Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,19
cast-iron bed.
I jerked back, waiting for him to rear up but he didn’t even moan. Didn’t even twitch.
“It’s for your own good, Max,” I said. “And mine. So you don’t…you know…kill me accidentally. Basically it’s for me.”
I put shaking fingers on the muscle of his shoulder. Hot. His skin was burning up. I touched his forehead with the back of my hand.
Fever.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to his inert figure. The bright sun was no longer slicing between the blinds and the shadows were thick and fuzzy. The skin of his chest and shoulders, taut and pale over his sleek muscles looked like moonlight. The black ink of his tattoos stood out in vivid relief and I nearly reached down to touch the swirl beneath the words “Brothers In Arms” beneath his collarbone. Like it might be soft.
Like one of those touch and feel books from the library when I was a kid.
Feel the soft little bunny.
Feel the dangerous biker.
“Oh God, Max…I’m really sorry.” I should have taken the bullet out in Atlanta. I shouldn’t have waited. And now he had a fever, and I’d lived with Fern just long enough and had just enough nursing school to know that wasn’t good.
Adrenaline had me fully awake, so I pulled on some cutoffs and went back into the living room and kitchen. There was an old rotary phone sitting on top of the kitchen counter. For a second I stared at it, trying to remember if I’d actually ever seen one outside of old movies.
I hadn’t. It was like a saber-toothed tiger or something.
And dead like one, too; when I picked up the receiver I didn’t get a dial tone. I had to go out to my car and grab my phone.
Now. Where the hell were my keys?
I found them on the other side of the counter. Next to three phones. Two of them were mine. One was Max’s.
Fern. Fern had done that. She had taken the bullet out of Max’s leg, covered me with a blanket, and went out to the car to grab my garbage bags and my phone.
I pulled open the fridge, and just as I suspected, there was juice and apples. A Tupperware container. I knew before popping the lid on the thing that it was tuna salad.
Tuna salad with grapes in it. And walnuts. Just like she made for us seven years ago. Jennifer had loved it. Ate it with a spoon right out of the fridge.
“Fruit and fish?” I would say to her. “Gross.”
“More for me!” She’d give me her wide-eyed happy look and dig in.
The Tupperware lid snapped back on and I shut the fridge.
My debt to Aunt Fern was growing past the point I knew how to pay it.
I shelved the emotions that couldn’t help me right now. Guilt. Regret. They’d be fuel for the hamster wheel at night. Today though, I needed to get back to the business of saving Jennifer. And that meant saving Max.
I brushed my thumb over my phone which was plugged into the charger and sat on the counter. No messages. No texts. No nothing.
I hit the icon for Fern’s phone.
The phone rang once and then was answered.
“Olivia?”
“Yeah—”
“I’ll be right there.”
And then she hung up.
Right. I hung up and looked down at the other two phones on the counter.
One was my detonator phone. I need to smash that and throw it in the ocean, fast.
The other one must have been Max’s. A cheap burner flip phone from a gas station. I flipped it open and the screen lit up.
Oh God. My heart leapt into my throat. Maybe I didn’t need Max after all. Maybe I could get the number for Lagan off his phone and take it to the cops. Or have it traced. Or maybe I could…
It was passcode protected. Of course.
I tried the basics. 1234. Nothing. 1111. Nothing.
I closed the phone and set it back down. I guess I had to keep Max around a little bit longer.
There was a knock at the door, and I crossed the room in my bare feet to unlock it and let Fern in, as well as a gust of hot hallway air. She was in full nurse mode—stern-faced and carrying her old army medical bag.
Totally terrifying, if she wasn’t also wearing a green and purple tennis outfit, with a little skirt and everything and a visor tucked into her red curls.
Rosie the Riveter does Wimbledon or some shit.
Affection swamped me. A wildflower in my chest. Uncomfortable and unfamiliar.