The Avoiding Series Boxset

by K. A. Linde

  “Just fine,” she said crossing her arms over her chest, sinking into one hip, and looking at Brandon pointedly.

  “Uh, Kace, you remember Lexi, right?” he asked gesturing between the two women.

  Her eyes traveled back to Lexi examining her before answering. “Don’t you date Ramsey Bridges?” Kace asked with accusatory inflection in her voice.

  Lexi smiled brightly at the mention of her boyfriend. Just the thought of him made her burst with excitement. She was certain that much was evident on her face. “Yeah, I do.”

  “Uh huh,” Kace replied glancing conspiratorially between the two.

  Lexi knew that this looked bad. She had clearly walked in on something and was now making the situation worse. Brandon was a known womanizer. Lexi had heard just such information straight out of Kace’s mouth one time. She knew the suspicions were likely warranted on Brandon’s end. Luckily no one knew anything about her or else the suspicions would be even more heightened.

  “Well, Kace, it’s been nice…as always,” Brandon said attempting damage control. “We can finish what we started later, yes?”

  “You’re kicking me out?” she gasped in surprise.

  Lexi grimaced at what she had walked in on and took a hesitant step backward. “I didn’t mean to come at a bad time,” she stuttered out quickly. “I can always come back later, and we can discuss that paperwork then if you want.” She knew her damage control sounded as forced as his.

  Brandon examined her closely. “Paperwork?” Her eyes bulged open as she attempted to signal him to shut the fuck up. “Right, paperwork. Yeah, you should probably come back for that.”

  “Not necessary,” Kace interjected. “I see that our…meeting is over anyway.”

  “Kace,” he pleaded.

  “No, no, I see that you have other business to attend to,” she said striding across the office and brushing past Lexi.

  “It’s really not like that,” Lexi responded hurriedly.

  Kace gave her a sad smile. “Of course not. It never is with Brandon,” she said with a roll of her eyes.

  “Kace,” he growled, grasping her elbow and yanking her toward him. She gasped as she was flung into his arms. He bent down and claimed her lips in a deep kiss. When he released her, the earlier anger in her eyes had dissipated. “I’ll see you later.”

  “Yes. Later,” she responded dreamily as she exited the office. He toed the door closed behind her and turned back to his desk.

  Lexi sighed and followed him, taking the unoccupied chair next to his desk. “Sorry.”

  “You can’t call ahead of time like a normal person?” he grumbled leafing back through the papers he had been dealing with before Kace’s interruption.

  Lexi shrugged helplessly. “I didn’t know you’d have…company.”

  “Assume away,” he said waving a dismissive hand.

  “Anyway, lunch?” she asked a bright smile crossing her face.

  He sighed staring down at the stack of papers on his desk. “If I keep having lunch with you, people are going to think you’ve put me in the friend zone,” he murmured practically quoting a line out of Just Friends.

  “You are in the friend zone,” she said with a giggle. “You have been for a couple weeks, and it’s seemed to work out just fine. Anyway, everyone knows that I’m living with Ramsey. You’re the only one who seems not to care about that.”

  “I’m not the only one,” he murmured. “Just the only one who will admit it.” He glanced back up at her flirtatiously, a smirk appearing on his lips.

  Lexi shrugged again nonchalantly as if she had been through this conversation before…and she had. “Doesn’t matter that you admit it. I’m still with Ramsey,” she said certainly.

  He set the papers aside, leaned back in his administrative chair, and stared at her. “And where is your man today?” he asked.

  “He’s working,” she told him with a faint sigh at the end.

  “Ahh,” he murmured, “Too busy to take his girlfriend to lunch?”

  “Stop goading me, Brandon. He’s not used to anyone being around. We had a long distance relationship, and he can’t quit his job to have lunch with me every day. Since you work a 9to5, you have no trouble being constantly available especially. You don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “I would, if you would let me take someone else to lunch,” he spat back playfully.

  “You know there’s nowhere else you’d rather be,” she said. “So come on. I want sushi today, and it’s your turn to pay.”

