Redemptive (Combative Trilogy #2)
Page 19
I pulled the covers up to my chin and didn’t bother answering him. I didn’t need to. It didn’t matter what I thought.
Dr. Polizi sighed as he stepped away from the bed, and looked over at Nate. “She can take them in the morning with her insulin, or at lunch with her vitamins and other pills,” Polizi told him.
Nate looked up, his face void of emotion. “Thanks, Doc.”
They spoke in hushed tones as if I wasn’t in the room, and a few minutes later, I was alone. Again. I was always alone. Nate had been (as he liked to call it) working “overtime.” He was barely home, and when he was, he was on his computer, or asleep. He’d been going to the gym a lot, too, and it showed, not that I had any sexual appetite to appreciate it.
Maybe that’s why he asked the doc to get me on anti-depressants.
I scoffed to myself just as he re-entered the room. “What’s funny?” he asked while he sat on the edge of the bed. He slipped on his shoes with one hand, the other landing on my hip. He forced a smile in my direction, one that said, I’m sorry, but I have to go. The real world awaits and besides, you barely get out of bed, and you haven’t showered in three days, so I’d rather not be around you…
“Bailey?”
My eyes moved to his.
“I might be home a little late…”
I contained my eye roll. He probably wanted to have sex. I should shower. Shave. Do all my hostage/girlfriend duties. Hostage. I scoffed again.
“Bailey!”
“What? I heard you!” I snapped.
“Okay, I’m sorry,” he rushed out, his hands going up in surrender. “It just seems like you keep zoning out on me.”
I wondered if the girls he was fucking during his so-called “overtime” could smell me on him. Or if they did, would they care? Girls loved the bad-boy, and they don’t get any badder than Nate fucking DeLuca.
“Bailey…”
“What?!”
“Nothing.” He shook his head, his gaze dropping. “I just love you, is all.”
Nate
I knew part of it was my fault. I’d been working a lot lately. Too much. Benny had a rat at the local precinct and, apparently, the cops had been on our tail since the rich kid OD’d. Benny told me all this, followed by an order/warning that it was on me to find a more discrete way to get supplies and do the exchange. So I ignored Polizi’s pleas, and I’d been working overtime, trying to find new ways to meet with suppliers, which, unfortunately, still included the Francos. Tiny and I spent most nights driving from one location to another, using the darkness of the night to hide our intentions, but I’d always made sure to come home, every single night, to Bailey.
It doesn’t matter that she didn’t notice, or that she no longer cared.
And the truth is, it was a selfish choice. I needed to be with her. I ached to be with her.
I spent my days trying to work out who I was, trying to find my reason, but at night… in the four walls of that basement with Bailey in my arms, her slumbered breaths on my skin and her heart beating with mine, I found peace.
I found solace.
I found purpose.
But I also found myself drowning, sinking, unable to breathe from the weight of my so-called peace, and I questioned everything I felt and tried to match it with how she felt and I couldn’t. I couldn’t find the truth between the web of lies we’d created, and worse… I couldn’t find Bailey. I guess that’s when I came to the realization. I could no longer find her, because she no longer existed.
*
Bailey was sitting at the top of the basement stairs when I got home. She stood as soon as she heard me, her hands grasping the hem of the too-big shirt she was wearing. She wiped her eyes as if she’d been crying, and lifted her chin, her shoulders square. For a moment, I thought it was anger I saw in her eyes—frustrated, built up anger that I was no doubt responsible for, but then she smiled, her breath shaky when she exhaled.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She shrugged, her voice almost a whisper when she said, “Waiting for you.”
“Oh yeah?” I stepped forward, and her hand claimed mine as soon as I was close enough.
She inhaled deeply, and looked up, her tear-coated eyes meeting mine. “I’ve been waiting for you to come home because I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry about… just… about everything, Nate, and I—” She broke off on a sob, one that pierced my already breaking heart.
I released her hands and cupped her face, tilting her head back. “Bailey, it’s fine.”
She shook her head, her hands grasping my wrists. “It’s not fine, Nate. You don’t deserve the way I’ve been treating you, or the way I’ve been acting and I’m so sorry because you’ve done nothing but take care of me since the moment you found me. I’m just lost at the moment, so lost, and I have been for a while, but every night you come home to me, and you’re here… you’re here with me, and you don’t have to be and I don’t know why I’ve been acting like that isn’t enough.”
Because it’s not, I wanted to tell her. And she was wrong. She had no idea how much I had to be with her.
“Do you remember our first fight?” she asked, wiping her cheeks with her forearm. “The one where I was insecure about what you did out there and jealous of all the—”
“Yeah,” I cut in. “I remember.”
