Tailspin (Better Than You)

  It plays in my head like a movie, Logan sitting by a large window in a downtown coffee shop, watching the cars drive by. As I walk by the window, the way the sun glints off of her hair catches my attention and I can’t help but stare. Our eyes meet, thick glass between us, and I smile. She smiles back. And we live happily ever after.

  Or we cross paths on a crowded college campus. Some asshole bumps into her and sends her books and papers flying. One flutters around my feet and I scoop it up, slowly picking up more pieces as I make my way towards her. We stand at the same time, our eyes meeting, hands stilling and hearts pumping. Love at first sight.

  “Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if my mom never took me away, if Amelia and Ralph would have stayed in my life,” she says, eyes still fixated on the ceiling. “Or if I’d never have met Danny or Sam.”

  “I always wonder what would have happened if I didn’t call my parents that night. If I just sucked it up and took care of Joshua myself.”

  She turns her head, meets my eyes, holds them steady. “It’s not your fault.”

  “It kind of is,” I argue.

  She shakes her head vehemently. “If it was raining like you said, the streets still would have been wet two hours later when they came home on their own. You had no control over it.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe you should tell yourself that.”

  Sighing, Logan looks back up at the ceiling, my eyes left to stare at the scar on her temple. I look away. “It’s different for me. It’s my fault because I stopped fighting. I gave up,” she says.

  “You didn’t know any better.”

  “I wish that was true, but I did. I just realized that being better was hard and I decided I wasn’t strong.”

  “What about now?” I ask carefully. We’re still walking on a thin sheet of glass, careful to place our feet in exactly the right spot lest it shatters and plunges us into the unknown below.

  “I don’t know. Some days I’m strong, other days my cravings are stronger.”

  “But you fight it, right? That makes you strong.” Please tell me you fight it.

  She sighs noisily. “Yeah, I do. But it’s tiring, you know? It feels like I’m always playing tug of war with myself.”

  “Do you think you did the right thing by coming back?”

  I hear her moving and look over to find her curled on her side, facing me, a small smile curving her lips and cheeks. “Yeah, I think I did.”

  ~~

  After Logan left, I got ready for work, slowly pulling on all of the layers meant to protect me from the world. Her words kept running through my head, distracting me from the simplest of tasks. My shirt buttons were misaligned, my socks mismatched, my badge upside down. It took twice as long to get ready, which forced me to rush to the station to get there on time.

  Derek is leaning against the building when I pull up, his arms crossed over his chest and a scowl on his face. “You’re late,” he says, standing tall.

  “Sorry. You ready?”

  He walks to the car. To the driver’s side, in fact. “I’ve been ready. And I’m driving.”

  Knowing better than to argue with him when he’s in a bad mood, I walk around to the passenger side and get in. We’re on patrol today, so our job is to basically drive around and wait for trouble. Sometimes it finds us, other times we find it. In Miami, there’s no shortage. Derek is still silent, which is unusual, even if he is in a bad mood.

  “What crawled up your ass today?” I ask, hoping to diffuse the tension, but he doesn’t take the bait. Seeing his hands tighten on the steering wheel, I change my approach. “You alright, man?”

  He blows out a short breath. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look fine right now.”

  “Are you saying you think I look fine sometimes?” And he’s back. “You know, you hit on me a lot.”

  “Me? You’re the one who’s always making jokes about me being a woman. Maybe it’s your deepest, darkest desire.”

  Derek laughs. “I just call it like it is,” he says, switching the car into the farthest right lane. As he’s doing so, a car runs a stop sign and cuts us off. Derek slams on his brakes. “What the fuck!” he yells, quickly throwing on the lights. The car doesn’t stop right away, possibly unaware of being pulled over. Derek hits the sirens and finally the car slows down and pulls into a side alley.

  It’s obvious Derek is mad as hell, so I turn to him and say, “Let me handle this,” before stepping out of the car. I place one hand on my gun and keep the other by my side and approach the driver’s side window. It rolls down slowly, revealing a young, Hispanic guy.

  “Are you aware that you ran a stop sign back there?” I ask him, slowly sweeping what can I see of his car. He doesn’t answer. A wary pressure starts to build in my chest. “License and registration, please.”

