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I’d also not intentionally set out to follow him. I’d just seen him heading somewhere after I’d finished up at the funeral parlor. I’d been headed to the store to buy some new color for my own hair, thinking I wanted to spice things up a little bit with a few flashy colors when I’d seen him pass by in his car.
Then I’d turned out behind him without thinking.
I was following my boyfriend, and I was actually kind of ashamed about it.
But I’d seen the guitar gone this morning and I’d wondered if that was what was going to happen today. But when I’d called him on my way to work, I could hear Easton in the background talking to himself, and I knew that he was at work.
He must be on his lunch break, I thought to myself as I slowed and watched him turn into the hospital.
I frowned ferociously as he pulled into a parking spot that was just outside the ER entrance.
Luckily, before he could make it too far across the parking lot, I too found a spot and expertly backed my truck in like I’d never done before.
Normally it took me two tries to get the big beast perfectly in between the lines—so sue me, I was anal—but my truck just slid into the spot like butter and I was bailing out of it and hauling ass across the parking lot before I could blink.
I’d just seen him walk in the elevator, spied the lit-up number three, and watched the doors close as I broached the entrance.
Cursing under my breath, I pressed the elevator up button, then thought to hell with it and aimed for the stairs.
Four flights—why were there freakin’ two per landing?—later I was pushing out of the door onto a unit. The children’s intensive care unit.
I frowned.
Then movement caught my eye.
It was Castiel’s back as he walked away from the nurses’ station.
I stayed in the entrance to the stairwell for a while as I watched him walk away, the neck of the guitar held loosely in his hand.
When he went inside a room, I took a step out.
The closer I got to the glass doors that surrounded the room, the more tight my belly got, until it was a bundle of knots as I walked up to the partition.
Then, for the next half hour, I watched through the glass door of the hospital room as Castiel played his guitar beside the bed of what had to be a ten-year-old little boy.
The little boy looked dwarfed in the full-size hospital bed, and I instantly felt my heart start to pound.
Who was this little boy?
Was it the boy he was telling me about? The one that he didn’t get to see anymore?
Holy shit but I needed answers.
And this time, I would get them. Not because I was mad or upset, but because as I watched him, I could clearly tell that he was upset.
Devastated, in fact.
Nobody bothered me in the thirty minutes that he played.
The nurses had to have seen me.
They had to have been curious as to why I was standing there watching, yet they stayed away, and I was thankful.
When he was finally done, he walked close to the bed and the small boy, and ran a blunt finger across his forehead, swiping some hair out of his face.
That’s when I took in the tubes that had to be keeping him alive.
There were a lot of them, so many in fact that I had a feeling that if even one slipped free that it would go badly.
I didn’t bother to hide as Castiel turned around and started out of the room.
The moment he stepped out, his eyes came directly to me, as if he’d known I was there the entire time.
“He would hate living like this,” Castiel said, voice slightly cracking. “Fucking hate it.”
I felt my belly knot even tighter.
He’d known I was there.
I was sure of it.
“How did you know I was here?” I questioned.
His lips twitched.
“You are a good driver, I’ll give you that,” he said. “But you don’t have any evasive driving skills whatsoever. And I clocked you about a half a block in.”
I snickered. “Nobody has taught me those just yet.” I paused. “Unless you’re offering.”
His eyes lifted to mine. “I’d teach you whatever you’re willing to know.”
I smiled and held out my hand to him, which he took.
He nodded at the nurses, who looked at him with pity and me with curiosity and walked with me to the elevator.
The moment they opened and then closed firmly behind us, I said, “Do you want to talk about it?”
He was silent until we reached the ground floor, and when we got out to the parking lot, he led me to my truck and not his vehicle—which were not close.
He really had clocked me way before I’d known.
