Raine (Gods of the Fifth Floor #2) - M.V. Ellis Page 0,101

beneath all that show is an actual person with needs, wants, desires. The real Raine is a man who doesn’t always do or say the right thing. He’s a man who can be a total asshole at his worst, but a total sweetheart at his best. And that man—the one who bleeds real blood, and cries real tears—is the Raine Davies I’m deeply in love with.”

“Yeah? Well, I didn’t want you to see more blood and tears than you already have. In fact, what you’ve seen is too much by far.”

“Too much for whom? Not for me. I mean, not that I want you to be hurt or sick, but you are, and I’m here to support you through it. Because that’s real life, and that caricature I mentioned before doesn’t exist. But you do, and I want you to carry on existing for a long time to come. You do that for me, and more importantly, for yourself, and I promise I’ll be by your side for whatever that entails and whatever that looks like, if only to remind you when you need to dial back the assholery a notch. Plus, you have it all wrong. The look in my eyes isn’t pity, it’s love.”

“I don’t deserve you.”

“Yeah you do, and I deserve you. Sure, sometimes you also deserve a punch in the dick, but that doesn’t mean you’re not worthy of my love, or anyone else’s for that matter. You are, and you have it. You have me. Ride or die.”

“I’m a lucky guy.”

“You’re not going to hear any arguments from me on that one.”

“Hmm... well, speaking of dicks, and the like, and being there for whatever I need...” I smiled, and nodded toward the peak in the sheets.

“What, here?”

“Well, if I’m going to do this treatment.”

“There’s no ‘if’ in that sentence.”

“Okay, I’m going to do this treatment, which means I’ll be spending a lot of time here, so we’ll need to improvise. I’m sure that the sooner we get practicing, the better it will be. And as they say, there’s no time like the present.”

“Really?”

“Really. You wouldn’t want me to give one of the nurses a fright, would you? Better we take care of it now, before we get interrupted.” It turned out that coke or no coke, I was hard as rock for her, pretty much twenty-four seven.

“And by ‘we,’ you mean me.” There was that light dancing in her eyes again. It felt so fucking good to know that I had helped put it there.

“Well, I’ll have a hand in it, too. Not a literal hand, obviously, that’s all on you, unless you prefer your mouth, or—”

“Jesus Christ, Raine. I’m not about to climb onto your dick in a hospital room, but I guess I could—”

“Knock, knock. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“Motherfucker!” Pissed didn’t even begin to cover the way I felt at that moment.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“Yeah, that’s about right.” Noa had just slipped her hand down under the sheets and gripped my dick, squeezing tight, but she dropped it like a hot brick as soon as she realized that we had company. Not that I necessarily blamed her. I did, however, blame him. A lot. This kind of stunt was so totally his MO, he always was a fucking cockblocker.

“What are you doing here? Oh, wait, what was it you said the last time we saw each other...?” I pretended to strain to recall his words. “Ah, that’s right. You never wanted to see me again, unless it was to be there when karma dry-fucked me in the ass with a ten-foot cactus. Well, looks like karma has your back, because I’m finally getting what I deserve.” I gave him a grim smile.

“The memo you sent her must have gotten lost in translation somewhere though, because there’s not a cactus in sight, only cancer—you can see how that happened though, right? Cancer/cactus, cactus/cancer. They kind of sound similar. Anyway, the fact is, I’m dying, and you get to have a ringside seat, so you can cash in all your karma chips, because you’ve hit the fucking jackpot. How did you even know I was here?” Noa was looking between us with her mouth slightly agape, which was understandable under the circumstances.

“Nate called his sister, and she told me.” Figures. It was the weirdest coincidence in the entire world that one of my best friends’ sisters was dating my estranged brother, and it was going to make for some strained family