  “Fine,” he grumbled, yet still managed a smile.

  The two had managed to develop quite a friendship as Lexi had predicted that night out on Ramsey’s balcony. Brandon, of course, never failed to shamelessly flirt and throw himself at Lexi, but she always deflected his advances. They had an easy banter, and found that they had more in common than originally anticipated. When they both let their guards down, they really enjoyed each other’s company. He wasn’t exactly a substitute for Chyna, no one could really replace her best friend, but he was a nice change in the mean time.

  Ramsey didn’t approve of the relationship as he had made clear time and time again. But with Ramsey’s continual absence, Lexi had to find a way to kill time outside of her job. He wasn’t always around when she was at home, but both cherished the time they spent together. Lexi was certain that the decision to move in with him had been an accurate one at this point. Even though he was so busy, it was better to have the couple hours a week together than to have the distance to separate them.

  Lexi paused in the doorway as her cell phone jingled in her purse. “Sorry,” she mumbled fumbling with the latch on her purse. “Mom, hey, it’s not the best time. I’m about to go to lunch,” Lexi spoke quickly into her phone. The sobbing that penetrated through the receiver stopped Lexi in her tracks. “Mom, are you all right? Is everything all right? What happened? Calm down. Calm down. Tell me what happened,” Lexi spoke urgently, her heart beating out of her chest with fear. Panic gripped her and she latched onto Brandon as he approached. Upon seeing her stricken face, he ushered her back into his office.

  “It’s your father,” her mother gasped through her tears.

  “Dad?” Lexi moaned in terror. “What happened to Dad?” Brandon rested his arm around her shoulder for support, as her body seemed to collapse under the weight of the impending news.

  “Honey, he had a heart attack,” she cried out. She hiccupped a couple times into the phone, a sure sign, Lexi knew, of an onset of hyperventilation.

  Lexi felt a tear run down her cheek and then another one followed. She couldn’t stop them from tumbling relentlessly out of her eyes. “Is he okay?” she could barely get out.

  Another round of sobbing came through the line. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I just…don’t know.”

  “Where is he? Did you call an ambulance?” Lexi asked taking the side of the parental figure and demanding the details.

  “He went into the city for some consulting work,” she sobbed. “He had been complaining that his shoulder and chest hurt, but we didn’t think anything of it. He always has chest pains. Luckily someone was around when he collapsed. They picked up the call and told me they were calling 911.” She paused for another round of fitful tears. Lexi had never quite heard her mother in such a state. “They took him to Grady. It’ll take me too long to get there, but I’m on my way. Please go and tell me he’s all right. Tell me I haven’t lost my George.”

  “I’m on my way now, Mom. I love you. I’ll call you from the hospital,” Lexi told her before hanging up.

  “Do you need me to go with you?” Brandon asked having heard everything through the line.

  “No,” Lexi said swiping at her face. “I just…I can drive.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked grasping both of her shoulders in his hands and staring deep in her tear streaked face. She nodded helplessly. He pulled her into a brief comforting hug. “Call me if you need anything,” he told her. She nodded again and then quic
kly left his office.

  She pulled her phone back out as soon as she was out of the elevator. Her first instinct was to call Ramsey. She knew he was busy working, but she needed to speak with him. Hopefully he would be available. Sometimes when he got so into work, he completely forgot all else, including to check his phone. She pressed the speed dial number for his phone, listened to it ring four times before going to voicemail.

  Lexi cursed loudly as she entered the parking garage and beelined for her car. She wanted to talk to Chyna. She was reassuring and always helped Lexi through these problems. Unfortunately, she was halfway across the world at a photo shoot in Milan, and the international reception was terrible. Lexi rarely got to talk with her, and never when she was the one who called.

  She scrambled to figure out who she could call. She needed to speak to someone…to have someone reassure her. She needed a voice of reason in her panic. Brandon was nice. She could have let him come with her, but they had been friends for less than a month. This wasn’t exactly a place for her to allow him to get involved. She needed someone else…someone who really knew her.

