Looking back, I’d have given my entire life—past, present, and future—for it to have actually been mud. However, there was no mistaking the crimson-red blood smeared across my thigh.
My heart stopped as I frantically scooped the dog up, begging and praying to any and every god in the universe that he’d cut his paw or broken a toenail. Anything that would’ve made the blood his—and not hers.
See, that was what made hope a drug. After two previous suicide attempts, combined with our fight and her overall deterioration that had led up to talks of an inpatient treatment facility to begin with, it being her blood was the most likely conclusion.
But hope clouded reality. It made me believe that anything was possible.
Like maybe she was feeling better.
Maybe I was jumping to conclusions.
Maybe the woman I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with would stop fucking trying to die.
All hope was gone when the blood on Sugar’s black fur covered my arm.
I didn’t remember putting him down or dropping the card.
Nor did I remember sprinting down the hall.
I shouted her name. I was sure of it.
At some point before I reached the bedroom, I dug my phone from my pocket and dialed nine-one-one.
As much as it destroyed me, I’d mastered the process of finding her like that.
She might not have wanted to stay, but I would have done anything to keep her.
“Fuck!” I boomed as I entered the room, finding her curled into the fetal position on the bed. My bed. What I had hoped would one day be our bed. The white sheets were covered in blood. My every nightmare playing out in front of me—again.
And just when I thought my scarred and tortured heart was unable to break any more, pain from the explosion in my chest rocked me to the core.
A female dispatcher spoke in my ear. “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”
With long strides, I hurried to her side and immediately checked for a pulse. It was faint, but a surge of adrenaline cleared the fog of fear from my head. “I need an ambulance. Fourteen-eleven Millstone Drive. My fiancée… She tried to kill herself.”
There were going to be more questions. Her name. Her age. How she was injured. Where she was located in the house. How long ago it had happened. Only some of which I had answers to. None of those answers would save her.
But I could.
And no matter how much she hated me for it, I always would.
Dropping the phone, I got to work, desperate to save the other half of my soul.
“Don’t you fucking do this,” I snarled, more angry at the world than at her.
Popping every button, I stripped my dress shirt off and wrapped it around her wrist, tying it as tight as possible before repeating the process with my undershirt on her other arm. “You promised me!” I raged, lifting her hands over her head to hopefully slow the bleeding until help could arrive.
Her breaths were shallow, and she was a terrifying shade of gray. Ghostly. If I was being honest, she’d been a ghost of the woman I’d fallen in love with for months.
My heart rattled my ribs as it pounded at a marathon pace, but it was the soul-crushing emotion in my throat that took my knees out.
As I sank down onto the blood-covered bed beside her, a boulder of grief settled in my gut.
What if this was it?
What if she didn’t survive this time?
Tears I’d long since given up on trying to control rolled down my cheeks. “Goddamn it, you promised me. Do you hear me? You hold on because I am not done yet,” I choked, barely able to get the words out. She needed to hear it, or more realistically, I desperately needed it to be true. “You are not allowed to leave me. Not like this.”
The day we’d met, I’d thought it was fate. She was perfect. Her laugh. Her chaos. The levity I felt in her presence. It took approximately an hour for me to fall in love. Deep, unwavering, life-altering love. The kind that burrows into your bones and rewrites your DNA.
But maybe the only thing that had been truly fated about our relationship was the fact that I had been destined to lose her from the start.
Remi
“Please tell me this is a joke,” I said. My father’s rickety office chair let out a loud creak as I leaned back and lifted a napkin with a handwritten IOU.
His thick gray mustache did little to hide his sheepish smirk. “What? Kenny always pays.” He cut his gaze off to the side and mumbled, “Eventually.”
“Which is never.” I dug a manila file stuffed full of similar paperwork from his desk drawer. “And Allen?”
He harrumphed and rested his crossed arms on his round belly. “He’s between jobs.”
I paused and leveled him with a glare. “Heather?”
“Give me a break, Remi.” He paced from one side of his tiny office to the other. “I don’t see you complaining when I feed your boys for free anytime they show their faces around here.”
“Mark and Aaron are family. Meanwhile, Heather told the entire school I had herpes after Mom left.”
“You still holding grudges from well over a decade ago?” He sliced me with a disappointing scowl, making me shrink in the chair.
“Well, no… Not exactly.”
“Since high school, she’s had two girls and married an alcoholic who has no problem spending his rent and grocery money on booze only to come home and make her pay in different ways.”
I winced, immediately feeling guilty, and my father didn’t miss it.
“So yeah,” he said. “Last I heard, you don’t have herpes, but she does have some serious issues. If I can give her and her girls a hot meal and a safe place for a few hours, I don’t give a damn if she can pay the tab or not.”
God, I loved my dad. Yes, even in the middle of a grade-A scolding. He’d always had such a kind and generous heart. Perhaps not the best head for business, but he made up for it in other ways.
Resting his hand on my shoulder, he stared deep into my eyes. “Talk to me, Remi. What’s really going on in that head of yours?”
Instinctively, I shrugged him off. “Nothing.”
It wasn’t a lie. It also wasn’t the truth. I’d been off for days. I attributed it to the finality of the settlement, but putting the past to rest should have come with relief, not anxiety.
He slanted his head. “You sure? Aaron said—”
“Aaron?” I rolled my eyes. Of course they’d been talking. While he was my ride-or-die most of the time, Aaron was one hundred percent a snitch when it came to my dad. “If you want to worry about someone, your informant hasn’t slept in almost a week.”
“Damn,” he whispered, shaking his head. “How am I supposed to leave you kids while you’re still dealing with all this?”
My stomach knotted as it had so often since he’d told me he was retiring to Miami. He’d tried to cancel the move at least a dozen times after the plane crash, but if there was ever a man who deserved happiness, it was Jack Grey.
“First off, we haven’t been kids in a long time. Secondly, I think Crystal Dawn would be pretty upset if you stood her up now.”
Yes. My father married a woman named Crystal Dawn, first and middle name respectively, but he never missed an opportunity to call her by both. She wasn’t a stripper. Though, if you asked me, she’d missed a pretty great opportunity with a name like that. Instead, she was a beautiful white-haired widow who carried chocolates in her purse for the neighborhood kids and thought my father had hung the moon.