Lev was still at the Followhills’ when Luna dropped me off in front of Mom’s hospital room. She’d rushed to the cafeteria to get Dad a coffee and pick up a bag of clothes Vicious had left for my father. I was all alone now, pushing the half-ajar door open.
What I saw inside stopped me in my tracks.
Dad, on his knees in front of my unconscious mother, holding her hand between his rough palms. It was the first time I’d seen my dad kneel, and I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, it’d be the last, too. He took Mom’s hand and kissed the back of it. His entire back was quivering.
“I’m trying, Baby Leblanc. I really am, but I don’t know if I can do it without you. The scariest part is, I don’t know if I want to. It’s a terrible thing to say. I know. Trust me, I know that. But what is life without you? Please wake up, baby. Please. There’s an experimental thing they want to try… They told me it could give you five more years. Five more years, sweetheart. Lev will be in college. Knight will probably have a kid or two of his own with Luna. I can’t imagine us not babysitting the little monsters together.”
I wanted to launch at him and hug the shit out of him, but I also didn’t want to kill this moment. It was theirs. Moving was too dangerous. He needed to finish what he had to say.
Dad drew a breath. “Just try for me, okay? Try to get better? I’ll fight the doctors. I promise. I’ll fight everyone. I just need the smallest signal from you. Anything. Move your eyelid. Twitch your nose. Breathe on your own. Fart, for all I care! Anything, Rosie. Please. Please. Please.”
I wanted it to be like in the movies. When his pleas for a miracle actually materialized, and she woke up, and everything was okay. Hell, I half-expected it to be the case. That’s the trouble with being a Generation X kid. They teach you dreams really do come true. Cruel assholes.
Dad stared at her for long minutes, not giving up, before his shoulders sagged and his head dropped to the mattress, by her waist.
He looked up again, changing his tone from pleading to stern.
“Rose Leblanc, you can’t die on me now. We still have a lot of work to do. Knight is out of control. Lev is too sensitive and emotional to grow up without a mother. And what about Emilia? What about our friends? Vicious, Trent, and Jaime will try to drag me out of the house to meet people—maybe fix me up with someone. I’ll start drinking, I swear. I’ll ruin all the progress we’ve made together.”
Pause.
My heart broke for him. It didn’t matter that I was still furious with him for how he’d treated Lev. Or me. Or the entire universe, for that matter.
Another growl left his mouth. “Take me with you.” He whispered this time, broken and sad and resolute. “I don’t want to be here without you, Rose Leblanc.”
I swallowed, looking down at my feet. He wanted to die. I got it. If Luna’s life was in danger, I’d want to go through whatever she was going through, too.
“Ride or die,” I heard him say, and my eyes darted up in shock.
What the fuck? It was the same as Luna and me. What were the odds?
“Remember? We carved it on the tree in the forest before the kids butted into our shit and asked us to make a treehouse out of it? I never forgot, Baby Leblanc. Ride or die. There will be no one like you. Nothing like you. You’re a once in a lifetime experience, baby, and I’m the lucky bastard who got you.”
A sound between a groan and a yelp escaped me, and Dad’s head snapped to the door, meeting my gaze. I closed my eyes. I was too self-conscious of getting caught seeing them like this. I’d rather catch them porking every day of the week for the rest of my life than witness this. It had gutted me like a fish.
“Knight.”
I didn’t know how much time passed before I realized he was hugging me. Or how much time passed before I hugged him back on the threshold of that room, between life and death, hanging by the thread, not here nor there.
I buried my face in his shoulder and tried hard not to cry. I still couldn’t cry.
“This is the end, isn’t it? You need to tell me,” I said.
I felt him nodding, but he didn’t say anything. I didn’t want him to. It was too hard on all of us as it was.
“How much time?”
“A week, if we’re lucky.”
“Oh, God. And the experimental thing?”
I wasn’t even pretending I hadn’t eavesdropped on his intimate breakdown. Tragedy and loss strip you off all those things—shame, humiliation, humanity. At some point, you just stop caring.
He shook his head, tightening his arms around me. I wanted to tell him so many things: That he needed to give Lev more attention. That we needed to prepare my baby brother for this. But for the first time in a long time, I just stole a moment alone with my father and pretended my mom wasn’t dying, that I wasn’t an addict, that my girlfriend wasn’t unhappy with me, that I had my shit together.
I breathed in the traces of Dad’s cologne, closing my eyes.
He’d carved the words ride or die on the back of the tree? How had I not noticed them carved on our treehouse?
It was only when Luna wrote them to me in blood that they’d registered.
She was all I saw. Always.
Since telling Luna about Mom was easier than telling Lev, I decided to start with that.
I went to school the next morning right from the hospital. People were still so busy talking shit about Poppy, they hadn’t noticed the changes in me, and they knew nothing about Mom. I knew Vaughn and Hunter would stop the gossip mill if people found out just how bad things had gotten with her.
There was something embarrassing and humiliating about death I had yet to uncover. It was a weakness everyone had—yet still, being affected by it felt shameful.
