His Every Word (9 page)

“What’s wrong?” he asked her.

“Nothing.”

“Kallie, I can read you like a book, same as always.” His eyes were alert and dark, watching her intently.

“I think it’s the meal I just had with my family. My parents, Sean and Lydia. It was kind of a disaster.” She laughed weakly. “Oh, and Detective Phillips ate with us, too.”

Hunter lifted his head and smiled. “You’re kidding.”

“No, unfortunately. He really had lunch with me and my family. To say that it was awkward was an understatement. My mother spent half the time crying. Everyone’s worried about me.”

Hunter nodded. “I don’t blame them.”

“I don’t blame them, either. But right now, my focus is on you.”

“Kallie, I’m fine. You need to keep living your life. I’m being taken care of here, and there’s nothing you can do for me.”

“So what do you want me to do? Go back to Ohio?”

“Of course not. I want you to keep things going. You’re running a production company—a multi-million dollar company with a hot new film that’s going to be fast tracked to the box office. I need you here, working, while I’m out of commission.”

“Hunter, I can’t just make business calls and take meetings and leave you in this dark little room by yourself.”

“I could use a sip of that water now,” he rasped, and Kallie got up and dutifully handed him the paper cup.

He took it and sipped slowly. His lips were deeply chapped, she noticed, and his cheekbones were standing out against his skin as if it had been stretched too tightly across his face.

Hunter had already lost weight. Is that all it took? A couple of days without solid food?

She couldn’t believe how different he looked since the attack. It made her angry to see him go through this—angry and helpless and frightened all at once.

After drinking slowly and for a long while, he sighed and handed her the cup back.

“See?” she said. “You need me here with you.”

“I think I could find someone to hand me water every few hours. What I really need is for you to make sure my business isn’t falling apart. That would set my mind at ease.”

“Okay,” she agreed, knowing he was right. “What should I do first?”

“Have you talked to Bryson or Max Weisman?”

She told him about their phone messages. “I haven’t gotten back to either of them just yet.”

“Well, get back to them. Make the calls and figure out what the next steps are.”

“But I don’t know anything. I don’t know what to do.”

“You’ll figure it out, and you can always ask me. I think you know where to find me.”

“Are you kicking me out?” she said.

“Not just yet.” He smiled again and patted the empty part of the hospital bed, down by his legs. “Come and sit with me for a minute.”

Kallie went to him, then, sitting on the edge of his bed, careful not to disturb anything as she slowly lowered herself onto the mattress. She could feel his legs through the sheet, and the heat radiating out from his body. She turned and looked down at him as he smiled back at her.

Her eyes filled with tears for the millionth time. “All I do is cry lately,” she told him.

“That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I wish I was stronger, more like you.”

“Kallie, you’re the strongest person I know.”

She laughed at that suggestion. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’m totally serious.” His expression had changed now. He wasn’t smiling and there was no humor in his eyes. “I’m not a strong person, Kallie. And I’m not a very good person, either.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t talk about yourself like that.”

He waved her off. “I’m just being honest. I need to tell you the truth about me.

It’s important.” His eyes were suddenly burning with an intensity and fire that she’d never seen before.

“What do you need to tell me?” she asked, feeling a deep sense of foreboding that something terrible was coming.

“I need to tell you everything,” Hunter said. “God help me, I need to tell you everything.” And then he began to speak.

***

“There’s a reason I haven’t told you anything about my private life, or my past.

There’s a good reason why I wanted to keep you at a distance, Kallie. And the reason is that I couldn’t bear for you to know who I really am and what I’ve done. The truth isn’t very pretty, and I figured it wouldn’t do anyone any good to know it, so I just kept it all to myself.”

Hunter was looking away from her now. His eyes stared off into the distance, at nothing in particular. He seemed lost in his thoughts, lost in the past. “I figured everyone would be better off if I just left well enough alone,” he continued. “Better if I kept living my life the way I’ve been doing it the last few years. Nobody gets too close, nothing ever gets too personal, and nobody gets hurt.”

