“Forget them Wendy. Forget them all. Come with me where you’ll never, never have to worry about grown up things again.”
-J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
“Hey, Ariana,” Bess sang out as she pushed the door to my room open with her hip. “You ready for your meds?”
I nodded and stuffed the magazine beneath the covers, but not before the head nurse saw what I’d been reading.
The corners of her eyes crinkled as she hooted, “Don’t hide that gorgeous man on my account! If I was thirty years younger, you can bet I’d be leaving my phone number all over this building for him to find.”
A wave of heat crept up my neck, but Bess didn’t seem to notice as she began mixing my medication into a container of applesauce.
The night tech shared a chuckle as she retrieved her purse from the small wardrobe. “I’ll be right back, Bess.”
“Sure thing. Take your time,” the nurse responded, before wheeling the table over to the bed. “Alright, Miss Ariana, eat this while I find something for you to watch on TV.”
My lips puckered with the first bite, the tartness sending shivers down my spine. I’d never particularly cared for applesauce and liked it even less with the medicine added in.
I’d just choked down the last bitter spoonful when something in the air shifted. I didn’t need to turn my head toward the door to know what that something was, either. I could see his reflection in the window just fine.
Killian.
The hat on his head was backward, but I imagined the logo matched the one on his shirt. In his sweatpants and house shoes, it was almost easy to believe he was a regular guy and not a ‘major-league superstar’ as the magazine had called him.
I was officially in uncharted waters. By accepting Killian’s offer, I’d essentially rejected any notion of a life of obscurity. And without a blue-eyed savior to smuggle me out of the city, I was back to square one with no real plan of escape. But I had time.
And I wasn’t capable of walking away from Killian. Seeing him incited a strange physical reaction within me, one that sent goosebumps racing across my skin and a flush across my cheeks.
“Hey, girl. You up for some company?” He asked, meeting my reflected gaze with a smirk. “I brought snacks.”
Bess dropped the remote back onto my bed and whirled around with a startled squeak. “You about gave me a heart attack, sugar! I’d love a snack. Come on in here!”
Killian cocked his head to the side in confusion. I turned away before he saw the smile tugging at my lips. I had a sneaking suspicion snack meant something entirely different for the nurse.
“Uh, well, I was actually here for Ari.”
She let out a booming laugh as she gathered up the empty applesauce container and spoon. “And here I thought it was my lucky day. Miss Ariana has just had her meds, so she’s gonna be drifting off to dreamland here shortly, but if you’d like, you can sit with her until then.”
I straightened against the pillows and gave a soft, wordless nod.
Please.
Killian caught my reaction, and the corner of his mouth quirked up. “I guess it’s settled then. Oh, Tsega said to mention that I did the training.”
“Did you now?” Bess asked with a cryptic smile. “Well, will wonders never cease? Alright, well, I’ll slip out and leave you two alone then. Just dial the extension on the board when you’re ready to leave. I’ll send someone in.”
She gathered up her things and headed for the door, but not before wagging her eyebrows at me, or Killian’s backside. It was hard to tell.
He leaned his crutches against the wall and handed me a plastic bag with another crooked grin. “I heard these were your favorite.”
I opened it up to find one of the giant frosted brownies from the cafeteria. The plastic container was warm to the touch, too. It was almost as if it had just been pulled from the oven, seemingly impossible as the cafeteria had closed over an hour ago.
“Thank you,” I said, my voice hoarse and grating. “But how did you—”
“Oh, a good magician never reveals his secrets.” Killian waved his fingers mystically, his body tilted at an awkward angle to keep the weight off his knee.
“Sit,” I offered, ignoring the nervous flutters in my belly as I scooted toward the window. It was the first time we’d been alone together. Technically, it was my first time in my life I’d been alone with a man I cared about, period.
“Want me to get the lights?” Killian asked, watching me with a steady gaze. “I don’t want to keep you up—”
“No,” I begged, taking a deep breath to calm my racing heart and thaw my insides. “I mean, will you lay here with me—just until I fall asleep?”
“Are you okay? Would it be better if I left?”
I patted the empty spot with a shaking hand. “Stay.”
He rolled the table over and sat down, almost immediately shifting as if he was uncomfortable. “What the hell?”
When he stood up and pulled the blankets back, I winced, belatedly remembering what I’d tucked away before his arrival.
“Well, well, well… what do we have here?” He dangled the magazine in front of me with a smirk. “Doing some light reading?”
“Nothing—it’s nothing.” I snatched it from his hand and pushed it beneath my pillow before reaching for the brownie container.
“Nothing,” Killian echoed with a lifted brow. “Right.”
He couldn’t expect me to talk if my mouth was full. With that flawless logic, I lifted the warm dessert to my lips. I’d never had one right out of the oven but decided with the first bite that I’d never be able to eat it any other way.
“How long does it take before the medicine kicks in?”
I swallowed before answering, “Um, it depends. Sometimes, a half-hour, maybe less. I’ve never actually timed it.”
“Do you want to watch TV?”
I shrugged and took another bite, closing my eyes with a small sigh of pleasure. Chocolate was my weakness.