  While he reaches over the seat to the glove compartment, I tighten the hand resting on my holster, ready for anything. It’s one of those moments, when the world stops spinning; when life stops moving. From a distance, I hear Derek yell something. I turn my head, ready to find out what’s going on, but in the next second the world explodes with a pain deep inside of my skull. I can’t hear anything except the pounding of my blood. I can’t feel anything except the warm trickle of wetness seeping into my hair. It feels as if someone has replaced the blood in my body with lead, making everything feel heavy and stiff. I fall to my knees facing Derek, watching as he struggles with a group of guys that are trying to contain him. There’s three of them and one of him, if my eyes can be trusted; terrible odds, no matter how trained we are.

  I’m helpless, eyes transfixed in a half-state of consciousness, idly wondering how I’m even staying upright. I can feel the blood leaving my body with every pump of my heart. Each breath becomes harder to take. Suddenly my vision is obstructed by a pair of legs. Slowly travelling up the length of him, I finally see what’s going on. I understand, a little too late, that we’ve been set up.

  Danny’s eyes meet mine, so much darker and crueler than I remember them being. There’s a slick malice there, an emptiness that raises the hair on the back of my neck. When he smiles, it’s deranged, full of pleasure and the promise of pain.

  “Got you,” he says coldly, adjusting the brass knuckles on his bleeding hand. There’s a split second between when he raises his fist and when it comes crashing down on the side of my head. In the time it takes for me to fall to the ground, my cheek pressed against the dirty asphalt, I hear Derek screaming and cars honking and birds chirping and dark, evil laughing and then…nothing, except for my breathing. In and out.

  In. Out.

  In…Out…

  Logan’s face pops into the darkness of my mind, her long hair swirling around her face, hands reaching for me as she falls into an endless pit of black. I want to reach for her, save her, hold her, but I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I can’t feel.

  A boom bursts into the silence and Logan’s face shatters into a million little pieces, raining specks of glitter into a sea of obscurity. Slowly, other sounds start to seep into the stillness, the world coming back in spurts and chaos.

  “Don’t move him.”

  “Hang on, Nathan. Just hang on.”

  “Can you hear me, Nathan? Can you open your eyes for me, buddy?”

  “He’s not responding.”

  “He’s flat lining!”

  And then the world goes black.

  36

  December 15, 2010

  “He’ll come to when he’s ready,” I hear someone say.

  I try to scream, try to tell them not to cry and that I’m here, right here, but I’m filled with insulation, my voice stuffed into a sound-proof room, my arms and legs tied into a strait jacket. Immobilized. Mute. Useless.

  The darkness takes me away again.

  37

  December 17, 2010

  “I’m so sorry, Nathan. So sorry. I love you. Please be okay. Please come back.”

  I’m right here
. I love you.

  Logan’s hands squeeze mine, her head heavy against my chest. I ache to wrap my arms around her, soothe her, but holding on to the strength to move is like trying to grab water. It slips through my fingers, bleeds out into the spaces around me. I’m empty, a hollow body.

  “We can do better,” Logan whispers, her thin fingers tracing the line of my jaw. “I can do better. I can be better. I just need you to be here with me. I need you to love me. I need you to be okay.”

  Her face forms in my mind, first faded, barely there; just outlines of her closed eyes and full, pink lips. The more she speaks, the more she solidifies.

  “I want you to teach me how to surf. I’ve been thinking about all of the things that I’m missing out on, and I don’t want to miss anything anymore. You know I’ve never even been to a football game? The stadium is, like, twenty minutes away and I’ve never been there. How pathetic is that?”

  Her hair, pulled back and messy, tickles my nose. I want to push it away and pull her closer at the same time. The memory feels so real, so dense. It’s almost as if I could reach out and tug on the strand falling into my face.

  “Emily told me all about how Joshua stopped talking after your parents…Well, he’s doing okay, if you’re wondering. Still kinda quiet, which I guess is normal, but he’s alright. God, I barely know anything about you. I’ve been so fucking selfish, dealing with all of my stupid problems and I never took the time to ask you questions. I want to know everything. I want you to wake up and tell me everything.”

  The pressure is gone from my chest. The bed shifts. Don’t go, I want to say. In my mind, I reach out my hand, grab her arm as she turns away, pull her into my chest and never let go.

