I’m reminded I failed to answer Joey’s question when he says, “The last time I saw Liam that pissed was when you kissed Melody’s cheek.” His heart monitor records his chuckle more than my ears. “You’d swear he had busted you checking her temperature with your pee-pee for the way he acted.” I twist my lips in contempt about him calling my dick a ‘pee-pee,’ but Joey reads the expression on my face the wrong way. “Holy shit! Pipsqueak got his dick wet!”
“Shut up!” Faulty heart or not, I’m five seconds from suffocating him when his roared chuckles reach the parents’ side of his room. “Nothing happened.”
He slaps away the hand I’m trying to clamp over his mouth before saying more quietly, “Bullshit. You’re the reason she’s walking funny.” When he notches his head to Melody, it’s a fight to act nonchalant. My acting skills must be better this time around as Joey buys my ruse. “How bad is it?”
I exhale a big breath. “He dragged her out of my room after telling me I can’t love and protect her at the same time.” I tilt closer to his side to ensure we don’t have any ears listening in. “I was naked, and it was clear what we were doing before he arrived.”
“BJ… fuck.” Joey looks like he wants to laugh, but instead, he drags his hand down his tired face. “You don’t make things easy for yourself, do you?” When I shrug, he smiles. “What else did he say?”
“That she’s seventeen—”
“She turns eighteen next month. Did you tell him that?”
I slant my head and arch a brow. “It wasn’t really the time to point that out.”
His smile lights up his face the way only medication can lately. “Good point. But what’s stopping you now?”
I thrust my hand at his chest.
“Hey, don’t use me as an excuse. You two have been tiptoeing toward this for months… if not years.” He jerks up his chin, encouraging me to move closer. “What has Mom always told us? If anyone tells you that you can’t do something, you prove them wrong by—”
“Doing it,” we say in sync.
Joey nods. “Prove to him you can both love and protect his daughter. Show him he’s trained you well. He didn’t raise you to cower away from a fight, BJ. He made you a machine.”
It should be weird that he credits a man who isn’t our father with raising me, but since it’s Mr. Gregg, it isn’t. He did raise me, and that’s why I know Joey is right. Melody is young, but that didn’t factor into the equation when Mr. Gregg forced her to relive her nightmares over and over again. Even if Melody wanted to forget what happened to her, her father wouldn’t allow it. He wants her scared, so she’ll be forever prepared.
It worked. Not just on Melody but me as well. I was gung-ho on preparing to protect her, I missed the one person capable of hurting her the most. Her father.
When Joey sees the determination on my face, he slaps his hand in mine before pulling me into his chest. “I’ll see you on the other side.”
I jerk up my chin, confident he has this, before shifting on my feet to face Melody. She pretends to continue acting interested in something my aunt is saying, but I can feel her eyes on me, burning me from the inside out. I can also feel the murderous glare of her father. His scold is life-threatening, but it won’t stop me from signing, “Come grab a drink with me, Melody?”
Melody stiffens for the quickest second before she briskly nods. When I fill the narrow gap between us, a commotion sounds from the corner of the room. It’s most likely Mr. Gregg trying to intercept my play before I’ve called ‘hut,’ acutely unaware he has more than a defensive linesman to tackle to get to me. He has my family and his wife. I don’t often get to play with a stacked team, but my family has been training for this day for years. Even Melody’s mother saw it coming. It was only her father who’s in denial of the inevitable.
After glancing back at Joey’s room, noticing my mom and Wren are doing a majority of the heavy lifting to block Mr. Gregg’s intercept, I devote my attention back to Melody. “Are you okay?” As she makes a beeline for the café at the entrance of the hospital, she jerks up her chin. “Did you talk to your mom?”
“Yeah.” Gratitude fills her eyes when she smiles. “She would have preferred for us to have waited until we were eighteen, but she said she understood.” She looks torn between rolling her eyes and gagging while adding, “She was the same age when she lost her virginity to my dad. He is just cranky because he can’t issue the same level of understanding. He was older than her, and he also wasn’t a virgin.”
I’m aware Mr. Gregg is older than his wife, but I’m unsure by how many years. I doubt it’s more than a handful. He has more gray hair than Wren, but that could be more compliments to hair dye than maturity.
I follow Melody to a drink fridge at the back of the café before asking, “And how about you? How are you feeling?”
She pulls down a diet coke before moving for the second fridge, aware I like my drinks fully sweetened. “I am okay. Still a little sore, but nothing I can’t handle.” She hands me a bottle of Mountain Dew before pulling five one-dollar bills from her pocket. “What about you? Did you talk to your parents?”
I smile at the fret on her face. “Yes… well, my mom. We met Dad here. He stayed at a motel in town overnight.” She flashes me a sympathetic grin, cautious of the unease surrounding my family dynamic right now. “My mom said similar things to your mom. That she would have preferred for us to wait, but she was glad we were sensible.”
“Oh. My. God.” Melody slaps a hand over her face to hide her embarrassment. “She emptied your bin, right?”
I don’t need to answer her, my grimace says it all, but I do anyway. “Yeah. She also replaced the condoms in our box of photographs, so don’t freak when there are more in there than you remembered.”
She whacks me in the gut like jealousy will never be an issue for us. I know she’s lying. Just the way her eyes narrowed at her friends when they watched me prance around the boxing ring proves jealousy will pop up occasionally during our relationship, and I’m not going to mention the envious glare a man with a neck tattoo is giving Melody’s butt. It has my jealousy skyrocketing, and Melody hasn’t even noticed his gawk.
After paying for our drinks, Melody spins around to face me. Her face is wearing the same worried expression she had when she entered Joey’s hospital room a little over an hour ago. “I don’t know how to get him past this, BJ. Mom said she would talk to him, but I don’t see words removing the images from his head anytime soon.”
“It will be okay. He will come around.” Her lips curve into a smile when I add, “If not, we leave for Browns in four months.”
Melody groans before signing, “If we get in.”
