by Amber Lynn
“Your time behind bars must have been a little hard on your memory. If you remember, I don’t need a knife to disembowel you.”
Casey was tired of standing around. Her legs weren’t broken, so she stepped on his left foot to get Jimmy out of her way. He needed the right one for working the pedals. The unexpected stomp accomplished what she set out to do.
She walked over to the passenger side of her car and opened the door. Getting into her car was her least favorite task, but she powered through it while Jimmy stood and stared at her. As she did, she used the door for support and pulled it shut as seamlessly as she could.
She made it through the pain she’d initiated and reached over to put the key in the ignition and turn it to start the engine. Once Jimmy heard the motor, he finally moved.
“You’re seriously going to let me drive your car?” he asked as he opened the door.
“Get in and I’ll tell you where to go. You’ll have plenty of time to explain why you’re here.”
Casey was slightly curious, especially after Jimmy was part of the reason her dad had commanded her and Dylan to get together in the first place. He’d just been a week off as far as his timing went.
Jimmy got in and backed up quickly, turning them around a little faster than Casey had expected. Seatbelts were awkward, so she hadn’t bothered to buckle in. Her body whipped a little towards her door, but she didn’t reveal the move hurt.
“Turn left when you get back to the road. It’s pretty much a straight shot from there, other than turning on seventy-third.”
Dylan had taken Casey and shown her around, so she could see what she was missing while living in her small house with no neighbors. She hadn’t been impressed by the two thousand square feet. There was so much wasted space that it made Casey a little sad. He’d only shown her a few of the rooms before she asked to leave.
Jimmy didn’t immediately start talking, even after they’d made it to the road. Casey didn’t care about his purpose for being there, so she sat quietly and waited for their turn, just in case Jimmy missed it.
“I can see you haven’t really changed over the years. Yeah, you’ve physically changed, but you still have that fire in you. There was a time I wanted to bottle that all up for myself, and I thought getting some fast cash would make that possible.”
“Clearly you were too busy screwing around to pay attention in school. If you would’ve at least turned on the news every once in a while, you’d have noticed how stupid your plan was.”
“I completely agree. I was stupid, but I’m trying to fix things. I have a daughter and I want her to be proud of me. That means I have a lot to make up for.”
“Not with me you don’t. I burned all the bridges between us long ago.”
Casey knew that he’d ended up having a baby girl, but she didn’t think he was going to be allowed in her life. If Casey had been the one who got pregnant, Jimmy would’ve never met his offspring.
“And I suppose that’s what I needed to hear. I hurt you when we were both too young to know better. I should take that back, you knew better. You were always more advanced than the rest of us in school.”
“Someone had to be. You guys were all a bunch of idiots. This is your turn.”
Casey had figured out the deal with Jimmy was just him trying to absolve his sins. She’d moved on so many years ago that it meant very little to her.
As they got closer to Dylan’s house, Casey’s heart pounded harder in her chest. She really hoped she was wrong. She tried to tell herself that he’d decided to do a big load of laundry that her small washer and dryer combo couldn’t handle. That didn’t explain why his phone was possessed, but it could explain what had been taking him so long.
Casey saw his car in the driveway, so at least she knew she didn’t have to drive around the city to find him. She tried to tell herself he wouldn’t be stupid enough to pick up a girl and take her to his house.
“It’s the house with the black sedan in the driveway.”
“Really? You know what kind of car that is, right? It’s the sure sign of a guy with more money than he knows what to do with.”
“Just pull up behind it and let me out. The fact that what you said is true doesn’t have any relevance.”
Jimmy shut up and pulled in. The front door was open behind the screen door, which seemed odd. It wouldn’t have been if Dylan expected to be in and out of the house, but he didn’t magically appear after Casey climbed out and slammed the door with her hip.
An echoing car door, made her look over to Jimmy. He walked over to the car in front of them and felt the hood.
“This has been parked here a while. Maybe you should give me a little more information about what I’m walking into.”
“You’re not walking into anything. I’m going to walk inside and see why my boyfriend isn’t answering when I call him.”
Jimmy didn’t need the exact details of the weird calls. He was transportation.
“It took you almost a minute to climb out of the car. There’s no way I’m letting you walk in there to deal with ‘Mr. Trying to Compensate.’”
It was rich hearing Jimmy giving her advice. He could’ve been trying to convince her the sky was blue and she wouldn’t have trusted him.
“He doesn’t have anything to compensate for. He’s a hockey player and he wants to look cool when he parks next to his teammates.”
“Then I’m definitely not letting you walk in there alone. Are you planning to knock, or just barge in?”
Casey ignored him and started walking towards the door. Standing around chatting wasn’t getting anything done, and Dylan still hadn’t come to check on what was going on in his driveway.
Jimmy ran in front of her and tried knocking on the door. For being such a spineless coward when she knew him, it seemed he was the one trying to compensate for something.
Casey stood behind him for a second and waited. When she didn’t hear any noises from within the house, she nudged him out of the way and opened the screen door. The foyer was empty, so she walked through it into the living room.
