Rare (26 page)

I let the deadweight of my body pull me down so my head slumped on the arm of the couch. I laid my cheek on my arm while I studied Joe. The dude was here all the time, every moment Pete wasn’t. It was odd at first, but now he felt like some weird extension of Pete, without the hot bits.

Weird, because I got the impression Pete didn’t like him.

Joe turned back to his phone, but he left his hand where it was. It was warm, like Pete’s, but it held none of the power Pete had: no buzz, no charge. No crackling energy. It didn’t feel right, and it didn’t feel wrong. It was just there.

A ripple of numbness washed over my face. I lay still, feeling myself drift into that horrible blank place where time disappeared. Sleep, but with my eyes wide open. Sometimes I came around from it to find whole days had passed, whole days with Pete that I’d missed. I’d wake up to find him gone again, and it would be hours before he came back. I didn’t want that… I couldn’t have that tonight. I needed to stay awake because, fuck, I just needed to see him.

I blinked hard to get my eyes to focus. “Who are you texting?”

If Joe was surprised I’d spoken to him, he covered it well. “My girl. She’s mad at me for sleeping through her call this morning.”

“I thought you broke up.” I shifted my heavy limbs and tried to sit up slightly. Joe yanked on my shoulder to help me out, passed me a bottle of water, and pulled his best impression of Pete until I drank some.

“We did,” he said. “It’s complicated.”

I fumbled with the cap of the water bottle, but I couldn’t get it screwed on. I didn’t protest when Joe swiped it from my hands and did it for me. “She sounds high maintenance.”

Joe shrugged. “All chicks are high maintenance. You’re lucky you like dudes.”

Lucky wasn’t a word I usually attributed to myself, but as far as my love life went, I knew it was true. It had been six weeks since Pete had carried me home from some freaky hospital in the ass end of nowhere. I’d spent most of that time rocking in the corner, convinced my head was about to explode. Now I was medicated to the point where I felt almost nothing at all, but something in me recognized that it took a special kind of love to do what he was doing for me.

The kind of love that could only come from a heart like his.

“What’s she like?”

Joe glanced away from the TV. His phone was on the arm of the couch, long forgotten. His face told me it had been longer than I thought since either of us had spoken.

“Who?”

“Your girlfriend.” With considerable effort, I lifted my head from the back of the couch.

Joe smiled and stretched his legs out in front of him. “I don’t really know how to describe her, man. She’s this buzz of… I don’t fucking know. She’s, like, magic or some shit. She walks into a room and lights the whole place up.”

“Does she smile?”

Joe’s lips twitched, perhaps at my badly worded question or maybe at something for his eyes only. “She does, actually, all the time, when she’s not getting on my case about bullshit that doesn’t matter. Did I ever tell you how I met her?”

He had, I was almost sure of it, but I couldn’t remember, so I shook my head. Joe leaned back and folded his hands behind his head. I could tell he was settling down for the long haul. I didn’t mind. I needed something to focus on.

“I was eighteen when I first saw her. Fresh out of high school, I’d only been in college a few weeks….”

And so it went on. He talked for hours about everything and nothing. Sometimes I listened, sometimes not. Turned out I had heard the story of the beautiful jazz musician he’d met at one of Charlie’s gigs, but I doubted I’d remember tonight’s particular rendition of it any more than the last. Whatever. It didn’t matter. Joe had a nice voice, almost as nice as Pete’s. It wasn’t too hard to distract myself from the white noise in my head.

Sometime later I realized his voice was fading. He sounded far away, too far away.

“Ash, come on, dude. Wake up.”

I wrestled with his hands as they shook me. What the hell was he shaking me for? I was already awake, dammit. I pushed at him and tried to roll away so I could get up, but I couldn’t. The arm of the couch was in the way, and my abdomen collided with it like a sucker punch. Winded, I tried again, but Joe held me back. I felt his hands on chest, my neck, and face. Why the hell was Joe touching my face?

“Easy, Ash. Wake up. You can’t sleep like that. Come on, wake up.”

Something wasn’t right. His voice was changing, morphing into something I knew I should recognize. I shook my head to clear it, but my eyes wouldn’t open. They felt too heavy, like they were glued shut and I would never open them to see….

