Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,112
blood-splattered and pale, touched my hands. “I told you not to love me.”
I laughed but it came out like a hard cough. A sob. “Too late, baby. I think you’re too late.” Her eyelids slid shut and I got to my knees, lifting Joan into my arms. “We have to get her out of here,” I said to Jennifer. “Grab my phone, call 911, and find out where the nearest hospital is.”
I met Jennifer’s panicked eyes for a moment. They were so much like Joan’s it hurt to look at them. And they were so scared.
“Go!” I yelled.
I got Joan in the backseat of the SUV.
“You…kidnapping me?” she asked, through white lips.
“Only a little.”
She smiled and I clung to the hope that smile gave me. I held it with both hands and my whole heart.
“Max!” Jennifer yelled and I turned and found her standing in the clearing, holding the phone.
“Let’s go! You called the hospital?”
“Better!”
In the distance I heard the sound of a chopper.
“I called the cavalry.”
Chapter 29
I’ve been in dozens of hospital waiting rooms, waiting for news on guys who’d been shot, knifed, or got the crap kicked out of them in a fight. I’d sat in my share of hospital waiting rooms with my brother, waiting to hear word on my mom when she’d OD’d.
They were all the same. Gray-green and filled with the smell of fear. Of anxiety and boredom. CNN on the televisions. Months old People and AARP magazines sitting in tatters on the end tables.
All that to say, I knew my way around hospital waiting rooms. You had to pace the stress. The trips to get coffee. You couldn’t let the boredom and the not knowing turn you into knots. Waiting had a rhythm. And it wasn’t easy.
Jennifer didn’t know any of this. And she paced the far end of the room like a tiger in one of those shitty everglade roadside zoos. Out of place and ready to tear through the walls. People were watching her from the corner of their eyes like she might start speaking in tongues. Or pull out a gun.
She had that kind of unhinged look about her.
And it was made worse by the scrubs the nurses gave her when we got here because her clothes had been saturated with Joan’s blood. The cupcakes with sunglasses looked utterly maniacal on her nearly vibrating body.
“Take a deep breath,” I said, because I had to say something. Her stress was starting to screw with my rhythm and I could not lose my shit right now. I was working very hard to not think about Joan behind the walls separating us. If I thought of her in some sterile operating room, with some surgeon who didn’t know her, didn’t know her heart and her courage and her pain—putting her together after Lagan tore her apart—I would lose my shit.
And I could not lose my shit. My shit was going to be locked down tight until I heard that Joan was okay.
“Like a deep breath is supposed to help?” she snapped.
I shrugged. “Doesn’t hurt.”
She sucked in a hard deep breath and let it out like a fist breaking through her chest. “Didn’t help.”
I smiled, kicking my feet out in front of me. I crossed my hands over my stomach. The nurse hadn’t offered me any scrubs and I still wore Joan’s blood. And I would wear it until I knew she was alive.
“How come you’re so calm?” she snapped.
“I’ve had some practice in waiting rooms.”
“You love her?” she asked, watching me sideways. “That’s what you said back there, that you love her.”
“You got a problem with that?” I asked. Because the words were new. The feelings uncertain, and I didn’t want to talk them over with Jennifer, who was looking for a fight to take her mind off waiting on Joan.
“Not if you treat her right.”
“Then you got no problem.” She paced again, over to the wall with the television and then back toward the corner. Five steps each way. She was making me dizzy.
“She gave you some fake name.”
“Joan. She’s been using that for months. I think ever since she left you.”
“Why?”
I explained how she’d been working undercover at the strip club. Different hair. Different name.
“Joan’s a shitty name for a stripper,” she said. She was so much like her sister, it hurt.
“I can’t really argue with that.”
“That’s how you met?” she asked.
“That’s how I met Joan. I met Olivia when she saved my life. Took me down to Florida so your aunt