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I wanted to go back, to start the conversation over so I could do it better. He deserved better. So did I.
“Lights off,” Frank said, checking something on his phone as Abey crept down the street the Oswalds lived on, and she flipped off her headlights. “Ain’t like they’re helpin’ us see any better. Damn. There goes cell service.” He shook his head, stuffing his cell into his front coat pocket and snapping the button closed.
The storm was out of control. I’d never seen anything like it. We still couldn’t see our elbows from our asses. It was a good thing both Abey and Frank knew this town like the backs of their hands. Now I saw the benefit of him knowing where everyone lived in Wisper. We couldn’t see road signs, let alone read them.
I couldn’t even tell if the houses on this street were one story or two.
“Samantha,” Frank said when Abey parked, “the Oswalds live two houses down on our right. Stay behind me. I doubt Murphy’s a threat to us, but just in case this is somethin’ else. And please…” He turned in his seat, looking at me with some ambiguous look in his eyes as I smoothed my hand over Grum’s neck, trying to calm the both of us. “I know you’re worried about him, but please, trust me?”
I did trust him. I knew he wouldn’t do anything to hurt Murphy. I knew he wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, so I decided, as soon as we found Murphy, I would lay it all out for Frank like the grown-ass woman I should’ve been in the first place.
“I do.”
“Thank you.”
We left Grum in the running truck, much to his consternation. Frank walked ahead of Abey and me, and she held my hand, maybe as a reminder to stay behind Frank or maybe so she wouldn’t lose me in the blizzard, but whatever the reason, I fell in love with her in that moment. She became my sister. She could probably feel the tension between Frank and me, and holding her hand was the only thing stopping me from crying.
She looked at me, squinting against the squall of snowflakes, bending her neck so her hat took the brunt of them, but it seemed like they were coming from every direction, even up from the ground. “Stay quiet. We don’t want the boy to know we’re comin’, or he might run right back out into this mess.”
I felt numb, but I bobbed my head and fixed my eyes on Frank’s back.
Abey left us on the front porch to stand guard at the back of the house. How she was going to navigate the snow, I had no idea, but Frank trusted her and was confident she had his back, so I did too.
He turned to me and brought his glove up, raising his index finger in front of his lips. Our boots on the porch were noisy, but the wind was so loud, I didn’t think it mattered. He had been right that first night at his house; my boots were doing a shit job of keeping my feet warm. The snow was getting in between the laces, melting and leaking into my socks, and the leather was stiff and uncomfortable in the cold. My feet felt like painful blocks of ice.
Frank rarely wore anything other than his cowboy hat, so looking at him now with a brown Teton County Sheriff Department winter beanie pulled down over his ears, I was realizing just how handsome he was. Yes, he was hot. Yes, he was sexy, and his smile could melt me from the inside out, but more than all of that, the love he had inside him, the care for his friends and his community, for Grum—the care and love he had for me was the sexiest thing about him.
I saw it in his eyes. Even though we were in this crazy and potentially deadly situation, there was still a hint of a smile in those eyes for me.
Because he loved me.
I remembered thinking of him as a bear, and I knew in that moment that nothing would ever stop him from loving me, if I’d let him. Not even my worthless reproductive system. He would be as fierce as a grizzly with his love, and I was the luckiest woman on the planet to be offered such a gift.
And those age lines around his eyes and the worried wrinkles in his forehead, the ones that had made me so nervous before? They were only markers of all the people in this life, and strangers, too, that he loved and protected, though he’d never say it. He wouldn’t want it to be recognized. It was who he was.
He turned toward the door and took a deep breath. I watched his shoulders rise and fall with a breath, and then he leaned to the side and put his hand on the doorknob. When he tried to turn it and it didn’t open, he threw his powerful body against the wood, busting through it on his first push.
I guess I’d expected there to be a big commotion once we were inside—maybe Murphy would freak at being surprised—but silence and stillness greeted us. There was a light on toward the back of the house, but there was no noise or movement that we could hear or see back there either. The only sound in the world was the storm behind us. The wind was so loud, it grew silent, too, like white noise.
I followed Frank inside, watching where he stepped so I could step there, too, in case that mattered somehow.
He stopped in the middle of the Oswalds’ conservatively decorated living room. Light beige carpet and white accents were everywhere. Seriously, after all the snow, I was so freaking sick of the color white.
But Frank must’ve seen something from his taller height that I couldn’t because he rushed forward toward the brightly lit kitchen behind a half wall. He slid to the floor, and when I caught up and peeked over his shoulder, he was checking Murphy’s pulse with two fingers on his neck as that poor boy lay deathly pale and unconscious on the white-tile floor.
Frank yelled into his radio. “Abey! Call a bus. Fuck. They can’t get here. Okay, pull up out front. Let’s try to get him to Doc Whitley.”
There was static for a few seconds, but then Abey’s voice rang out. “10-4.”
Frank checked everywhere, digging in Murphy’s pockets, pulling off his soaked shoes and socks. He grabbed Murphy’s backpack sitting a few feet away and dumped the stolen paperbacks and the rest of its contents on the floor.
“What are you looking for?”
“Needles. Pills. Anything. I have naloxone.”
“No, Frank. He’s just a baby. He’s not on drugs. It’s his cut. It’s so infected, and he’s not eating, probably not drinking.”
He lifted the hem of Murphy’s sweater, and the wound looked fifty times worse than it had when I’d seen it at the library this morning. It was oozing now, and I’d never seen that color on skin before.