I
CAME
awake with a gasp that nearly made me retch.

I snapped my eyes open. The cold, clammy weight on my face fell away and I lurched sideways. I tried to right myself. Knowing myself as well as I did, I expected my flailing hands to find air and shadows, but they found flesh, and I dug my fingers into a strong, olive-skinned arm. “Fuck!”

I lashed out. The body attached to the arm pinned me to the bed, and before my brain could engage, my faulty fight-or-flight response kicked in. Held down against my will, I chose to fight, and it took far longer than it should have for me to realize the arms restraining me belonged to Pete.

He held me firm, though he kept his face clear of breathing in my ear. Sadly, he was an old hand at dealing with this. “Ash, Ash. It’s okay, it’s me. Ash, come on. Focus.”

I stared at him, my heart pounding. In the murkiness of the room, his dark eyes seemed almost black. “Pete? Wha… what are you doing here?”

“I couldn’t wake you up.” He inhaled a shaky breath. “Shit, Ash. I couldn’t wake you up.”

I clamped a hand over my mouth, breathing hard, and looked around the dark bedroom. I had a vague memory of getting ready to trudge over to Maggie’s place. By the look of it, I hadn’t gotten very far. I was still barefoot. I glanced at the window. It was late, that much was clear. Damn. Last thing I knew it was daylight and I was counting the hours until I could see him again.

A shudder passed through me. It took a moment to figure out it wasn’t mine, and that the arms around me were damp and clammy. “Jesus! You’re freezing. How the hell did you get here?”

“I walked.”

“You
what
?”

He didn’t answer, but he didn’t need to. The sight of him dressed in sweats and a T-shirt, hair damp from the rain lashing the windows, was answer enough. “Why did you walk here? What’s the matter?”

Pete shook his head. “I couldn’t wake you up….”

He trailed off, racked by violent shivers, but I got the picture. He’d told me once what had gone through his mind the day he found me zonked out in a benzo coma. It didn’t take a genius to work out he’d come home tonight and freaked the fuck out. I put my hand on his cold arm. “I was sleeping, Pete. It’s okay.”

He scowled. “I know that now.”

I dropped my hand. “Why are you here? Did you need something? I would have brought it to you if you’d called me.”

“I did call you; I think… maybe I got the number wrong. It wouldn’t connect.”

The frown on his face faded as he became uncertain again. I looked around and spotted the earphones I’d found in his drawer. They were still attached to my cell phone, where I’d finally figured out how to work the MP3 player. I’d been listening to Danni play her piano when I’d come in the bedroom. I must have passed out with it playing and run the battery down.

I got up and plugged it in. “Battery’s dead,” I said. “And you threw the apartment phone at the wall.”

Silence. I stood by the window as Pete stared at the floor. I waited for him to look up and tell me whatever was going on behind his troubled eyes, but he didn’t. To break the deadlock, I knelt in front of him, balancing myself with my hands on his knees. “Pete, it’s the middle of the night. Why did you walk here?”

“You didn’t come.”

My eyebrows shot up. The simple sentence held many meanings. “What?”

He made a frustrated noise. “Look, I know it’s fucking selfish for me to expect you to drag your ass over to Maggie’s while I sulk on her couch, but I freaked out when I woke up and you weren’t there. I called you; you didn’t answer, and when I got here, you were flat out on the bed—”

“You knew I was at Maggie’s with you?”

He stared at me like
I
was the one not making sense. “Of course I knew. Do you really think I’d have stayed away this long otherwise?”

I didn’t understand why he’d left in the first place. “I thought you were asleep.”

“I was, most of the time, at least, but I knew you were there. I could hear that damn pencil scratching on your sketchbook. I liked it… it felt like it was grounding me, reminding me what was really important. I lost my head a bit when I couldn’t hear you tonight. I’m sorry.”

There were so many things I wanted to say, but as I got to my feet, he shivered again, and the sensible side of me knew I had to get him out of his wet clothes before he got really sick.