  Lexi knew she had lost her sanity the instant her fingers numbly dialed the next number. “Lexi?” Jack asked answering the phone on the first ring. She couldn’t help it. She sobbed into the phone just as her mother had when Lexi had answered.

  “Lexi? Are you all right? Are you hurt? What happened?” he asked, listening to her tears.

  “Jack. Oh Jack,” she cried. “My dad had a heart attack.”

  “What?” he gasped. “Is everything all right?”

  “I don’t know. I’m on my way to Grady right now to find out,” she told him finding her car in the garage.

  “You can’t drive! Listen to yourself,” he cried.

  She blubbered into the phone about how concerned her mom sounded. “What other choice do I have?”

  “Where are you? Let me come get you,” he said.

  “I can’t take you away,” she told him, unlocking her car and throwing her purse inside.

  “Lexi, god damn it, don’t be stubborn this time!”

  She sank into the front seat of her car. Placing her hands on the steering wheel, she found they were trembling beyond control. She couldn’t drive like this. “I’m at Bridges in the parking garage,” she told him.

  “You’re just downstairs, and you weren’t going to let me help you?” he demanded angrily. “Fuck. Don’t you move. I’ll be down there in a second. Meet me at the stairs.”

  A few agonizingly long minutes later, Jack appeared at the bottom of the stairwell and walked her to his car. She wasn’t sure why she was letting him help her when she had refused Brandon the same request. Her heart hurt too much, and she was too scared to even want to contemplate it. He was Jack. That was all that mattered right now.

  Jack peeled out of the garage and zipped toward the interstate. Lexi sat numbly with her hands clenched in her lap staring out the windshield. She gulped, her mind spinning webs of possibilities.

  “Hey,” he said tentatively brushing her shoulder. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “Okay,” she murmured, tears falling out of her eyes once more. Jack reached over, unclasped her hands, and gently placed one in his. They laced fingers; it was the most comforting thing he could offer.

  “He’s going to be fine. Grady has some of the best doctors in the world. He is in good hands there.”

  “I know,” she murmured, wiping a tear from her cheek with her free hand, “but it’s my daddy.”

  “I know, Lex,” he said, “but you have to be positive. You don’t know all the details. Things will work out.”

  “How? How do you know?”

  “I don’t. I just have a feeling,” he told her. “He’s going to be all right.”

  “Promise?” she begged.

  He paused a second before answering. “Yes, I do.”

  “Thanks, Jack,” she breathed. “That means a lot.” She was holding back another round of tears.

  “Of course.”

  “I just needed to talk to someone…someone who knows me,” she said quietly.

  Jack took another exaggerated pause before responding. “Well, I know you, Lex.”

  “I know, Jack,” she whispered.

  Jack pulled off the road and into the Grady emergency room parking lot. “If you need me to come get you from the hospital afterwards just give me a call, okay?”

  “Okay,” she mumbled.

  “Everything will be fine,” he repeated for reassurance.

  “Thanks.”

  “Please call me to let me know what happens, all right, Lex?” he pleaded. She gripped his hand tightly. “I want to know that I’m right…that I held up my promise.”

  “Sure, Jack,” she said sadly as she slowly released his hand. “Thank you.”

  “Of course,” he told her as she exited the car. She raced into the Emergency Room lobby and to the woman behind the desk.

  “Name,” she said dryly not looking up from her clipboard.

  “My father had a heart attack. I need to see him,” Lexi gasped out.

  “Name?” she asked turning to her computer flippantly.

  “George. George Walsh. My name is Lexi. I’m his daughter,” she breathed out as fast as possible.

  “Yes. Mr. Walsh is up the stairs and down the hall. Room number 205,” the woman told her barely glancing at her over her horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Thank you,” Lexi said before darting down the hall. She skidded around the corner at a near break neck speed and took the stairs two at a time. She slowed as she approached the much busier hallway. She lightly jogged as she followed the line of numbers to the one her father had been assigned.