Kallie smiled a little, knowing how hard she pushed him to break from that tradition, and how much he’d fought against her meddling. “I suppose I didn’t help matters with my constant prying and snooping, did I?” she said.

Hunter’s gaze seemed to come back to the present with lightning fast speed. He met her eyes with his own and she felt the same shock as always, the shock of her love for him, rocking her to the core.

“Oh, but you did help,” he said. “I just didn’t know that I wanted your help at the time. In fact, even up until the moment I got shot—I was never really intending to let you all the way in. I never thought I could tell you the entire truth.” His eyes glazed over as he continued to retreat into himself. “I think maybe getting shot was the best thing that ever happened to me, because now I can’t keep it inside anymore.”

“You shouldn’t have to carry the burden alone,” she told him. “Whatever it is that happened, you don’t need to take it all on your shoulders.”

“When I first woke up from surgery, it was like a nightmare,” he said. “I was on a ventilator. I couldn’t breathe for myself, and this machine was there and I had a tube down my throat. It was as if I’d somehow been transported into my father’s body—the body of a dying man. That’s what I thought in my confused, drug addled brain. I started struggling, fighting with everything I was worth—and the nurses and staff came in and had to hold me down and then strap my hands so that I didn’t rip all the tubes and equipment off of me.”

“I had no idea that happened to you,” Kallie whispered, her hands clutching the bed sheets as he spoke.

“And then, when I began to calm down and some of the drugs faded, I realized where I was and what had happened to me—and then all the memories came flooding back. All the stuff about my past that I’d been trying to push away, it all rushed in.”

“What did you remember?”

He licked his lips. “My mother died when I was just a kid—I barely even knew her. She got pancreatic cancer and it went fast. She was gone by the time I turned three.

My dad was my whole world from that time on, and he was a good dad, too. I loved him more than you could possibly imagine.” He turned to look at her again, and there was more pain in his eyes than she’d ever encountered in another human being. She almost couldn’t stand to look at him, but she forced herself to meet his tortured gaze.

“I can see how much you love him still,” Kallie said.

“My father was a fun person, a person that loved to live life. He was also a little bit of a risk taker. He owned a motorcycle and sometimes he’d drive it too fast.”

“That sounds familiar.”

Hunter allowed himself to laugh at her joke. “I know why I ride motorcycles, why I love them so much. They remind me of him in the good times, when he was still healthy and full of life.” Hunter took a deep, rasping breath, and sighed.

Kallie felt that she didn’t like the sound his chest made. It sounded wheezy and bubbly, as if he had water in his lungs. She wanted to ask him if he was having any discomfort, but didn’t want to stop him from saying what he had to say. So instead she stayed quiet and listened.

“One day, Dad took a risk that didn’t pan out so well. We needed some new shingles on the roof, and instead of hiring someone to do the job, he went up to do it himself. I was in my freshman year of college—and I got a call from the hospital. Dad had fallen off the roof.” Hunter took another wheezing breath. “He was paralyzed from the neck down and he needed twenty-four hour care, so I left school and came home to take care of him.”

Kallie reached for his hand and he pulled away from her. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“I just want to be here for you while you talk about this.”

“I just—I can’t be touched right now,” he said softly.

“I understand.”

He nodded, cleared his throat. “My dad changed—almost overnight. He wasn’t the guy I’d known my entire life. He’d morphed into this twisted shell of himself. He was angry and bitter, yelling all the time. A lot of the time he took his anger out on me, because I was the one who was there. I was learning how to care for him, and I wasn’t perfect. I made mistakes all the time. Dad hated that he was a burden to me, hated it with a passion that somehow turned into acting like he hated me most of the time.”

“God, Hunter. That sounds horrible.”

“It was horrible. I thought about leaving all the time. But I couldn’t allow myself to have strangers taking care of him. He needed me, and I was determined to be there for him. I worked a sales job that I could do over the phone from home, to bring in some extra cash, and then the rest of it came from his disability money. We struggled to get the kinds of equipment that dad needed. Applying for benefits and trying to get him what he needed was a whole other job, on top of being a full-time nurse. I can’t say I was cut out for any of it.”

