"Yeah, we can talk about it." I could hear her smiling, and it made the ache in my chest ten times worse. "You call me anytime, honey. Day or night. I mean that."
"I will. I love you, Mom."
"I love you too, sweetheart. So much."
I ended the call and set the phone face down on the table and pressed both hands over my mouth. The tears came fast and I didn't try to stop them because there was nobody there to see me breaking down. I cried until my ribs hurt, sitting alone at my brother's kitchen table in a city I didn't want to be in, carrying a baby I couldn't tell anyone about, missing a man who didn't even care that I was gone.
Grove Hill wasn't my home anymore. I didn't know where home was now.
8
GARRET
The nurse locked the wheelchair at the curb and stepped back like she was done with me, which was fair because I was done with this place too. Three months of hospital food and fluorescent lights and physical therapists who smiled too much while they bent my leg in directions it didn't want to go was enough to kill a lesser man. And I thought about it often.
The fracture in my hip had healed enough for them to cut me loose, but the orthopedic surgeon made it clear on his way out that I wasn't fixed. I was just stable enough to be someone else's problem instead of his. I had a long road of physical therapy ahead of me, which I would be facing on my own from now on. Just like everything else in my life.
Lightning's truck was idling at the curb, a black Silverado with tinted windows and mud on the fenders. He didn't get out to help me, which I expected, and he didn't roll the window down to say hello, which I also expected.
Lightning wasn't the helping type. He was the type who showed up because the president told him to and did the bare minimum to say he'd done it.
"Doesn't your friend want to help you?" the nurse asked quietly before she opened the door. I looked up and saw Lightning staring straight ahead, not bothering to look down at me as I gripped the cane in my right hand and pushed myself out of the wheelchair with my left.
"He's not my friend," I grumbled. The pain hit immediately, a hot, grinding ache that started in my hip and radiated down through my thigh and into my knee. I clenched my jaw and took the first step, then the second, and by the third I had a rhythm going that was ugly but functional. The truck was ten feet away and it might as well have been ten miles.
I stood in the open passenger door for a second figuring out the geometry of getting my body into the cab without bending my hip past the angle I knew would be excruciating, but there wasn't a graceful way to do it. I turned, gripped the handle above the door, and raised myself onto the seat in one slow, controlled drop that sent a bolt of white-hot pain straight through my pelvis. I sucked air through my teeth and pulled my left leg in with both hands as the nurse put my things in the back seat.
"Everything you need is in that bag, Mr. Strunk." She smiled so softly as she took hold of the door and looked up at me. "If you have any questions, call us right away. And go to the pharmacy to fill your pain prescription. Don't forget your follow-up next week."
I nodded at her and reached for the door and she closed it for me. Thank God that part was over, and now I could move onwith my life. God knows I spent enough time lying flat on my back to last my lifetime.
Lightning glanced over at me. "You good?"
"Just drive," I grumbled again.
He pulled away from the curb and merged onto the highway heading south, and for a few minutes neither of us said anything. The radio was off and it made the silence feel charged with tension, but I refused to be the first person to talk.
"So," he said, and I already didn't like where it was going. "Three months is a long time to be off your bike."
"I'm aware."
"Surgeon say when you can ride again?" Fox was the only club member who came to visit me, and this jerk thought he was gonna buddy up to me like we were pals or something.
"Six months. Maybe more." I had the nerve to tell him to shut up, but I knew how obnoxious he could be. I wanted this over with as quickly as possible with as little drama as could be mustered.
He whistled low. "That's rough. You took that curve pretty hard from what I heard. Gravel got you?"
I bit my tongue rather than answering him. I was sure by now the whole town had heard about me taking that curve too fast. I was also certain that he had some reason for pushing my buttons. Lightning was a manipulative bastard. Leave it to him to add salt to a wound.
"Funny timing, though." He adjusted his grip on the wheel, and I could see him choosing his next words carefully, probably tomake the biggest impact. "Wasn't that right around when the Ducette girl took off?"
I turned my head and looked at him. "What'd you just say?"
"I'm just making an observation. She leaves town, and a few days later, you lay your bike down on a curve you've ridden a thousand times. Doesn't take a genius to connect those dots."
"Then it's a good thing you're not a genius. Mind your business." The air inside this truck went from January chill to the temperature in Hell in a split second. He was stickin' his nose where it didn’t belong, but there was nothing I could do about it. In my condition, I couldn’t fend off a chihuahua, let alone the holy terror Lightning was.
"Hey, I'm not judging. Everybody knew you had a thing for her. I'm just saying, if a woman rattled me that bad…" He whistled through his teeth and shook his head while I clenched my jaw again to bite back the nasty comments flying through my brain.