When I reopened them, Killian was watching me through hooded eyes. “Good?” he murmured.
“So good,” I whispered, fighting the urge to moan as the decadent flavors melted on my tongue. “Do you want some?”
“Yeah,” he responded in a gruff tone. Instead of taking the container from my hand, he slid the pad of his thumb along the side of my mouth before popping it into his. “Mmm… you’re right. That’s fucking delicious.”
My eyes went round, and I made a noise that sounded a little like a whimper. The chill I’d felt only moments before heated, sending soft ripples of warmth to my extremities.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he whispered, running his tongue over his bottom lip.
“Why?”
My heart frolicked around my chest as Killian bent his head to mine. “Because I don’t want to rush this.”
His response was simple, but I couldn’t resist looking up at him from under my lashes. The spark burning in his blue eyes left me dazed. Disoriented. Mindless.
For a moment, he just stared at me before cupping my jaw in his right hand and tipping my face up. I wanted to beg him to keep touching me, but I didn’t have the words. His proximity left me excited and achy, but in a way that felt good.
Really good.
Killian’s eyes moved over my face, narrowing slightly when he got to my lips. Just as I became convinced he was going to kiss me, my voice returned. But instead of telling him all the things I wanted him to do, I blurted out the first thing that popped in my head.
“Did you always know you wanted to play baseball?” I asked in a tight voice, overcome by the strongest sense of loss when his hand fell away from my face.
He settled back against the pillows and reached for the remote, flipping aimlessly through the channels as he considered my question. “Yeah…well, I take that back. As a kid, I told anyone who would listen that I was going to be a ballplayer when I grew up. Then, I hit my teens, and those doubts crept in. I just didn’t see it being a lifelong ca
reer. What about you?”
“Oh no, I never saw myself playing baseball,” I deadpanned. “I don’t even know the first thing about it.”
Killian playfully pushed my shoulder with a grin. “No, I mean, tell me about yourself. What’s your passion?”
“Music,” I answered easily. “My passion is music.”
His brows pulled together as he scratched his jaw. “Really? Why music?”
“It’s an escape,” I whispered, lifting my eyes to the netting above my bed. I wondered if it was the medicine making my tongue loose, or just a deep-seated need to connect with someone. “I can get lost in the lyrics, and for those three or four minutes, it’s like nothing else exists.”
Killian stayed silent, but I could tell he was thinking. “I feel like that, too,” he finally admitted. “With the game. When I’m out on the field, I can shut the world out until it’s just me and the ball. It’s a powerful feeling.”
I agreed with a nod. It was when the song ended that my power was stripped away from me again.
“So,” he murmured, tilting his head toward me. “Do you play an instrument or sing?”
“I’m a singer/songwriter.”
Killian’s eyebrow raised. “Really? Well, color me impressed. Anything I might have heard?”
He was fishing for information. Given that I knew who he was, it only made sense he’d want the same in return. Still, I needed to tread carefully to avoid giving too much away. The less he knew about the church and my father, the better.
“I don’t know. I doubt it,” I answered quietly. It was an honest answer, as Killian didn’t strike me as the type of person who spent a lot of time listening to Christian radio stations.
“Don’t want me to know about your platinum rap album, do you?” He joked, running his tongue over his teeth.
The idea of it made me laugh. I shook my head, gazing up at his face. “Well, now that you’ve solved that mystery, could we maybe pick one channel to watch, instead of all of them?”
“What? You don’t like this?”
I wrinkled my nose and joked, “You’re giving me motion sickness—wait. Go back to that last one.”
“What, this one?” He flipped the channel. “Haunted Places? You want to watch this?”
I nodded, refusing to make eye contact with the foot of the bed, halfway convinced I’d see the lingering images from the car wreck. It was terrible enough to relive it in my nightmares almost every night.
When I didn’t answer, Killian’s gaze shifted to me, and I barely resisted the urge to burrow into his side. “Do you—” My voice cracked, and I cleared my throat before trying again. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
He was quiet for several seconds before shaking his head. “No, I don’t. I mean, I don’t doubt that there are people who think they’ve seen ghosts, but it seems a little out there for me. Why—you believe in ghosts, girl?”
I chewed at the corner of my bottom lip with a small nod, lost to my memories. “I think that maybe I might. I’ve been having recurring nightmares since my car accident.” I shuddered, hugging myself as another chill descended over me. “There’s something wrong with the car, almost like it’s not under my control anymore, and I hear people talking. Sometimes, I don’t recognize the voices, but every now and then, I do—which is impossible, because that person is dead.”
“Christ, Ari,” Killian said softly, before pulling my body closer. His hand moved over my back in gentle circles, and I relaxed, feeling the drowsiness settling in. “It sounds like your brain just took two traumatic events and combined them into one, but I can understand why you might believe there was a supernatural explanation.”
I stayed silent with my cheek resting against his chest, watching as the paranormal team investigated a haunted movie theater. My pulse had just evened out when he spoke again.
“When I was sixteen, I was in an accident. Well, I don’t know that it was much of an accident. Another kid and I got into a fight and I cracked my head on the dock, falling into the lake—”
“What?” I asked, my voice strangled.
