.

  And I don’t hate that. I don’t hate it at all, and that fact scares the shit out of me because, okay, yes, I’ve thought about going there with Trent more than once. More than a couple of times, actually, because he’s sweet, protective, makes me laugh, and Trent gets me in a way no one else does. For fuck’s sake, he just saved my life, or at least saved me from way worse burns.

  Plus, have you ever seen a guitar player’s forearms? Not to mention the rest of Trent? Jesus Christ.

  But people who bang break up. They break up all the fucking time.

  “I’m not really sure what part of the mermaid you fuck,” I say, and turn my face back toward Trent. “Do they lay eggs?”

  He’s smiling.

  “And you still haven’t explained why you look like you got run over by an entire rugby team,” I say. “Did you have to cross a rugby field to get here?”

  “I think they call it a pitch.”

  “Don’t fucking avoid the question.”

  He sits up straighter. He rearranges himself in the chair, taps the armrest, glances out the window, but I just keep watching him because I know he’ll tell me if I just wait.

  “Gavin and I got into it a little,” he finally admits.

  I’m not exactly surprised, but I can already tell that’s not the whole story. The four members of Dirtshine — well, five, I guess, if you count both Liam and Eddie — have always had somewhat tumultuous relationships with each other. You know, the way you do when you’re close with three other people but also spend a lot of time in a van, often high or drunk, and you know each other way, way too well?

  “You and Gavin,” I say, waiting for a better explanation.

  Trent glares out the window.

  “I had some words with the fireworks guy, and Gavin didn’t think I should be having words with the fireworks guy, so I had words with Gavin instead.”

  I stare at him. I know what he means by words, because I’ve seen Trent angry. Even if I’ve never seen him actually get violent.

  To anything living, at least. I’ve watched him punch some inanimate objects. They never fared well.

  “Words didn’t get your lip split,” I say.

  “No, that was Gavin’s elbow.”

  I swallow hard, just watching his face, a knot forming in my stomach. I have a bad feeling that he might have actually done something to that guy, and that Gavin stopped him, or at least tried.

  And I don’t hate it. I hate that I don’t hate it, because violence is bad and punching people is bad, but there’s a secret part of my heart that gets warm and tingly at the thought of Trent going on a revenge crusade for me.

  It’s fucked up, but sweet. In a fucked up way.

  “Is everyone okay?” I ask.

  “Yeah, everyone’s fine,” he says, pushing his hair back from his forehead. “Well, except you.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I offer. “Two to three weeks.”

  “In the hospital?”

  “Until it’s healed. I think they want me out of here ASAP, something about burns getting infected easily and hospitals being a great breeding ground for super-MRSA and shit.”

  Trent takes a long, slow look at my back. I’m not wearing a shirt or anything, just bandages, but they are definitely not sexy. Unless mummies are sexy.

  “How bad is it?” he finally asks. “Really.”

  I try to rearrange myself again and mostly just flop around a little on the sex wedge until different parts of me are uncomfortable.

  “They’re fairly serious second-degree burns but no third degree,” I finally tell him. “So it looks super gross, probably, and the doctors said there are huge blisters and it’s gonna hurt for a while and take a couple weeks to heal, but I don’t need skin grafts or anything.”

  I pause for a moment. Trent’s looking serious again, his eyes on my bandages like he can heal me with the force of his glare.

  “And they said that if it hadn’t been put out when it was it would have been way worse, so, thanks,” I say.

  Trent just half-smiles and looks down, like he doesn’t know what to say. He’s not really good with gratitude or compliments, like he never thinks he deserves them.

  “Of course,” he says. “Now you owe me.”

  I laugh.

  “If you’re ever on fire, I promise to do my best to put you out,” I say.

  Chapter Seven

  Trent

  Half an hour later, the nurses finally chase me out. Darcy’s fallen asleep anyway, and I’m just sitting in the vinyl-covered arm chair next to her bed while she snores slightly, watching her back rise and fall. Thinking about how small and fragile and hurtable she looks right now, and how different it is from her normal loud, brassy, fuck-the-world-I’m-Darcy-fuckin’-Greene self.