Luna picked me up from school (“You’re fucking a freshman in college! Good for you,” Hunter called when he saw me kiss her lips.), and we drove to the beach. I hadn’t had a drop of alcohol the entire day, and I was snappy, on edge. I decided to make every effort not to piss my girlfriend off. I had a very strong feeling I was already walking a tightrope after our encounter yesterday, when I’d basically thrown her encounter with FUCKING JOSH in her face yet again.
The drive, like many hours of my life recently, passed in silence. Then Luna got us blue slushies and we settled on the sand, letting the freezing waves break on our toes.
“My mother has one week to live, give or take,” I told her, looking at that magical sliver where the sky kisses the ocean—where little kids could get swallowed into another portal, apparently.
I wanted it to suck me in. Take me and Dad and Mom and Lev and Luna somewhere we could live without bone-crushing problems.
“Knight,” she whispered, cupping my bent knee and giving it a squeeze. “I’m so sorry. I’m here for you. Whatever you need, baby. I took the rest of the week off from school, and my mom and Aunt Emilia said they’ll be moving into your house until…”
I turned my head toward her, my face probably carrying a puzzled expression. How did she know all this, and why in the fresh hell wasn’t she more surprised by this whole ordeal? It had certainly caught me off guard.
“I just heard them speak on the phone,” she clarified, rubbing the back of her neck. Bullshit. Luna couldn’t lie to save her life.
“Luna,” I warned.
I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t. But Luna wasn’t the only one with a great memory. I remembered the last time she’d acted weird when the subject of my mom’s health came up. Like she’d known something I hadn’t.
“I really don’t—”
“But you do,” I cut her off. “You do, so tell me.”
Her face fell, her features tightening. She looked wary. I couldn’t bear it. She was wary of me. I scrubbed my face, willing myself not to snap at her. I’d do whatever it took to keep myself together.
“Please don’t lie to me,” I asked softly, not looking at her.
“I knew,” she whispered.
My heart broke all over again. Because I hadn’t known. I was the idiot who still prayed while everyone around me was making plans, putting shit in motion. Everyone was preparing for grief, while I was still deep in denial. I exhaled sharply, my face still buried in my hands.
“She asked me to do something for you and Lev. We worked on it over winter break. It was a secret. I promised her I’d always take care of you, Knight, and I meant it.”
“You knew it was coming,” I repeated. “You knew she was dying. You knew, and you still let me come to you, to Boon, knowing I might not have a mother when I came back. And as it happens, I don’t. She’s in a coma. I’ll never speak to her again.”
I didn’t know if the betrayal was really that big, or if the tragedy itself enhanced it. Either way, I knew one thing for sure: between finding out I’d be an orphan in the next few days, and that my girlfriend had known about it and hadn’t told me, I was angry, in self-destructive mode, and not in the right headspace to be lovey-dovey.
Only this time, I bottled it in.
I couldn’t call her ass out and lose her. She’d made a bullshit move—no doubt in my mind. She couldn’t fuck someone else and keep something like this from me in the same year. Only, apparently, she could. I wasn’t going to fight with her, because I knew I’d lose control.
I couldn’t do that anymore. Not after our little dub-con in the shower. No way, José.
I stood up, smiling tightly.
“Knight?”
“Sorry, baby. Nerves.”
“You’re scaring me.”
Wait till you read my mind. That’ll send you running to the hills in a heartbeat.
Actually, drunk Knight wasn’t the only asshole inside of me. These days sober Knight was a miserable piece of work, too.
“Don’t be scared, Moonshine. I’m just trying to cope as best I can. Drop me at home?”
She frowned at me, still hugging her knees to her chest. “What? Why?”
“Homework.”
“You expect me to believe that?” She raised an eyebrow.
Sometimes I still couldn’t believe she was talking. And at times like this, wished she wasn’t.
“You can sit and watch if you’d like,” I tried to give my lie wings.
“Sure.” She followed through, standing up.
Wrong answer, bae. I needed to be alone, and I needed to be alone right now.
“Although…” I laced my arm through hers as we walked up the stairs back to the promenade, knowing how wrong everything about the situation was. “I’d only get distracted and try to put my dick in you.”
It all sounded off. The proposition. My excuse. My smiles. Every single thing about it. But I could see she knew I was trying really hard not to be a dick. And being a dick was a knee-jerk reaction.
“It’s okay,” she finally relented, looking around, like there was some hidden camera she wasn’t aware of capturing this debacle. “I was going to drive Lev to the hospital so he and Dean could have…a talk.”
I practically sighed in relief. I needed a binge like Tom Brady needed a personality transplant. Urgently.
“Right.” Because you knew about this talk before I did, is what I left out.
“Are you sure everything is okay?” Luna stopped in front of her car.
This was my chance to come clean. To tell her I was mad at her for not telling me this. To blow shit up. But wearing my heart on my sleeve never did me any good. Last time I tried it, I’d pushed her away.
So I just offered her another one of the many smiles that never reached my heart, and kept her close.
“Never been so sure in my life, baby.”