“You were just a kid,” she told him. “Nobody’s cut out for that.”

Hunter seemed to ignore her comment. “I don’t remember exactly when, but Dad started talking about suicide. And once he started, it was like the only thing he’d talk about. From morning until night, he’d make comments—saying he wished he was dead, telling me how much better off I would be. And when he wasn’t doing that, he was yelling at me for something or other.”

Kallie could barely stand to hear this, let alone have lived through it like Hunter had done. She saw how hard he was working just to rid himself of the details, to let the words pour out of him. Talking was exhausting work for him, and sweat beads were standing out on his forehead. His breathing had grown even raspier, and she could feel the heat pouring from his body now, radiating outward. “Do you need some water?” she said.

He nodded, but kept talking as she went and poured a cup for him.

“It went on like that for another few years. I was going out of my mind with it. I was stuck in that house with him and we were completely isolated. I tried getting him to do therapy, but he quit every time. I swear, we must have tried a dozen different therapists, and each time, Dad quit a little bit sooner.”

Kallie brought him the cup of water and then slid back onto the bed next to him.

He drank from the cup, water spilling down his chin, and then handed it back to her absentmindedly. His eyes weren’t even focused now—he was lost in his memories.

“One day,” Hunter continued, “I couldn’t stand it anymore. I needed to escape, but I couldn’t escape. So I started writing a story.”

“Blue Horizon,” Kallie whispered.

Hunter’s eyes momentarily focused on her and he nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Yes, it would eventually turn into Blue Horizon.” He smiled a little. “Dad noticed I was writing all the time, and he started haranguing me about it. At first, I didn’t want to admit that I was doing it, because it was like my own little piece of serenity. When I was writing that story, nothing could touch me—I was in another world, a better world.” He shifted slightly in bed, seemingly intent on sitting up further, so he could speak more clearly.

Kallie could tell that any movement was incredibly painful. “Don’t move so much,” she said.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he waved her off. “Listen.” He swallowed, took a few breaths. “Listen, Kallie. I need to get this out.”

“I’m listening.” Her knuckles were white from clutching the bed, struggling to watch him suffer through his retelling of his past. Something she’d always longed for him to do—it now seemed like a bad idea that she wished she could take back.

“Finally, one day after about a week of my writing all the time, Dad insisted I read him what I was working on. At first, I said no. We had a huge fight about it, and he continued to insist that I show him my writing. So that night, as he was starting to drift off to sleep, I told him I was ready to read him my story. I sat down next to his bed and I read him the first couple of chapters of Blue Horizon.”

Kallie smiled to herself. She suddenly recalled the dedication at the beginning of Blue Horizon. She remembered thinking it seemed very mysterious, but now it all made sense. “I wrote this book because you said that it was the one thing you looked forward to, and that was enough for me,” Kallie said aloud.

Hunter looked surprised. “You remember that? You memorized the dedication?”

“I always wondered what it meant and who it was for.”

“Well now my secret is out.”

“I take it your father liked those first chapters you read him?”

Hunter laughed. “He more than liked it. He became singularly obsessed with my novel—as much as I was obsessed with writing it. That became our bond, something that we could relate about—something that had come after his injury. Every night I would read him whatever I’d managed to write that day. If my output dropped at all, he would get angry, telling me to write more. Work harder. He lived for the end of the day, when I would sit next to him and read the newest pages.”

“That’s beautiful.”

“It was a special time. I wrote every day for hours, and soon enough, I was getting close to finishing the book. Dad was convinced that I would become a bestselling author, and he often said that I needed to be on my own, pounding the pavement in New York City, trying to find an agent for it.”

“And what did you think?” Kallie asked.

“I didn’t think of anything beyond finishing the book. I was possessed, and I wasn’t interested in fantasizing about what would happen when I was done with it. But Dad had a bee in his bonnet.”