  Lexi pushed open the door to her father’s hospital room and stepped in. “Daddy?” she whispered into the sunlit room tears streaming down her face again.

  Her father’s eyes fluttered open briefly in recognition before closing again. His breathing was labored and he looked as if he had just run a marathon. His skin was almost a green color, and he was soaked through with sweat, even though the hospital room was frigid. Despite this, a faint smile appeared at the edges of his lips upon her entrance. “Hey…ba…by girl,” he breathed out before falling silent again, the effort to speak taking too much out of him.

  “Hey,” she cooed rushing to his bedside, planting a soft kiss on his forehead, and falling back softly into the waiting bedside chair. “You don’t look too good, old man,” she said jokingly. It took everything she could to chuckle softly. She could tell it was straining him to pull up the corners of his mouth, but that didn’t stop him.

  Lexi pulled out her phone and quickly sent a text to her mother to let her know that her husband was still alive. She didn’t want to leave his side long enough to make the phone call. She knew her mother was likely still in hysterics, and the thought of being out of the room for long enough to deal with that seemed too much to grasp right now.

  A nurse scrambled in the doorway and Lexi snapped her head around at the disruption to the quiet of the room. The only thing that had been constant were the deep wheezing breaths her father was taking, and the slow beeps emitted from the machine next to his bedside. The woman stopped in her tracks when she saw Lexi sitting in the previously unoccupied chair. “Well, hello dear,” she said a bit too brightly for the circumstances.

  “Hi,” Lexi squeaked out. “Is he going to be okay?”

  “Oh, he is going to be just fine. The doctors will come in and explain everything to you shortly. You’re his daughter, I presume?” she asked waddling over to her father’s bedside. Lexi nodded mutely as she watched the nurse begin to fiddle with the IV stuck into his hand. For some reason Lexi hadn’t even realized it was there. “Well, I’m going to monitor the ECG until the doctor arrives.”

  A short while later her mother bustled into the room. Her face was still covered in tears and at the sight of her husband hooked up to machines; she fell into another round of hysterics. Lexi stood and
allowed her to take the seat at his side that she had occupied. She watched her mother reach out tentatively and grasp his hand in her own. She stayed there staring at the love of her life, the man she had spent the last thirty years with. Lexi wondered if she would ever be as happy as them one day.

  Just then the doctor walked through the door. Lexi turned around to face the door as the small brunette entered, her nose buried in the patient’s chart. “Well, let’s see what we have here,” she began. “George Walsh. Age forty-nine. Heart attack. Overall, I’d say you are rather lucky, under the circumstances, Mr. Walsh.” Finally, she looked up at her patient.

  Lexi released a short gasp at the recognition between the two. “Parker?”

  The doctor looked between Lexi and the patient she had been addressing and back. She was clearly thrown off that her personal life had somehow managed to wiggle into her work environment. “Lexi?”

  “You two know each other?” Lexi’s mother asked glancing back and forth between her daughter and the doctor who looked remarkably like Lexi. Lexi and Parker both nodded. “But…you look so much alike,” she said wistfully.

  “We’ve heard that before,” Parker answered returning to her paperwork quickly.

  Lexi forgot how shy Parker could be in uncomfortable situations. “This is my father,” she stated even though the fact was now obvious. “Sorry, I’ll just…uh, wait outside. I need some air. I’ll be back in a minute, Mom.” Lexi rushed past Parker and out into the hallway. She took a deep intake of the stale hospital air. She was sure that she was overreacting, but being in the same room with her at such an emotional time felt wrong. She needed to leave. She needed to get out of there.

  A seat was placed outside of one of the rooms, and she slumped into it. All she wanted to do was shut off her brain. She closed her eyes and pressed her palms to her temples in an attempt to stop the pounding in her skull. A tear fell from her eye, as the pressure from the last couple hours seemed to settle on her body. She wanted to go home, cuddle up with some double chocolate ice cream, and cry herself to sleep. She had almost lost her daddy today. It wasn’t a feeling she was soon to forget.