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She took it, but didn’t place it in her mouth seeing as it’d been gummed to death.
I patted her on the shoulder but went on to explain.
“I had a heart attack when I was seventeen,” I explained. “They say it was due to my poor diet. I lived off of Ramen noodles and bacon that the butcher down the street gave us when I begged enough. For years we lived off of that. I also had myocarditis as a child after a viral infection. I recovered from that eventually, but ultimately, I wasn’t able to take care of my body as I should have. Because at the time of my heart attack, it was found that my blood pressure was two twenty over one sixty. Cholesterol levels through the roof. Good low, bad very high. Hell, I don’t even think that I got a damn veggie or fruit in me for about eight years or so. So it was no wonder that when I suffered that heart attack, it hit me as hard as it did. It damaged a lot of my heart, and that’s what started the downward spiral that I’m in now.”
“That fuckin’ sucks,” Madden grumbled. “That just really fuckin’ sucks.”
I looked at the man that I’d had a rough relationship with since the very beginning.
Madden, I knew, had the hots for Mavis.
There was no doubt in my mind that he did.
But he’d backed off when I’d sort of started to stake my claim when she’d started coming to morning classes, giving me no other options but to see her.
Now, looking at us, I wondered if I should’ve left it alone.
I wondered if…
A hand cupped my jaw, fingers curling lightly into the overgrowth, and I blinked, staring down into Mavis’s eyes.
“You’re mine, and I love you,” she whispered fiercely.
I closed my eyes and placed my forehead against hers.
“I love you, too,” I promised her.
That was the night that I had another heart attack.
CHAPTER 17
You need to stop living for someone else’s idea of perfect.
-Murphy to Mavis
MAVIS
A few weeks later
“Can’t. Breathe.”
I reached into my pocket for the aspirin that I carried everywhere now—I never left home without it—and shoved two practically down his throat.
“I’m going, baby. I’m going.”
I blew the stoplight that was turning red, and quickly drove to the hospital like I was on two wheels.
By the time that we pulled up to the ER entrance, it’d been two minutes and fifteen seconds since he’d first shown signs of a heart attack.
I screeched to a halt and all but screamed my head off for someone to come help me.
A brawny young man in green scrubs came out seconds later with a wheelchair in front of him, looking nervous.
I yanked open the van door and all but lifted Murphy out of his seat.
All I had to do was pivot and turn Murphy into the wheelchair before I was screaming, “He’s having a heart attack! Take him back!”
The green-scrubbed guy didn’t hesitate after that.
Vlad was screaming his head off in the backseat, and I turned woodenly and stared at his face.
He was staring at where Murphy had disappeared through the large doors.
I sat down on the concrete right there, put my head in my hands, and cried.
It took them twenty minutes to come out to me and tell me that Murphy had suffered a heart attack.
Five minutes later, I was walking into my worst nightmare.
“Baby?”
He was so weak he could barely hold his head up.
His eyes were sunken, and he couldn’t sleep worth a damn because of the coughing that kept him up all night.
Weeks ago, when he’d had his heart attack after we’d left dinner with our friends, he’d gone from moving around to…not.
He’d gone from being able to do just about everything, just with a hitch in his step, to barely able to move from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen.
Now, he couldn’t even do that.
“Read to me,” he pleaded.
I swallowed past a lump in my throat, my fingers scraping down the length of his scruffy jaw.
“What do you want me to read you?” I asked.
He cleared his throat. “Read me the romance book you started reading me last night.”
I choked out a laugh. “That was a joke.”
“It might’ve been, but I got into it. Now read, woman,” he ordered.
I dashed away the tear, hopefully before he got a chance to see it, and reached for my phone.
I’d already started to read on the book, but I knew exactly where we’d left off.
There was a specific scene that’d left me all hot and bothered.
One that I had to stop reading because I couldn’t go about reading it anymore in front of the man that, though weakened and barely able to lift his head, still had the power to undo me.
Even with a heated, sallow-eyed look, he could totally and completely do it for me.
