A Love Like Ours (29 page)

“I sure do.”

“Well.” She set down her fork, resignation stealing over her. “Then I suppose I’m game.”

The elevator binged. Jake exited it and walked down the hospital corridor, his chest tightening the same way it always did when he neared Mollie’s hospital room. He hated Mollie’s hospital room. He hated it just as much—more—than he’d hated the hospital rooms he’d been trapped in once, long ago. He’d rather be the one suffering than the one watching Lyndie’s sister suffer.

Mollie had not improved. Since she’d been admitted five days before, she’d only worsened. For the past three mornings Lyndie had come to work. She’d spent the rest of her time at Mollie’s bedside, and some of her nights here, too.

He and Lyndie had shared a couple of rushed dinners, but for the most part, he’d gone back to take-out meals and hours of insomnia inside his loft. And though Lyndie did a good job of covering it, Jake could see the strain on her face.

Whenever he could get away from work, he drove to this suffocating building where fears sank their teeth into him, so he could be near her. She always thanked him for coming and always encouraged him not to stay too long. He didn’t know if she wanted him gone because she worried for his sanity or because she needed a break from him or what. He only knew that if Lyndie was here, he wanted to be here, too.

He pushed open Mollie’s door, pausing when he saw Karen sitting on one of the two crummy little sofas.

She looked up from the pile of scrapbooking stuff on the coffee table, her face lighting up at the sight of him. “Come on in.”

He approached, his attention sweeping the space. No offense to Karen, but if Lyndie wasn’t here, which she wasn’t, he didn’t want to spend any extra time in this room.

Karen lifted her glasses onto the top of her head. “Lyndie should be here any minute. Will you sit down with me until she gets here?”

He hesitated.

“I could use the company,” she added.

He let out his breath slowly and sat on the sofa next to the one Karen occupied.

“Your sweet mom visited earlier. She brought all this.” Karen motioned to the side table. Snacks, plus a mini coffeemaker and all kinds of coffees and teas covered the surface.

Jake nodded. His mother had never been the type of Christian who sat around expecting others to meet needs. She took care of the needs she saw. “How’s Mollie?”

“About the same.” Lyndie and her parents talked about Mollie’s condition to each other and to the doctors like experts. They talked to him about it in simple terms. “She’s sleeping quietly at the moment. I’m relieved about that.”

Mollie had an IV going and monitoring machines strapped to her. Her family had tucked her favorite pillow beneath her head and her favorite blanket over her. Mollie’s devotional book and two novels rested on her bedside table. Karen had brought in her scrapbooking stuff, Lyndie had brought sketch pads, colored pencils, ink pens. Mike had brought nothing, since all he needed was a remote control and one came with the room. The James family had moved in.

“How are you?” Jake asked, focusing on Karen.

“Doing okay.”

Dark circles marked the skin beneath her eyes. She wore no makeup except for shiny pink lip gloss. Her hair looked as wrinkled as her purple shirt. Even so, she seemed at peace. Still. After days of listening to her daughter fighting for breath.

“I’m interested to know how you are,” she said. “This has been hard on you, I know.”

Jake bristled. “Far more for you guys.”

“Can I interest you in some coffee or tea? Something to eat?”

“Plain coffee, please.” He might need caffeine for a discussion with Karen.

She filled the pitcher at the sink, then got coffee started. “Do you remember what we discussed the last time we talked? About the things that have helped my clients with PTSD?”

He’d learned to respond to Karen’s directness with directness. “Is this when you start psychoanalyzing me and make me want to run out of here?”

“Psychoanalyze—yes. Make you want to run out of here—who knows? Maybe not.”

He gave her a dark look.

She chuckled. “I’m hopeless, aren’t I? I can’t help it! I see you, and I want to talk to you about things that matter. I haven’t been to work since we brought Mollie to the hospital, so you’re it, the only patient I have at the moment.”

“I don’t remember signing up to be your patient.”

“Quit arguing with me over details in order to avoid the conversation. The last time we talked, I told you that a relationship with God and the practice of remembering the trauma help. Have you tried either?”

“I’ve been trying to remember.”

“And?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, don’t give up. It’s not a quick fix. It’s something that’s valuable over time. Keep trying. I’ve noticed that you’ve improved in the weeks since I first saw you.”

The coffee finished, so she poured a cup for him, then one for herself. “What about the first part? What about God?”

Not enough caffeine in the world for this discussion. Wasn’t Karen embarrassed to keep bringing this subject up with him over and over? If so, she didn’t look it.

