AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It had been over two years since the last time Allison had kissed Colin, and every one of those moments was tainted by the way things had ended between them. And yet, she’d expected this first kiss to be familiar. Like an old book she hadn’t read in a while, the story returning as she followed it again.
Instead, their kiss had the electricity of something new and surprising, and a little bit forbidden. His mouth was hungry and urgent on hers, his hands tangled in her loose waves. The collar of his T-shirt was balled in Allison’s fist. If only he’d get closer, press himself against her. He tasted like powdered donut and smelled of coffee and hair gel, and it was like kissing a stranger Allison had been dreaming about for too long.
She pulled away, breathing raggedly. Her heart pounded. Her lungs begged for air.
Colin’s mouth moved silently for a moment before her name left his lips.
“I have to go,” she replied.
Then she threw herself from the car and slammed the door before she could add another to the pile of mistakes she’d made tonight.
Chapter 20
Allison found hospitals unsettling enough by day. In the middle of the night, they bordered on creepy.
A chill snuck up her spine as she maneuvered her way through empty, antiseptic hallways toward the ICU. Nurses smiled somberly behind surgical masks as she passed, and Allison almost reached into her purse for her own out of habit. (Since the pandemic, everyone she knew carried one with them just in case, like a scar lingering behind from those awful years.)
At the sterile-white doors to the intensive-care unit, Allison gave her name over the speaker and waited to be let in.
A buzzer cawed like the one on her washer and dryer back in Providence, and the doors swung open. Inside, the lights were bright, shining like spotlights on the square, white nurses’ station at the center of the room. All around the periphery, darkened rooms hid behind glass sliding doors dressed with clipboards and white lettering. Machines beeped from every corner, an electronic symphony, and as the doors eased shut behind Allison, an alarm screamed from a nearby room. She jumped to the side as a grave-faced nurse rushed by.
A thirty-something blond woman sitting behind the desk glanced up with tired eyes. “Who are you looking for?”
“My father.”
The woman’s mouth tightened, but her voice remained calm. “Name?”
“Allison.”
A loud breath left the woman’s lips, and she stood up, her eyes closed. “Your father’s name, honey.”
Allison’s hands shook at her sides, and she gripped the strap of her purse to steady herself. Under this woman’s no-nonsense gaze, she felt small and childish, like a five-year-old lost somewhere she didn’t belong.
“Jed. Jed Avery,” she stuttered.
The nurse smiled. “You’re Cassandra’s daughter. I should have known. You two could be twins.”
Allison twisted her mouth into something vaguely friendly.
“Second door to the right.”
Thanking her, Allison took a hesitant step forward. Suddenly, she wished the nurse had been more interested in talking. Anything to give Allison time to determine how to handle whatever came next.
But after five slow steps, she was standing in front of the glass door. Through its thick cream curtain, she spotted a prostrate form on the bed and the silhouette of someone in a chair beside it that could only be her mother.
The glass swooshed open, sensing her presence, and she forced herself to walk in.
Though average-sized in height and weight, Jed and his uninvited opinions had always taken up so much space in Allison’s life that he’d seemed extra-large. But in that hospital bed, with its white sheets and flat pillow, monitors flanking his shoulders and wires crawling across and beneath the sheets, his face pale, his mouth slack around a breathing tube, he looked powerless. Decrepit. Feeble. Incapable of the pain he’d caused Allison over the years.
A sob lurched from her mouth.
Her mom was cradling one of Jed’s hands in both of hers, her head ducked over his fingers. At the wretched sound Allison made, her gaze jerked toward her daughter.
“You’re here.” She set Jed’s hand against the sheet gently, as if this man, who had been so cruel to them both, were suddenly wrought of thin, fragile glass. Allison fought the urge to throw something and watch him shatter into pieces.
For the hundredth time since she’d gotten in Colin’s car, she wondered what she was doing here.
Her mother folded her into a hug, pressing her daughter’s head to her shoulder. “I’m glad you came,” she whispered, “even if you smell like you’ve been swimming in a keg.”
