Drowning in You (22 page)

“
Wait a
minute.” I hold up a finger. “You’re going to be ‘investigating’
this on your own?” I hold my palms by my shoulders in a gesture of
surrender. “You’re on your own. I’m reporting this to the police,
so investigate all you—”

“
Charz.” Dex
tilts his head at me, giving me a serious look. He steps in, head
still tilted, saying, “You don’t call the cops on Dad’s old gang.
You buy them a bottle of Royal DeMaria and say sorry for getting
confused with whatever you heard wrong.”

“
It’s people
like that who need to be sent to jail.”

“
People like
that know what school the jail warden’s son goes to and knows what
that warden’s wife’s breast feels like in his hand.”

I gape at Dex. That poker face
is back up. He sucks in huge lungfuls of air through his nose since
his lips are a thin line.

Should have stuck to my head.
My head was right when it told me a billion times Dex looks like,
and is, trouble. Instincts are the problem; you leap at the innate
reaction and it gets you face-to-face with your crush, who’s best
friends with the guy you kissed and has you involved with one of
the most dangerous families in the country.

What should we do? Do we pack
up and escape? Do I have to organize to have my dad transferred to
a high-security room with extra guards? How do I do that? These are
the questions I imagine myself asking Dex as I spin and bolt to my
front door. As I’m reaching for the knob, I feel something pull me
back.

I fall into Dex’s arms and he
holds my weight upright. I push out of his grip, and grab at the
handle again, but he grabs my waist from behind and drags me back.
I spin. I spit in his face, but he’s practiced. He holds onto me
with one hand as my shoes lunge at the decking, and wipes away the
spit from his eye and cheek with the back of his other hand.

When he pulls me in by my chin,
the exact way I’d caressed his skin before, it’s so soft and easy
to slip away from that I actually don’t move from him. I fall into
him and slam my palms to his chest, leaving them there, feeling
hope drain from my fingers like melted butter.

For as much as I wanted to
escape, a rush of adrenaline hits me now that he won’t let me go
and I don’t want him to.

“
I know how
this works. I
will
stop this from happening, but you have to trust me,
Charz.”

My nickname spins through my
mind, tearing me apart between fear and love. I trust him more than
I trust almost anyone but my dad, but going against the law is a
different issue. What’s the point in even having rules and
regulations if you’re going to take the law into your own hands
anyway? Why not everyone run amok, if that’s the preferred way of
handling crime?

The moment catches up to me.
Elliot is a great guy but I’ve loved Dex for too long now to deny
what’s happening to us. My mom was murdered for my dad. My dad was
set up to die for money. Everyone thinks Dex is bad news in every
way, especially since they think he set up the “accident” my
parents and two dozen others were involved in. I might not be able
to stop my dad from dying.

I fall against
Dex’s chest and he holds up me up since my legs seem to have turned
to jelly. He whispers,
Shh, I won’t let
anything happen,
into my ear as I suck in
air without letting any out, until my head is perched as far
forward as it’ll go and I’m still sucking in but there’s no more
space in my lungs left to fill.

Dex lifts me to his eye level,
ducking his head to find my eyes, and says, “Hey, Charz.” He moves
one hand, caressing away the tear rolling down my cheek without
letting my body slip down. “I l—”

My cell cuts him off, and I
twist in Dex’s hands, signaling I want him to let me go. Let
anything happen, please, to get me out of this situation. Which is
why it’s a relief that my phone is ringing. Which is also why it
doesn’t immediately register that it’s the hospital calling.

“
Hello?” I
say.

“
Can I please
speak to Charlee May.”

“
S-speaking.”

“
Miss May your
father is being taken to emergency surgery. Please come here as
soon as you can where the doctors will explain what’s going
on.”

The phone is
up to my ear, but I’m not holding it at all. I’m floating amongst
the wispy, foggy clouds, being pulled in a breeze both left and
right and even higher. Time has warped because my mind is
thinking
how what when why really how
when
but in all that time my body has yet
to move.