  I’ve never seen her like this. I told her once that she was an inside-out iron maiden — the torture device, not the band — because her spikes are on the outside. Not that I blame her. She’s been through some shit and seen some shit that no one should have to see or go through, and if becoming a medieval torture device is how she did it, that’s just fine.

  But I hate leaving her, even though I know she’s perfectly safe and she’s where she needs to be, and I know that if something happened right now I’d be worth fuck-all in the help department. It’s not like I can punch an infection.

  For the record, I would. I’d punch MRSA right in the goddamn face.

  It’s past one in the morning. When I walk out of the hospital and into the parking lot, the air is cool and the night’s dark, so dark I’m disoriented for a moment. Tallwood, Washington is a pretty small town with a pretty big music festival every year, but that means that I can see twice as many stars as I could in Los Angeles.

  And I just stand there, looking at them. I’m not religious and never have been, despite my mom’s best efforts, but at this moment staring at the stars out here and thinking thank you, she’s going to be okay, thank you so much seems like the right thing to do.

  After a while, I stop. I shake my head, then rub my face before I remember it’s bruised and fucked up. I know I need to get back to the hotel, I need a shower, I need to check in with Gavin, update him on Darcy and talk to him about what’s going to happen next, and I should probably eat something sometime.

  But I keep thinking of her, asleep and fragile, and I can’t stop wishing that it hadn’t happened and I can’t stop being grateful that this was all that happened. I stand in the hospital parking lot for a long time, staring up and trying to sort through everything, until someone else finally comes out of the hospital and walks to their car.

  That shakes me loose, so I call a cab and head back to our hotel.

  I hardly sleep. When I leave the hotel the next morning the desk attendant gives me a holy shit what happened to you look, and I just smile and shrug at her as I leave. To be honest, I’ve had my lip split so many times that I nearly forgot.

  Stop number one is a car rental place, because I’m gonna need wheels. Stop number two is a cutesy, homey cafe in downtown Tallwood that’s got wood paneling on every wall and cross-stitched inspirational sayings everywhere. They also make damn good breakfast biscuits, so I grab one for me and one for Darcy.

  Stop number three is the bookstore a block down from the cafe, because if I know Darcy she’s already bored out of her mind.

  Then the hospital again, quietly clenching my jaw and steeling myself as I walk through those big doors. That feeling of dread and nausea hits me full in the chest, all that shit flooding back, but I just keep walking.<
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  The new nurses glance my way, but I guess they’ve been told, because no one tries to stop me from heading past their station and into Darcy’s room, the morning sunlight flooding in through the window, making the bright hospital white even brighter.

  I stop short. There’s no Darcy. Just a messy bed with that pillow wedge on it.

  My heart crashes into itself. This hospital’s already got me tense and on edge, just waiting for something awful to happen, and I instantly think of the worst case scenario.

  Her burns got infected, she had a concussion they didn’t know about, when I tackled her it burst an aneurysm...

  Jesus, I hate hospitals. Fucking hate them. I fight down the panic and take a deep breath, knowing I’m getting ahead of myself, and I step into the room.

  “Darce?” I call.

  “In here,” she says, her voice echoing out of the bathroom.

  See? You were worried about nothing.

  “I brought breakfast.”

  “Come in, I’m not naked.”

  I toss the books and breakfast on the bed along with my jacket, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I walk for the hospital room’s bathroom. I look like reheated hell. Not even fresh hell. Split lip, bruised face, a huge gash on one arm that I don’t remember getting.

  It’s probably gonna scar and fuck up the tattoo of a dragon that’s under it, but I’m okay with it since that tattoo was done after hours in the back room of a tattoo shop by some guy named Jesús, and Jesús was probably drunk and definitely high.

  The tattoo isn’t very good, is what I’m saying.

  Darcy’s standing at the bathroom mirror, both arms over her head and a pair of scissors in one hand. She’s grimacing in pain and trying not to as she holds strands of hair up, examines them, and snips burned pieces off and lets them float to the floor, the bandages on her back stretching and wrinkling.

  “The fuck are you doing?” I ask, standing in the doorway.

  “Cutting off my burned hair,” she says, her tone of voice suggesting duh.