“Crazy, right? I remember falling and then coming to on the beach. I swore there was a girl there with me, but she was gone before I was fully conscious. My mama was convinced it was an angel.”
My body tensed as I lifted my head to study his features, suddenly seeing a very different sort of ghost altogether.
The brownie in my lap began slipping, but I couldn’t look away. Killian managed to catch the container before it landed on the bed and rolled over to place it on the small table. When he turned back, my breath caught. I wondered how I hadn’t seen it before now.
Long dark lashes and blue eyes that seemed almost gray against the sky…
My inability to stay away—to suppress my feelings—it was as if all the puzzle pieces had finally aligned. Killian was the boy from the lake. I blinked against the fog settling over my brain, struggling to fight the effects of the medicine meant to help me sleep.
I didn’t want to sleep.
I wanted answers. It was no longer coincidence that when I needed a sanctuary the most, I’d run right into the arms of a man whose name meant church. The very man whose life I saved ten years prior.
He’d never been a stranger or a means to an end.
He was my beginning and end.
“Hey—” Killian frowned as he brushed the hair back off my face. “You okay?”
Was I?
“I—” I yawned, my eyes falling shut on their own. “I need—”
“You need to get some sleep,” he responded dryly, the corner of his mouth lifting. “Come here.”
My tongue felt heavy in my mouth, weighed down by the magnitude of what Killian had just revealed. And probably the drugs. But mostly, the revelation.
Tears pricked my eyes as he cradled my head against his chest, feeling the steady rise and fall like the waves that day on the lake.
The silence stretched from seconds into minutes. The paranormal team had already moved on to their next haunted place —a long-abandoned amusement park with a sinister history. Meanwhile, I was still reeling from the bombshell, trying to decide what my next step should be.
“Sometimes, I think, what if she was real?” Killian murmured as he stroked my hair. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. My heart was lodged somewhere in the base of my throat, anxiously waiting for him to connect the dots as I had.
“What if she was my one chance at salvation?” He exhaled a breathless laugh. “Hell, maybe my mama was right. Maybe she was just a guardian angel sent to watch over my dumb ass.”
I was being suffocated under a blanket of drugs, but managed to stay conscious long enough to mumble, “I’m no angel.”
It was the last thing I remembered before drifting off. Later, I’d swear I was already dreaming when I felt Killian’s lips brush against the inside of my wrist.
That was the thing about falling asleep with the medication. It could conjure up any number of hallucinations, including a whispered, “No, Ari. You’re as real as they come.”
14
Killian
“He couldn’t. Never again, not with anyone else. Nothing would ever, after that moment, compare. Not with her cry, not with her reaction, not with her kiss. A woman shouldn’t be created in such heartbreakingly beautiful combinations. A woman shouldn’t, in fifteen minutes, have the ability to ruin him for life.”
―Alessandra Torre, Moonshot
“You gonna tell me, girl, or should I just keep guessing?”
Ari sat cross-legged on the bed, studiously poring over a travel magazine with a distracted smile. Thanks to a tip from Tsega, her worn house shoes had been replaced with a pair almost identical to mine. After delivering them, my mama had pushed to meet my mystery girl, but I’d declined.
This was new to me. I wanted to shield it, and Ari, from the world for as long as possible.
“What about Argentina? There’s this fort—the Pucará de Tilcara—where they’ve found hum
an traces dating back over ten thousand years.”
I didn’t give two shits about touring ancient ruins in South America, but there was something to be said about watching Ari in her element. She’d mispronounced or completely butchered most of the names of the places in the magazine but had grinned up at me so earnestly that I hadn’t dared to correct her.
Because when Ari smiled—a real, genuine smile—it was like someone flipping on a light switch, making you aware that you’d spent your whole life living in the dark.
Her hair fell messily over one eye, and she paused to push it off her forehead. The movement revealed the scar underneath, the only visible wound from her car accident. As if sensing my stare, Ari used her fingers to hurriedly cover it up before going back to her research. I hated that she felt she had to hide from me but kept the thought to myself.
“That’s, uh, that’s pretty cool. Now, remind me again why we’re planning Georgia’s vacation for her? Aren’t there travel agents for that?” I adjusted the pillow beneath my knee before stretching out on the leather chair across from her.
“Georgia asked me to…” Ari’s words faded out, and she cleared her throat until she no longer sounded like a boy going through puberty. “Besides, it gives me something to do in the evenings.”
Sanchez and his crew grinned up at me from the Sports Illustrated on my lap, and I flipped it over before returning my attention to her. “You could—oh, I don’t know—tell me what you did to Helen. That would be a fun way to pass the time, don’t you think?”
“Not gonna happen,” she chuckled and wrote down a note before turning the page.
“C’mon,” I pleaded. I’d been trying to get it out of her for days now. “Did you run her over with your wheelchair?”
“You guessed that one already.”
“Wait, I got it. You, uh, you…” I was floundering, and we both knew it, but as long as it kept her amused, I could go all night. “Poisoned her food?”
“Killian,” she sighed in mock exasperation. “It’s like you’re not even trying. How would poisoning cause her great facial harm?”
Through The Water: Fairest Series Book Two Page 17