He wasn’t used to people taking care of him. However cold he was, I knew he wouldn’t take kindly to being undressed like a child. Instead, I gave him the shirt off my back, retrieved a hoodie and a pair of sweats still warm from the dryer, and retreated to the kitchen while he got changed. I made him some coffee while I waited. He wasn’t supposed to drink it for a while, but I figured one weak cup couldn’t do much harm.

I watched from a safe distance as he took a long sip and smiled for what felt like the first time in weeks. “Wow. Is this, like, real coffee? Maggie tried to give me dandelion extract yesterday. I nearly throttled her. God knows where she got it from.”

His sudden geniality made me nervous. It must have shown on my face. He set the mug down on the nightstand when I didn’t answer. “Come here.”

“Where?”

“
Here
. I need to talk to you.” He held out his hand. “Please?”

It was telling that he didn’t get up and come to me. Though he was often careful when I was antsy, it wasn’t his style to passively sit back and wait. I appraised him, needing a respectable distance to be objective. He was a mess—pale, tired, and in obvious pain. Was I really going to make him ask me again?

I sank down beside him, leaving a gap between us that he quickly closed.

“Ash, I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”

He nudged me with his shoulder. I leaned into him. He was warm now—warm and familiar, like he’d always been, even when he crawled into bed after a long night shift in the middle of winter. Putting my hands on his cold, rain-soaked skin had unnerved me more than I’d realized until I felt the comforting heat from his body flood through me. “Don’t be sorry. It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay.” He shook his head and then thought better of it. “I know I’ve been a real bastard to you, Maggie, and everyone else who’s crossed my path. I don’t….”

“Don’t what?”

Pete sighed. “I don’t understand how I got here. It’s like everything I need to know about my life is just out of reach. I can see pictures of it, the ones you drew me, but it feels like something’s missing.”

I reached out, but instead of finding his hand, I caught the cord of his hoodie and wound it round my fingers. “I don’t get it. Did you forget me? Or us? I don’t understand.”

Pete stilled my twisting fingers, unraveling the cord before I cut off my circulation. “I can’t explain it. It’s like when I walked in the apartment after getting out of the hospital. I knew it was mine… ours. I could see stuff I liked everywhere, I could see
you
everywhere, but it scared me as much as it comforted me. I felt like I had this defined life I knew nothing about.”

I knew the apartment had freaked him when he’d first come home from the way he’d stared quizzically at certain things, like it was the first time he’d ever seen them. But in the six weeks that had passed since the accident, those brief moments had become less frequent. Right up until Heidi had appeared on our doorstep, I’d honestly thought he’d gotten over it.

“What about now? Pete, you’ve been gone, what, like, two weeks? It feels like a lifetime to me, but what’s changed?”

He opened his mouth and shut it again, a move he’d definitely learned from me. “Everything,” he said hoarsely. “Everything and nothing. I… sometimes, I feel like I’ve forgotten the foundation of who I am. I remember that I love you, I even remember why. God, this is so hard to explain. I just feel like I’ve forgotten how, like I’m not capable of it or something.”

Was he kidding me? Since I’d spent the evening with Danni a few days ago, her thoughts on Pete had been playing in a loop in my head.

“Seeing you two together changed the way Joe thought about us,” she’d said. “Instead of seeing the obstacles in our way, he started to just see us. Ash, he honestly believes Pete taught him how to love me, and I think he’s right.”

Her words struck a chord. There was no doubt in my mind that Pete had taught
me
how to love too. He’d opened my eyes to a part of me I hadn’t known existed, and it broke my heart now to see him doubt himself. Perhaps it was my fault. In the hospital, I’d drawn everything I thought he needed to see. I’d never thought to draw myself.

“For what it’s worth,” he said tiredly when I didn’t respond, “I’m sorry I hurt you.”

I stared at him, taking in his unshaven face and shadowed, bloodshot eyes. He was so tired he could barely hold himself up. “No, I’m sorry. I never even thought… shit. I thought you’d forgotten
things
, you know? I never… I never thought.”

“Why would you? It’s not like we planned for this.”

“Yeah, but….”

“Ash, don’t. I’ve done this to death in my head. It’s not your fault; hell, it’s not even mine. It happened, and now we need to get through it, together.” He grunted humorlessly. “We’ve been through worse, right?”