“No.”
“Yes.” He winds his hand around the back of her neck and pulls her in for a gentler kiss. “I’ll be back soon.”
“Kane!”
“I love you. Be safe. Shoot first, ask questions when I get back with the shovel.” Turning on his heel, he walks away and steps through the door before she can go find her bat.
I’d forgotten Angelo’s presence, so when he clears his throat, I almost jump out of my skin. “Sorry.” His gray eyes study mine. “We’ll be back soon. You girls stay put.”
“You can go home… if you want.”
His eyes narrow. “You don’t want me here?”
I can’t look into his angry eyes. I can’t pretend to be his equal, so I cowardly turn in Jess’ arms and bury my face between the pillow and her shoulder. “I’m just saying, you can sleep in your own bed tonight. You don’t have to sleep in a crappy chair.”
He says nothing.
He doesn’t touch me.
He simply lets out a weary sigh, walks through the door, and closes it with a soft snick.
“Laine…” Jess’ disappointment hurts my heart. “Don’t push him away so much. He’s looking out for you.”
“I don’t want him to.” I sniffle and shamelessly wipe my nose on the pillow. “I want him to go away and never come back.”
“Never?” She turns in the bed and faces me. Twining her fingers with mine, she pounds the pillow with her head until I’m forced to meet her eyes. “Never? He’s family, Baby. He’s one of us.”
“I don’t like it.”
“What don’t you like?” With our hands still intertwined, she stretches forward and swipes a thumb beneath my eye. “What’s he doing wrong? He’s just one of the guys, and he’s hanging out. He just wants to make sure that you’re okay.”
“He…” I swallow past a lump in my throat. “It was him that found me the other day. He knows what I did. He knows I’m crazy.”
“Crazy; like funny crazy like the rest of us?”
“No! Like white jacket and padded walls crazy.”
“No, you’re not crazy. You’re no crazier than the rest of us.”
“I tried to kill myself! That means I should go to a hospital for freaks. Who knows; maybe they’ll still send me there, then you can visit on our birthday.”
“No, Baby.” She presses a kiss to my knuckles. “They’re not sending you anywhere, and you’re not crazy. Not the kind that you think. You’ve lived through a really traumatic time in your life. It was really, really bad. It got too heavy and you did something to make it easier. That doesn’t make you crazy.”
“It makes me a coward.” My lips tremble. “It makes me weak.”
“We don’t always have to be strong. Sometimes we can’t. Sometimes we’re just so unbelievably tired, we need to sleep. You act like I didn’t consider the same thing when Kane was gone. You think I wasn’t going insane without him? I could still feel him.” She presses our hands to her heart. “I could feel him, but he was gone, and he was never coming back. You think I didn’t want to go to sleep and never wake up again?”
My lips quiver. “You did? You thought about it?”
“Every day for months, Baby. Every single day, I thought about it, I planned it, I played it out in my mind so many times, sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference between imagination and memory anymore. I wasn’t sure what was real. I didn’t know if I was still alive or dead. The only thing that let me know I was still here was the pain in my heart. Heaven couldn’t possibly hurt that much. That wouldn’t be fair.”
“Why didn’t you do it?” I clear my throat. “How’d you keep going?”
She shrugs. “Alex told me that Kane wasn’t a bad person. He was one of us, and knowing that, gave me new purpose. I was still tired; I wassotired, and sad, and so very heavy. It felt like I wore cement shoes, and everything felt a thousand times harder than it used to, but I wanted to do something good. I wanted to become a lawyer and put someone away for hurting people. Because then I could be with Kane again in heaven and tell him I did that. I did that for him.”
“How does it feel, Jessie?” My voice breaks. “How does that feel?”
“How does what feel?”