“I’m sorry, angel.” Foster touched a spot on my shoulder and I flinched. “I fucking drew blood.”
I turned my head to look back at him. His fingertips were smeared with blood. He glanced down his chest, finding a streak of red there, too. When he looked over at me, regret m
orphed his features. I let my head sink back into the bed. “I’m sure I’ll live.”
“Goddammit,” he said, obviously more disturbed by this turn of events than I was. “I just—fuck—what is wrong with me? You taunt me and I unleash on you, trampling over limits we haven’t even discussed. I should’ve never—”
“Don’t you dare take a second of this back,” I said, cutting him off with what little energy I could muster. “Or I will personally kick your ass—well, when I have the ability to move again. I told you to do what you wanted. And you did. Now you’re just raining on my afterglow.”
He let out a long, belabored breath. “Don’t move. I’m going to get you cleaned up and then there’s a bathtub with our names on it.”
—
An hour later, I was curled up in Foster’s bed, mellow and sated. He’d gently cared for me, bathing me, then treating the spot where the skin had broken and rubbing salve on the rest. Two ibuprofen had been swallowed down, the curtains had been drawn tight, and now I was ready for a nap. But even though his back was to me, I could sense Foster’s restlessness.
We hadn’t talked much after sex, and I was trying to leave him be. I’d pushed enough today. But there was also no way I was going to drift off, knowing he was still so tense next to me. I reached out and touched his hip. “You okay?”
He didn’t respond at first, but then reached back and laced his fingers with mine. “I don’t know what I am, angel.”
“That’s understandable. I can’t imagine what you’ve been through these last few days.”
He pulled my hand off his hip and drew it around his front side until I was almost spooning him. He traced my knuckles with his fingertip. “I thought I would feel better once I knew. I thought it would help.”
I pressed my lips to the back of his shoulder.
“But knowing all that happened to her . . .” A shudder worked through him. “I can’t even . . .”
“Try not to think about that stuff,” I said softly. “Remember her as she was.”
He drew me even closer to him, like he was holding on to a ledge. After a deep breath he said, “You know, earlier that same year, I got the flu for the first time. God, it was awful. I didn’t think I’d ever feel good again. That whole week was so miserable.”
I stayed quiet, not sure where he was going, but knowing that talking was moving in the right direction. I’d listen to him all day and night if that could make him feel better.
“My parents had warned her to stay out of my room, told her she’d get sick, too. But Neve didn’t listen. She would sneak into my room each morning before kindergarten and try to cheer me up. ‘I don’t want you to be sad no more, E,’ she’d say in that perky little voice of hers. That’s what she called me—E. She thought Ian was too long.” His voice caught, and it took a moment before he continued. “One day she dressed up in her dance class outfit and sang Debbie Gibson songs, another she cooked me my favorite dinner with her play food since I couldn’t manage to eat any real meals. She was like this joyous tornado of glitter and giggles.”
Tears stung my eyes. “She sounds amazing.”
“She was,” he said, his voice pained. “And that horrible day later that summer, I told my bubbly little sister to go away, that she was annoying me. All she wanted to do was spend time with me and my friends, and I treated her like she was a brat. That was the last thing she heard from me before . . . before she was, God . . .”
“Oh, Foster,” I said, my heart ripping in two for him, for his family, for that bright little girl who the world would never get the privilege of knowing. “Don’t.”
His body began to jerk with hard sobs. “I led her right to him, right into his sick fucking hands . . .”
I tightened my hold on him, my tears dripping and sliding down my cheeks, as Foster broke apart. “No, Foster, not you. Him. That sicko. What happened wasn’t your fault, baby. It was his fault.”
Foster shook his head against the pillow, but he was past words now. Everything that had been locked inside him seemed to rush out in a deluge. His body wracked with the force of his grief. I grabbed hold of him and rolled him over, wrapping him in my arms and holding him against me. He didn’t fight it. Gone was the bravado, the tough man, and all that was left was the little boy who’d made a simple mistake and suffered the worst of consequences, a boy that’d been abandoned by his parents for it.
I cried silently with him, his pain becoming my own, and didn’t let go.
I would never let go again.
FORTY-ONE
Foster scanned through his email, not feeling very motivated but at least feeling somewhat human again. Cela had refused to leave his side for the last week and had even helped him make it through his sister’s memorial service. At first, he had protested her going, but trying to talk her off that was like trying to talk a brick wall into crumbling. And in the end, he’d been happy to have her there.
His parents had attended and they’d talked with him briefly—like a vaguely polite business relationship—but Cela hadn’t let them get away with the brush-off. She’d cornered his mom and dad, telling them how sorry she was, of course, but also sharing how inspired she was by 4N and Foster’s work for missing children. She’d thrown in a few, “You must be so proud of the man he’s become” type comments.
It’d made his parents visibly uncomfortable, and he’d even caught a flash of regret cross his father’s face. But, to his surprise, his mother had really looked at him for the first time in years, her blue eyes holding remorse for so much time lost, and said, “I am. More than he knows. Foster has probably suffered more than any of us for all of this.”