“You remember what you said? About how we end all our fights?”
I nodded.
“I need you to end it, Nate,” she cried, moving her hands to my shirt, fisting and tugging harshly. “God, I need you to end it,” she repeated, and so I did, right there on the stairs with a million emotions fleeting between us, I gave her what she needed. I inhaled her cries and let them consume me, I tasted her tears and let them destroy me, I gave in to her pleas and let them control me, and then she did the same with me. We used each other, physically, emotionally, it didn’t matter, because when the pink of her lips spread thin around my cock and my hands fisted her hair, she looked up at me with love and appreciation in her eyes, and for a second, one split second, my heart stopped hurting. Then I was inside her, the sounds of my pain and despair muffled by her neck while she panted, promises and declarations of a forever that didn’t exist whispered into the still, dead air around us. But it wasn’t until it was over, her in my arms and our bodies still connected, drowning in the evidence of our pleasure and pain that reality hit, and hit with a force I couldn’t ignore… our actions hadn’t ended it. If anything, it just restarted the cycle. And I guess she must’ve felt it too because when I woke up the next morning, she wasn’t in our bed, she was on the bathroom floor, and I felt the shift in both our presence, like a tidal wave of doom. For minutes, I just sat there watching her, until she turned to me, her eyes hopeless and tired and then she said the two words that sparked the flames, the two words that ruined me for all of eternity. “Thank you.”
39
Bailey
“Get up!”
My eyes snapped open, and my hand reached out, grabbing the arm of the person shaking me. I knew it wasn’t Nate. Even in the darkness of the room, I could tell.
It wasn’t his voice.
It wasn’t his touch.
Adrenalin pumped through my veins, mixing with my fear and the only thing I thought to do was scream. I turned over in bed, and I screamed and cried for Nate, but he wasn’t there.
Hands grasped my shoulders while a cloth was put over my head, and then the same hands were on my waist, lifting me in the air. My stomach landed on a shoulder, my body folded in half, and I thrashed around, my fists thumping the person’s back while my legs kicked out and I screamed, and I cried for Nate.
Doors opened, doors closed, footsteps thudded across the floor, and I wept, tears falling in all directions. My throat closed up, the shock of fresh air filling my lungs. I heard the thunder, felt the rain on my legs and my back while a car door opened, and I was released, landing harshly on my side and I screamed, and I cried for Nate.
I kicke
d again, hands pulling the fabric off my head at the same time the engine started. I found the door handle, and I pulled, and I pulled, but it was no use. The car moved, tires spinning against loose gravel and I screamed, and I cried for Nate.
Then I looked out the back window, past the tears and the darkness and the rain and the lighting surrounding me, to Nate’s house, the only light source coming from his open front door, and I banged my fist on the window as I screamed and I cried for Nate.
And then he appeared, the outline of his frame standing in the doorway, and everything in me froze, just for a second, before my mind reeled, and my tears fell, and my heart broke, and I slumped in the seat.
And I cried.
And I cried
For Nate.
Epilogue
Nate
Five years later
“I’d woken up that morning to Bailey sitting naked on the bathroom floor—her thin, pale frame a contrast against the gray of the tiles. She’d been counting, her finger pointed in the air, and her body shaking, and all of a sudden, that ache I had felt tripled in strength, only it hadn’t been because I needed to be with her, needed to feel her in my arms… No, the reasons were worse. A lot worse. Bailey once told me that the only thing she experienced when she pulled the trigger that night I found her was a repeat of the events that led her to where she was. Gunshot. Breath. Darkness. She’d said those three words as if they were all her life meant, but she said she’d been sad that she hadn’t seen her life flash before her eyes. But I had—my life, I mean. That morning, I’d watched Bailey lean forward, her eyes squinting, her lips moving, and her pointed finger slowing, and my heart hurt to the point where I thought I was dying, or maybe I was because it was at that point when my life flashed before my eyes.”
Doctor Aroma looked up from her notepad, her eyes wide. “And what did you see, Nate?”
“Bailey and Hickory.”
Other Books By Jay McLean
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More Than This (Bk 1)
More Than Her (Bk 2)
More Than Him (Bk 3)
More Than Forever (Bk 4)
More Than Enough (Bk 5)
The Road Series:
Where the Road Takes Me
Kick Push
Boy Toy Chronicles:
Volume One
About Jay McLean
Jay McLean is an international best-selling author and full-time reader, writer of New Adult Romance, and most of all, procrastinator. When she’s not doing any of those things, she can be found running after her two little boys, playing house and binge watching Netflix.
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