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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“He doesn’t touch me.”
“You promise?”
“Yeah. He’s a drunk and not winning any awards for best parent of the year anytime soon, but he leaves me alone.”
“You’d tell us if he was…hurting you, right?”
He scoffs, and waves us off. “Of course. I tell you guys everything.”
Izzy and I share a worried look, and he groans.
“Seriously, guys. He’s a piece of shit, but it could be worse… Just a few more years, and then we’re outta here anyway.”
“You promise you’ll tell us,” Izzy says, holding out her pinky. “You know Mom and Dad would let you live with us.”
Rolling his eyes, he curls his pinky with hers. “I promise. He doesn’t lay a hand on me.”
It’s silent, save for the rhythmic beeping and whirring of the machines surrounding the head of the hospital bed.
Izzy and I sit on his right side, hand in hand, chairs pushed as close as we can get them, our knees pressed together right up against the bed.
“Hey,” I say, when a single hazel eye cracks open. The other is swollen shut. I sigh. “You’re awake.”
They said he’d be fine—physically—but it’s been almost twenty-four hours since the attack…
Eighteen since surgery ended.
We were beginning to worry he’d never wake up.
His black brows knit with confusion, but then he hisses, tensing, like even that small movement hurt him.
“Waylon?” Izzy says, her voice breaking. “It’s okay. Don’t move,” she says quickly, when he looks wildly around, trying to sit up, despite having to be in a world of pain.
The heart monitor spikes with his panic and confusion—the beeps quickening, growing louder—and the tendons in his neck draw tight, straining against his skin like he’s struggling to breathe.
I grab his forearm, gently—one of the few places he’s not all banged up. His knuckles are twice the size they normally are, black and blue and red, with stitches woven in where he’d broken skin.
He fought back.
He snaps his head my way, his one somewhat-good eye wide and bloodshot, the pupil swallowing his hazel iris.
Izzy’s rubbing his leg, and I massage my thumb over his chilled skin.
“You’re safe,” I tell him.
His forehead creases.
A sniffle comes from next to me, and Waylon’s gaze follows, before snapping to mine with a familiar edge to it that has me rolling my eyes.
“Dude, short of tying her up in my room, there was no stopping her from being here.”
His mouth thins into a bloodless line, drawing stark attention to the stitches keeping the split in his lip from gaping open.
Seeing how beat up he is, with bruising covering nearly every visible inch of his skin—stitches across his temple, going down the corner of his lip, his knuckles…
The tubes curling up out from under the blanket, where they drain fluid into a collection container…