He sipped the coffee, then held it steady on the arm of the sofa. “Not much progress there.”

“You know, when God disappoints us, it’s natural to want to blame Him and pull away. I tried that myself for a few years after Mollie was born, if you recall. The thing is, rejecting God ends up injuring the person who rejects Him the most.”

“I don’t think anything I did or didn’t do ended up injuring me more than I’d been already.”

“Hmm.” She tilted her head, seeming to weigh his statement. “And I think that whenever someone distances himself from God, he makes everything a lot worse.” A strand of blond hair fell across her forehead near one eye. “It’s hard, isn’t it? When you’ve grown up trusting God and trying to live an obedient life, and then you’re handed something that breaks your heart? It’s crushing.”

When he didn’t reply, she raised her brows, waiting for him to answer.

Crushing? “Yes.” Growing up, he
had
tried to follow where God had led. Right up until God had led his Humvee over an improvised explosive device.

Worse, God had let him live when everyone else had died.

She drank her coffee, studying him kindly. “Terrible things happen to people. But usually there’s a lot of good in their lives, too. If you were to put the good and the terrible on a scale, Jake, I’m guessing that the good would outweigh the rest. There are things in your life that you’re grateful for, aren’t there?”

An image of Lyndie took shape in his mind. They’d been alone in the tack room this morning, and she’d pulled back from hugging him and looked right at him. She’d seen into him, her arms around his sides, her brown eyes glowing.

He was intensely grateful for Lyndie, grateful in a way he’d never been grateful before. Even the ability to feel about her the way that he did was something he’d never expected for himself after the IED. “There are several things I’m grateful for.”

“Good.”

Karen and Lyndie had been doing their best to bring him around
to their point of view. He respected and admired them. He even saw the sense in their arguments in support of faith. Yet, deep within him, something still resisted. Because of Lyndie, he’d only just begun to experience happiness again. She was enough for him right now. She was more than enough. She was everything he needed.

Karen set her cup aside. “Do you want to run from the room?”

“Yes,” he answered.

Beneath her answering smile, he saw the steel of certainty. The kind of certainty that no amount of years or trials could shake. “Even if you did run out of here, you’d never be able to run far enough. The God I know is as patient as He is . . .”

“Yes?”

“Unrelenting.”

M
ollie had been in the hospital for six nights.

Silver Leaf had a race the day after tomorrow.

But as Lyndie watched Jake walk toward her through the early evening darkness, she consciously set thoughts of those things aside in order to focus every bit of her attention on him.

She’d tucked herself into a spot outside the hospital’s doors. From here, she had a good view of the crosswalk leading from the parking garage to the building’s entrance. Jake hadn’t spotted her yet, which gave her an excellent opportunity to stare.

He had on a navy cotton shirt with a pocket over one side of his chest. He’d pushed the sleeves up, revealing muscular forearms. Through the fabric, she could make out the contours of his wide shoulders, his narrow waist and abs. His jeans were as worn-in as his belt and boots. No hat tonight. The darkness of both his shirt and the sky behind him suited the deep brown of his hair and the harsh angles of his face with its distinctive scar.

Though the setting was not romantic—the nearby cars scented the warm air with the smell of exhaust—she couldn’t remember when she’d ever seen a more romantic sight in her life. Jake was arriving here at the hospital, again. Even though she knew very well that he hated this hospital, he’d come, just like he had every
day since her family had arrived, so that he could be with her. When he left later, he’d run by her parents’ house to check on Grandpa Harold. And if he caught Mom at home, he’d ask her if she needed anything.

Tears warbled her vision as he drew closer. She loved him.

Well. For heaven’s sake, it was his fault! Jake’s actions toward her and Mollie and her family this past week had made it impossible to stay on the “like” side of the line that ran between like and love. How could she have stopped herself from loving him? She couldn’t have. She’d tried.

Tiredness had taken its toll on her. Plus, concern over Mollie and worry about what anxiety about Mollie might be doing to Jake had frayed her badly. That didn’t explain, though, why she was going so teary and sentimental over him.

She was going teary and sentimental because she was crazy, ridiculously in love with him.

It might not be smart. Probably wasn’t. She’d been trying to be cautious and keep some of herself in reserve. Jake had not, after all, gotten himself straight with God. Nor had he articulated his feelings for her. Never once had they even discussed the status of their relationship.

He stepped onto the sidewalk, and she moved forward. “Jake.”