“
My father…” I
breathe into the night, looking past Dexter, past the house, just
across into the black bushes that strangle the stars and the night
across the road.

People are
rushing by me, shrieking and running, but those noises disappear,
while something—someone, maybe, possibly—pulls me somewhere, then
sets me down straddling a seat. Something heavy comes over my head,
blocking out everything altogether, and then a voice demands,
“hold
tight
.”

I do this. I remember I should
“hold tight” as I was told, while wind whips at my legs and we bob
and weave around corners at breakneck speed, flying along, our
bodies at times only inches from the tarmac.

20. Well, I Never!

Charlee

Dad told me he took fifteen
minutes to get to the hospital when Mom’s water broke with Darcy.
It took my mom’s best friend twenty-five minutes.

After it
registers that Dex strapped me to his dirt bike and it was his
words saying
hold tight
and
we’re already at the
hospital
, I check the time on my cell. I
see we made it here nine minutes after the call. How long did it
actually take Dex to speed us here on his bike? Moreover, why does
he care about my dad? Shouldn’t Dex’s dad be priority one with
family loyalty and all?

Dex clutches
my hands and drags us through the ER doors, weaving past coughing
toddlers and their shuffling parents, past people with more scalp
than hair huddled over metal walkers—all the while calling
sorry
over his
shoulder.

Too many people walk slowly in
the ER. It felt like they walked slowly when I got the call a week
ago about Dad’s health, but tonight the world is on freeze-frame,
moving past us agonizingly at frame-by-frame speed. Don’t these
people know my dad is dying?

I blink and a hospital-blue
laminated counter rests under my arms. Dex’s arm is stretched out.
The nurse turns, wide-eyed.

“
What’s the
matter? Can I help you?” she asks.

“
Walter May.
Where is he?” Dex says.

She leans forward, settling at
her computer. She begins typing in such a blasé fashion I feel as
annoyed as Dex.

“
Where?” Dex
growls.

“
Sir,
I’m—”

“
Fuck!” He
catches his hair in his hands half spinning and then slams a fist
on the counter. “You,” he says, pointing at another nurse nearby
behind the counter. “You,” Dex shouts addressing anyone in our
immediate radius. “Does anyone know where Walter May is? Father to
this girl. Condition: dying.”

His words are flat like a sheet
of metal, and as cool as the lining of a freezer. It’s strange
watching this flip, how much sense he can make. I haven’t said a
word. Not sure I will for a while, truthfully.

“
Walter was
wheeled to surgery a few minutes ago,” a nurse says from behind the
counter.

“
Where?”

She hooks her finger,
indicating we should go around the corner, and tells us to visit a
particular reception on level three where they have the latest
details.

Dex gives the lady a curt nod,
and grabs my hand again, rushing us there. He skids around a corner
and catches his fingers in the elevator. Luckily it opens at that
instant, so it mustn’t hurt him too much.

In the lift,
that’s when it hits me. When I look at him I mean to say,
this is happening, isn’t it?
but I choke and dry heave, suddenly starving for air. I cough
once more and breathe. I’m too scared to open my mouth again, but
Dex already seems to know this. His face hangs with the weight of
an old man in his eighties, after a lifetime of hurt and loss, yet
he still looks exactly like the twenty-one-year-old tattooed
mechanic he’s always been.

He pulls me into his arms,
kissing my forehead. His lips sting, I swear it. He angles his head
up and kisses me again and again on the same spot in the middle of
my forehead, and his arms are so tight it tingles, which is the
only real thing my mind processes while everything else blurs
around me.

A moment later, ten minutes, I
can’t say, but the doors open, and they make a sound, jamming when
Dex tries to thrust them open faster, with his hand on either door,
resulting is us having to side-step and go through that way.

At the reception desk, Dex hits
the counter, getting the attention of the nurse behind the
computer. “Walter,” he demands again, as if that’s his only tone.
“Where is he?”