Having never been one for hysterics, anyone who knew her would’ve been surprised when she started screaming. She expected to maybe walk in and catch Dylan in a compromised position. It hadn’t dawned on her that she’d walk in to find him in a pool of blood.
The oak floor underneath his body had a dark red stain around his torso, and there were streaks of blood across the floor where he either moved himself or was moved. He was turned away from her and wore a dark shirt, so she couldn’t see where the damage was. She was thankful to see there wasn’t any blood around his head. There was already enough to worry about without thinking about seeing his brains leaking out on the floor.
After the initial scream, she gave herself a mental smack and hurried over to him. She was afraid to move him, but she needed to assess the damage. He wasn’t moving, and that scared her to death.
“Call nine-one-one,” she commanded as she rolled Dylan onto his back. The first thing she noticed was his eyes were closed and his skin was a sickly shade of white.
She grabbed the wrist closest to her to check for a pulse. It was there, but it was weak. She dropped his hand down by his side and lifted up his shirt to look at the damage. Any hope that it was a simple wound was instantly dashed. Dylan had six or seven holes and slashes in his torso. None of them looked high enough to damage his heart or lungs, but anything involved in digestion was probably injured.
Seeing that there were more wounds on his left side than his right, gave her a little hope. She knew the liver was on the right, and too many stab wounds to it could be critical.
Casey couldn’t tear off his shirt to make compresses; she was lucky she’d been able to roll him around to begin with. She lowered his shirt and pressed down on the wounds she thought were most dangerous. Blood wasn’t exactly still pouring out of them, but it was all she could do as she heard Jimmy speaking to the operator behind her.
Looking
over next to where Dylan had been lying, she saw his phone with bloody fingerprints on the touchscreen. She fought back the tears welling in her eyes, but it was a big task.
“I’m sorry, Casey. I’ve got an ambulance on the way here, but I can’t be here when the police arrive. I wanted to see you and say I was sorry, but I’m on parole and I don’t think the police will be thrilled if they find me here.”
“That’s okay. Take my car and just leave the keys in the mailbox at my place.”
A part of her was a little mad at him for hesitating at every turn on their way over, but all she could really focus on was pushing on Dylan’s stomach and watching his shallow breaths move his chest up and down. She tried to match her breaths with his, but they were too slow for her rapid breathing.
She vaguely heard a car start up and leave through her concentration. She wished he was at least conscious, so he could hear what she had to say to him.
“Don’t you die on me, Dylan Jones. You finally made me fall in love with you, and I’m not going to let you get off that easy. You’re going to have to deal with me the rest of your life, and that better not end today.”
Casey hadn’t ever been one to pray for anything. She realized early on that it didn’t do a lot of good, but she found herself begging someone, anyone, to save his life.
Chapter Nineteen
Someone needed to stop the beeping. Dylan didn’t know what it was, but it was enough to drive him crazy, a feat most people who knew him would say wasn’t hard to do. He’d had a screw loose most of his life, but he thought he’d gotten by just fine.
Better than fine he’d say. His team was getting ready to head into the playoffs at the top of the standings and he’d met the love of his life. Casey wasn’t the easiest woman to live with, but she made things fun. Thinking of her, he heard her voice whispering to him. Asking him to wake up.
It was a silly request. He was obviously awake. He heard her and he heard the horrible beeping drilling into his head. It didn’t sound like the alarm clock at Casey’s place, and she didn’t have a television or radio, so he couldn’t figure out what it was.
Opening his eyes to show her he was awake proved a little more difficult than he expected. There seemed to be a giant weight keeping them closed. He fought to open them, though. It’s what Casey wanted, so he had to do it.
It may have taken him an hour to actually get it done. The bright light greeting him made him instantly want to close them again, but moving his head just a little, he saw his beautiful girlfriend’s head laying on top of his chest. He always found it hard to close his eyes or look away when she was right in front of him.
After all the talk about him opening his eyes, hers were closed, and she seemed to be mumbling in her sleep. Dylan lifted up his left arm to run his finger through her hair, his right hand was clasped tightly in hers and clutched to her chest. That couldn’t have been comfortable so soon after her operation.
Moving his arm, Dylan realized it was more difficult than just picking it up and placing it in a new spot. There were tethers trying to keep his hand stationary, but he fight through the web and successful dropped his hand on her head, a little harder than he’d planned.
Casey’s green eyes popped open as he started running his fingers through her hair. He hadn’t noticed as he fought to touch her, but tears were streaming down her face. He couldn’t believe he’d missed them.
“Why are you crying?”
Dylan didn’t recognize his own voice. It was raspy and weak, nothing at all like what he was used to.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because the man I love has been lying around comatose in a hospital bed for three days. The doctors kept telling me you wouldn’t make it, which of course I replied back that you wouldn’t dare die. It seems I’ve potentially won the bet.”
Dylan tried to remember anything that would’ve left him in a coma, momentarily not commenting on the fact that she’d said she loved him.
“I don’t understand. You love me?”