At once, as if she’d shouted his name, his vision swung to her and his motion halted. Sparks, their sparks, whirled between them.
Be careful, Lyndie
, her instincts beseeched.
Don’t rush him. If you put too much pressure
on him, he might break
.

He took her hand, pulled her down the walkway away from the doors, then angled her toward him. “Why are you crying?”

“Crying? Who’s crying?” She sniffed and smiled because she, very obviously, was crying.

“Please don’t cry.”

“It’s okay. I’m just thankful.”

“Thankful?” he repeated, as if he couldn’t understand why she’d cry over a happy emotion.

“I’m thankful for you.”

Some of the concern ebbed from his face. “Mollie’s condition?”

“The same.” The doctors were doing everything they could, but Lyndie feared that the status quo of Mollie’s pneumonia could as easily break toward tragedy this time as wellness.

Mollie had already far outlived the number of years the experts had predicted for someone in her condition—a fact that comforted Lyndie not at all. She didn’t have six sisters. She had only one. Mollie was integral to her small family of four in the way that four solid corners were integral to a square. “My dad’s with her. He’s not planning to leave for another hour, so when I got your text saying you were on your way, he shooed me out.”

“Good, then I want to take you to dinner.”

“You do?”

“Of course I do. Let’s go to that pizza place the nurse told us about yesterday. We can walk there from here.”

“Perfect.” In fact, no dinner invitation had ever sounded more perfect to her. She dashed away the tears that still misted her eyes.

Carefully, Jake ran the tips of his thumbs beneath her eyelashes. “Lyndie, please don’t cry. Seriously. Please don’t.”

“Sometimes I can’t help it.”

“I understand. I just . . .”

“These are happy tears.”

“Still. I really—I can’t stand to see you cry.”

She stretched up and kissed him. He kissed her back, heart-slaying tenderness traveling between them. When they parted, she couldn’t make herself let him go. She hugged him, closing her eyes, letting the comfort of his closeness seep into her and ease her stress for a few bliss-soaked moments.

The whole way to the restaurant, Jake clasped her hand securely in his.

The pizza place turned out to be tiny and somewhat of a hole-in-the-wall. A stretch of bar at the front, which served a bustling number of take-out customers, featured green wine bottles with candles stuffed into their tops and hardened rivulets of wax down their sides. A teenaged hostess led Jake and Lyndie through a dim
interior and sat them at one of only a handful of tables. All the others were occupied.

The electronic candle centered on their table welcomed them with flickering. Its burgundy container matched the burgundy clusters of grapes that hung in intervals above them, where the wall met the ceiling. Both the plastic grapes and the grapevine that swagged between them looked like they’d been nailed there in 1993.

Lyndie’s lips tugged upward insistently as she looked over the top of her menu at Jake. He was here with her. She’d desperately missed their nightly dinners together. Those dinners had been like pearls on a shimmering golden chain, each one rare and treasured.

Their waitress brought hot breadsticks gleaming with melted butter. Next came salad, followed by the loaded pizza they’d ordered to share.

When Jake tried to pick up a slice, the point of his pizza bent immediately downward and his cheese and toppings made a bid for freedom.

Laughing, Lyndie slipped a plate underneath just in time. “The crust is so thin that I think you’re supposed to eat this kind of pizza with a knife and fork.”

“Huh?” He lifted the plate from her, one dark eyebrow quirking.

“Give it a try, cowboy.” She served herself a slice and ate a bite off her fork. Melt-in-your-mouth deliciousness. Tomato, cheese, crust, seasonings, toppings. Her appetite had mostly been nonexistent since Mollie’s hospitalization, but this pizza could tempt anyone into binge eating. “What do you think?”

He tried a bite via fork. “It’s not terrible.” His eyes glinted with teasing. He’d have had to be devoid of taste buds not to notice the amazing status of this pizza.

“Even though you’re having to use utensils in order to eat it?”

“Even so.”

“You want to know what’s especially excellent about this dinner?”

“Not my conversational skills, that’s for sure.”

Laughter bubbled from her. “There’s nothing wrong with your conversational skills.”

His expression told her he wasn’t buying.

“I was going to say that this meal is especially excellent because I’m not going to be required to square dance or participate in icebreakers at a Hibachi restaurant, like I was on the dates Amber organized. Do you remember us discussing it on Easter Sunday? How Amber and I had both agreed to go on three dates in three months—”

“I remember.” He leaned back in his chair and lowered his hands to his thighs. Tall, Dark, and Brooding didn’t look happy. “I hated that agreement.”

“Believe me, I hated it more.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“I’m the one who had to go on the dates.”