What’s happened to him? How did
this happen? That’s what I think, but my mind has shriveled up at
the idea of speaking again, so I have to wait. I just need to know
Dad’s fine. That should come first.

Dex tuts and touches my
shoulder. “I need to make a call. Listen to what this nurse says
and then go. I’ll catch up soon.”

I mouth
what
but Dex kisses me on
the forehead again, already punching keys on his phone.

He’s gone.

I turn back to
the lady, tears brimming my eyes again. My eyes are stinging so
bad, searing more like, my cheeks on fire as if a heater is blowing
up against them. My face hurts. My head—it’s throbbing. I stare at
her, expressionless. I’m empty. I’m what scientists have discovered
is called a
homo sapien
but I’m an empty storage box inside.

Why is this happening? Why now?
How?

“
Ma’am,
please…” the nurse rushes around the counter reaching for me as if
she has minus one second to catch me before I collapse.

“
Yes, now—”
Dex says from the distance, then, “Walter—Charz!”

I spin, everything blurring.
The nurse has me, helping me stay upright.

Dad
. But he’s not there.

Dex is at my side. “Mom’s
working. She was just on a break. She’s coming up now. It’ll be
much quicker if she explains.” He takes my shoulders and nods to
the nurse. “I’ve got her, thanks.”

He nudges me toward the seating
area, but no. No, I thought Dad was being wheeled past me and I
could see him one last time. No, my parents are dead and I do not
want to move a muscle because that will somehow validate the fact
I’m nobody’s daughter anymore. I don’t care if no one’s okay with
that. I don’t give a flying fuck.

I don’t want
hands touching my shoulders, or
oh,
honey
s, or any of their sympathy. Apart
from Dexter. I need him.

Dex carries me in his arms to a
square waiting room where a TV with poor reception crackles in one
corner, and seats line the room, back-to-back. He eases me into a
chair and then crouches between my legs.

What
, I mouth again.

Dex holds my hand placed on my
thigh. His eyes are red angry lumps in their sockets. His broken
look switches something in me.

We’re at the hospital. Dad
fell, or something. Is that what the nurse was trying to tell
me?

“
Where’s your
bike?”

It’s the first
thing I manage to say after
what’s going
on
fell flat on my tongue. I remember
holding on tight and now I’m getting shivers, feeling so terrified
his precious bike will get stolen.

Hold tight.

It’s all I can remember.

“
My bike?” He
starts as if I’ve pulled a rug out from under his feet. “It’s, um,
on the road? I don’t know where I left it. Charz,” he says,
propping himself up on his knees and holding me by cupping my
cheeks. He brings his forehead to rest against mine, and sniffs. I
see us from the corner, as though a fly on the wall, Dex scooping
up all the parts of me—mind, body, the broken, the helpless—and
holding it together the only way he knows how. By holding himself
as close as possible and trying to take away my pain.

“
Is he alive?”
I murmur.

“
He’s alive,
Charz. He’s on this floor, just down a bit in another ward being
worked on. He fell and hit his head, apparently, but I don’t know
how or why or…” Dex stops and flips his hair out of his
eyes.

“
What? Dex,
are you okay?”

He nods facing the other way
then stands and paces along the wall, never turning his head toward
me. Without thinking, I follow him and catch him when he’s about to
turn back. Instead, his fists fall against the wall, his head
flopped between the gap. I wrap my arms around his hard middle from
behind, afraid to duck under into his space. I’m sure he doesn’t
want that.

We stand like that for a long
time, with him facing the wall and me shaped around his body, arms
wrapped around his waist. I sob into his T-shirt until I’m resting
in soaked material and he’s sniffing, too.

At the same time as I undo the
knot of my hands at his waist, he pulls towards the wall, away from
me. Instinctively, we turn to each other, and I can see his eyes
are red and wet. I collapse onto his front, pressing up against his
hard chest, because I need to be inside his arms. He backs up to
the wall by feel, still embracing me, and we slide down the wall
stuck together until we’re a heap of knees and elbows in the
corner.