  “Nathan? Oh my god! Nathan, can you hear me? Are you there?”

  I’ve been here, I try to say, but this time it’s different. This time it’s like breaking through a thick fog, the vision of her in my mind becoming clear and real. This time, when I tell my lips to move, they do, cracking and pulling apart.

  And then Logan is right there, hair pulled up and messy, glassy, honey eyes staring into mine; full, pink lips spread into so wide of a smile that it’s almost blinding.

  “You came back,” she whispers.

  I swallow, lick my lips, push past the ball of cotton. “Always.”

  Epilogue

  December 25, 2010

  The previously white, bare walls of the hospital are covered in garland and twinkling lights. Mistletoe hangs above the open door. Joshua takes it upon himself to remind every person who walks underneath it that they must kiss. Emily blushes as she stands underneath it with Derek, who glances at me as if asking for permission.

  “Make it quick,” I say from my spot on the edge of the bed. Of course I look away, instead choosing to focus on Logan, how the grey shirt she’s wearing slips off her shoulder, leaves it bare and lonely. I can feel her eyes watching me, can feel the intensity of her love in the way she traces her hand up my arm.

  A nudge grabs my attention and I look up to see Derek, his arm in a sling and stitches on the corner of his jaw. He saved my life that day. When I tried to thank him, he told me to stop being sensitive and that he should be thanking me for his first war wound. Derek found the papers that ultimately saved Logan’s life, and he also killed the man that ruined it in the first place. Instead of feeling resentment or jealousy, I just feel relief, glad that Danny is finally gone. I know that it’s not the end of our troubles; Danny was part of a gang hundreds of people deep, with a father who knows our names. But for now, we’re safe. We’re here, alive and together.

  “How’re you feeling?” Em asks, sitting on the other side of me.

  “The same as yesterday.”

  “Yeah, well, you still look like shit, too.”

  “Thanks, Em. So encouraging.”

  She’s right, though. They had to shave my head for surgery to release the swelling, I have stitches on my head and temple and the entire side of my face is a purplish black color from the fracture. I’m still having a hard time moving one side of my mouth, making my words come out with a slight lisp, but the doctors tell me that’ll lessen over time.

  It’s funny how, at the end of it all, Logan and I bear the same scars, if only on the outside.

  A few minutes later, Amelia and Ralph come bursting into the room, Chief in tow. “Look who we found prowling around outside,” Ralph says, slapping Mitch on the back.

  He scratches his head, looking sheepish. “Martha insisted.”

  That’s when I notice Martha behind them, both her and Amelia carrying boxes holding a delicious smell. “Merry Christmas everyone!” Martha shouts, smiling broadly.

  There’s enough food in the boxes to feed an army, and as everyone gets situated around the room; me in the bed with Logan beside me, Joshua sitting on the end, Derek sitting on the recliner with Emily on his lap, Mitch and Ralph leaning against the wall and Martha and Amelia fussing around everyone, tears start to gather in my eyes. I wonder what Mom and Dad would think if they saw how loved we are, how we found a family in so many different places. They would be happy, I decide. Proud.

  Even though we’re in a hospital room, surrounded by sadness and sickness and death, I know that I’m home; that these people are the whole of my life, of my love.

  I know that, without a doubt, this is where I belong.

  Acknowledgements

  To those of you that don’t read, and still read my books.

  To those of you that didn’t get annoyed when I talked about my characters like they were real.

  To those of you who supported, rooted, cheered, and believed.

  And of course, to my husband and his tendency to turn a blind eye towards the disastrous house, THANK YOU.

  I don’t know that I can ever say it enough, but I love you all.

  About the author

  Raquel Valldeperas is a mother and a wife, which consequently means she is a chef, a chauffeur, a teacher, a lifeguard, a maid, a coach, and sometimes a tyrant, among many other things. In the dark of night, under the cover of clouds, she becomes a writer, a reader and a line dancer. Unless Game of Thrones or The Vampire Diaries are on. Then she becomes hypnotized. She would create a list of accomplishments to make her sound more prestigious, but alas, she is merely a part-time student and a full-time homemaker, where her accomplishments include making it through the day with bother her husband and son still alive.

  Look for news and updates on her Facebook, Goodreads page, or blog.