“I’m the one who had to hear about it from Bo.”

“Oh.”

He gave her a challenging look that dared her to keep on claiming her experience had been worse.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I’ve now fulfilled my part of the agreement with Amber thanks to you.”

“You’re liking this pizza place better than the Hibachi place?” he asked.

“It’s the company that’s better.” He could light her hair on fire with a look.
This
date was the stuff dreams were made of. “I’m enjoying this dinner with you light-years more.”

“It’s not too dim in here?”

“The lighting is charming.”

“I can barely see you.”

“You exaggerate.”

“The grapes”—he made a motion toward the ceiling—“aren’t bothering you?”

“Not at all.” She served him and herself another slice of pizza, then dug through her salad for a bite that included both goat cheese and black olive.

“I think I might scratch Silver Leaf from Saturday’s race,” Jake stated. Just like that, no warning.

Lyndie paused, then slowly straightened her spine. “What?”

“There’s no reason to force a race into the schedule right now. I can enter him in another week or two.”

Inside, Lyndie’s thoughts went into a clamor.
No!
No, no, no. “But we’ve been preparing him on a timeline so that he’ll be at his peak day after tomorrow.”

“I’ll prepare him again.”

“He’s healthy now. He’s ready. I’m ready.”

“I’m not ready,” Jake said.

Lyndie had been clinging to the promise of the upcoming race. Amid everything with Mollie this past week, it had represented one shining bit of positivity. “Are you wanting to postpone because of Mollie?”

He scrutinized her for a long moment, his hazel eyes hooded. “Yes.”

Lyndie couldn’t tell whether he was being a hundred percent truthful with her. “I promise you, Jake, that I won’t let what’s going on with Mollie affect my ride.”

“It’s not necessary to get this race in right now, on top of everything else.”

“But Bo’s been looking ahead. He and Meg have their eye on upcoming races for Silver that will all build on this next one.”

“There are always variables.” His jaw might as well have been carved from wood.

After days of being able to influence
nothing
with regard to Mollie’s health, Lyndie dearly wanted to influence this one thing. She set her elbow on the table and raised her palm toward him. He answered by placing his palm against hers in the way they had. The simple touch, skin to skin, always felt to Lyndie like two parts of the same whole clicking together.

After a moment, he switched the position of their hands, so that he held hers on the surface of the table.

“The race,” she said earnestly, honestly, “has given me something
to anticipate. It’s a . . . a happy counterpoint to everything else right now. I need that.”

“I understand.” As usual, he gave very little outward evidence of his inner conflict. A slight tensing of his mouth, little more. “I still think we should postpone.”

A voice within that sounded like intuition whispered to her that Jake had chosen the better path, that she ran the risk of pushing him too far. She barreled past. She needed this to go her way. “Please don’t postpone it. Please let me ride.”

His fingers tightened around hers with what felt like urgency. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

A shadow fell across his features.

Twenty-four hours later, Lyndie finished a hallway discussion with one of Mollie’s doctors and let herself back into Mollie’s hospital room.

She looked to Jake, because like the sight of an island in a choppy sea, he gave her something fixed and handsome to concentrate on. He’d taken up a position on one of the loveseats, his boots crossed and propped on the coffee table. His computer sat on his lap. He’d been working while Lyndie spent time reading aloud to Mollie.

She’d tried a couple of times over the past few hours to convince him to leave the hospital. He’d be up just as early tomorrow morning for Silver’s race as she would be. He needed sleep, and she couldn’t help but think that he also needed protecting from the sadness of Mollie’s condition.

So far, he’d proven especially stubborn. Bless him, he’d stayed.

Even before she reached him, he set aside his computer and opened an arm so that she could slide in beside him. She rested her head on his upper chest, and he pulled her in close. As she listened to the thud of his heart, security coiled around her. That sense of belonging and safety tempted her to crack open and sob
out twenty-seven years of accumulated anxiety and love and duty centering around Mollie.

From her earliest conscious memory, Lyndie had known herself to be the daughter with the health, the daughter with the luck, the daughter with the expectations, the daughter responsible for the younger, more vulnerable Mollie. She’d tried to defend Mollie’s health. She’d tried. But God held Mollie’s health in His hands, and Lyndie didn’t know if He was going to take her home this time. The very real possibility that He might terrified her.

She didn’t sob over it. It would put even more pressure on Jake, when this circumstance already demanded far more of him than should be required of a brand-new boyfriend. She tucked her knees up and scooted closer.

“You’re tired,” he said. “Why don’t you sleep for a bit?”