“Of course I do, and I would’ve said it to you eventually. You didn’t have to go and get yourself stabbed to draw it out of me.”
Casey moved to lift her head, but Dylan pushed it down to keep her close. “What are you talking about?”
“You don’t remember? They said you took a pretty hard hit to the head, but we couldn’t find what hit you, so we assumed it was just the floor. I lobbied that it was actually a wrecking ball, because that’s the only thing I could think of that would’ve knocked you out.”
“I was stabbed and hit? Maybe you should start from the beginning.”
“If I did that, I’d reveal what an insecure ninny I can be. While you were leaking out blood all over your living room floor, I was at home thinking you were cheating on me. How messed up is that? You take longer than I think you should to get home, and my mind instantly thinks you’re off banging someone else.”
“That is silly, and I think a little undeserved on my part, but I’m sure you’ll learn from your mistake.”
“Yeah, you’re never going to leave my side again. I’ve been trying to convince the doctors around here to connect us at the hip, but they aren’t being very cooperative.”
Dylan was pretty sure that was for the best. Figuratively joined at the hip was one thing, and perfectly fine. Having surgery to make it a reality was crossing some line he didn’t think needed to be crossed.
“We can talk about that later. Other than the head injury, exactly what else is wrong with me? I don’t know that I feel any pain in a particular spot.”
“They were nice enough to hook you up with the top shelf drugs, since you weren’t awake to administer them yourself. If you didn’t have them, believe me, you’d be screaming. You were stabbed seven times in the stomach. Four of the wounds weren’t deep enough to cause any problems, bleeding yes, but not internal damage. One of the other three went through your left kidney, and since your attacker decided to twist the knife, that was where most of the damage occurred. I should go grab the doctors, so they can check on you.”
“They can wait. You’re sure about all the injuries? I feel like I should remember being stabbed.”
Dylan didn’t like where the conversation was going, so he tried delaying the inevitable. He should’ve waited to ask her what happened until he had a little more time to feel what was going on with his body.
“You were conscious at some point after you were stabbed. I called you and you answered, but didn’t say anything. A few second later, you called me back and started hitting every button you could. I’m told the stabbing had taken place probably thirty minutes before I got there.”
“I want to ask if they know who did it, but I think the more pressing question is how you got there. There’s no way you could drive yourself. Did you call your dad?” Dylan knew there were other people she could call, but Holcomb was the most likely candidate.
“We should probably get back to the fact that you’re down a kidney, and what exactly that means for you.”
“No, we shouldn’t. With a misdirection like that, I think we should discuss my line of questioning.”
Losing a kidney changed a lot of things in Dylan’s world. He wasn’t sure exactly what it meant for his career, but being down to a single kidney probably meant he had to keep the remaining one in good shape.
“There’s nothing to talk about. I got a ride and made it there not long before you would’ve died.”
“And I’m sure I’m grateful for that, but you, my dear, are hiding something. Didn’t anyone ever teach you it isn’t nice to keep things from a guy who almost died?”
Casey stared at him for a second before she continued. “I’ll tell you, but you’re going to have to have a psych evaluation for thinking it’s more important than going through your injuries and hearing who tried to kill you.”
“Not a problem. How did you get a ride when you live in the middle of nowhere?”
Casey sighed and tried to sit up again. She failed t
he second time, which let Dylan know he wasn’t as weak as he mentally felt. The more he realized he didn’t know what was going on, the more his brain felt like mush.
“I was going to drive myself, you know how I get when my mind starts thinking irrationally. I didn’t have to though, because when I got outside, Jimmy was waiting for me.”
“Jimmy, as in the guy your dad was worried about coming after you, Jimmy. What the hell was he doing at our house?”
Dylan watched as one of Casey’s eyebrows lifted when he called it their house. He vaguely remembered that he was trying to get the last of his clothes from his place so he didn’t have to go back and forth. He’d even stopped by a realtor’s office to discuss putting his old house up for sale.
He remembered that it had taken the guy forever to get paperwork together for Dylan to take back and talk with Casey about. No wonder she’d been worried about what had taken so long. He didn’t want to tell her he was selling the place until he had an idea of what it would take to sell it.
“That would be the one. It sounded like he’d joined some twelve-step program or something and felt he needed to make amends. I was focused on you, so I didn’t really pay much attention. I had him call the cops and he disappeared because he wanted to say he was sorry, but not end up in jail for a parole violation.”
“Wasn’t it a little suspicious that he showed up while I was attacked? You just let him walk away without the police checking him out?” Dylan was trying to hide the fact that he was pissed Jimmy had any contact with Casey, but that task proved a little difficult.
“You don’t have to rub it in. I was so busy trying to put your blood back in you that I wasn’t thinking straight. It turns out it wasn’t him, so I didn’t let your potential murderer walk out your front door.”
“So they caught the person?”
Dylan had no idea who would’ve wanted to kill him. The only enemy he could think of, just because they’d been talking about him, was her ex-boyfriend. If Casey hadn’t brought him up, Dylan would’ve said no one was out to get him.