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And I’d hurt her.
“You were her saving grace. Her miracle. The man who was always supposed to put her first…and then you chose Lina over her, and she just…broke.”
When he put it like that, after everything he’d just told me, I couldn’t blame her one bit for leaving.
Didn’t blame her at all.
At least not anymore.
“I can see you’re hurting.” Kourt stood and went for the pain pump that was at my side. “Press the button in your left hand.”
I hadn’t even realized that I had a button in my left hand, but after glancing down and seeing that I did, indeed, have the button in my hand, I pressed it.
“I’m sure that you’re going to have questions,” he said softly. “Don’t hesitate to ask. We work opposite shifts, and I’m normally here when she’s at home. I’m at home when she’s at work. I’ll leave my cell phone number here in your phone.” He informed me as he picked my phone up and typed his information in without asking.
With that, he left and didn’t once look back.
If he had, he’d have seen the devastation that his words left me with written plain as day on my face.
I felt utterly broken.
“I think we both failed her, man,” Bayou said softly.
Yeah, I think we—I—did, too.Chapter 5Fool me once, fuck you forever.
-Text from Landry to Wade
Landry
My hand hurt.
My hand hurt really bad.
In fact, on a pain scale of one to ten, I’d rank it at about a seventy.
“You okay?”
I gasped and looked up, finding the last person I ever thought that I’d see standing in front of me.
“Yeah,” I nodded at Bayou. “I’m okay. My hand hurts, is all.”
It’d been two weeks since I’d been shot—since Wade had also been shot—and it felt even worse today than it had when it’d first happened.
Hell, even Bayou had been shot. It’d been a flesh wound, but still.
We were just three peas in a pod.
“Gonna hurt for a while, I expect,” Bayou grunted and took a seat on the bench next to me.
I was on lunch break from the daycare, and I’d rather be anywhere but where I was at.
I used to love the place, and what it represented, but now? Well, now I wasn’t so excited about coming here every day. It was a pain in the ass, and I was beginning to resent it.
Not to mention all the hassle that came with it.
Parents being late on making payments. Kids coming in sick and passing it along to me. Employees coming in late for work, or hell, not coming in at all. Things going wrong—such as the oven breaking last week, or the toilets overflowing.
As much as I enjoyed seeing the children every day, their smiling faces and laughter…it wasn’t enough anymore.
“How do you know it’s going to hurt for a while?” I asked. “Done it often?”
He snorted. “This bullet wound was my third—and hopefully last. The first two I sustained a couple of months into my first tour. Took one to the lower calf, and one to the upper arm. They all fucking hurt, but I suspect that none of them hurt as much as taking one through your hand.”
“How do you know?” I challenged.
“I know based on usage levels. Your hand is probably one of the most used out of all your body parts.” He moved until he was perched on the bench beside me, his long legs stretched out in front. “You do a lot more with your hand than you realize. Drive. Eat. Sleep on it. Style your hair. The hand has more nerves than other body parts, also.”
I gave him a droll look. “My hair looks bad, doesn’t it?”
He snorted. “It’s cute. Just like you.”
I laughed at that. “You’re terrible.”
I felt like crying.
Bayou hadn’t spoken to me so much in a long time.
I missed him.
I hadn’t realized how much until that very moment.
Hell, that only made me miss Wade all the more.
“Why are you sitting out here all alone?” he asked.
“Why are you sitting out here all alone?” I countered.
I’d seen him, of course.
He’d been sitting on the park bench across the entire park. The bench that I usually sat at because it was the furthest away from the daycare.
If I sat too close, the workers sometimes came out to ask me questions despite it being my lunch break, and I wasn’t in the mood to deal with whether they thought I should be open for Labor Day or not.
“I was here first,” he countered.
That he was.
“True.”
“Dropped Wade off at physical therapy today. I was waiting for him to call and let me know that he’s ready to be picked up…” he began.
I snorted. “Wade probably took a freakin’ taxi. If you’ve been waiting, that means he’s been gone for a while.”
Bayou frowned, then pulled out his phone to dial a number. I assumed it was the hospital.
