Hold Me Like a Breath (37 page)

“That's possibly true,” Whitaker conceded. It looked like it pained him to do so. “Ming, who should I talk to about security matters?”

Ming. Not Char. I hadn't made that transition yet, and I didn't know if I would.

“Kun was …” His jaw tightened. “Now it would be Delun. If you ask my man just down the hall, he'll take you to see him.”

“Thank you,” said Whitaker. “Rest up, Penelope.”

“Is your father okay?” I asked.

“No change.” He stepped into the room as Whitaker exited. “My mother's sitting with him. She wanted some time alone.”

“Please let me know if I can do anything,” said Dr. Castillo.

“Thank you,” said Char.

“I'm going to get Penelope something to drink. Would you like anything?” The doctor waited for Char to shake his head, then left.

“I'm in charge now,” Char said once the door shut again. “I—that hadn't occurred to me.”

“You're a good person. This won't change that.”

“Thank you. And I'm sorry about Garrett …” He shoved his hands in the pockets of his pants. “Were you close?”

“Not as close as I thought.” I wished he would hold my hand, hold me. I sighed. “After …
this
, I don't even know what's left of my Family. I should probably get Nolan on the phone, or Miles, not that they need me, but … I'm not useless.”

“What?” He wrinkled his forehead. “I don't get why this is your fear. Of course you're not useless. Who said you were?”

“Every person in my life ever.”

“I've never said that. I never will. You do realize you saved my life, right? If you hadn't flipped that table onto Al Ward, I would've been shot. You bought us the extra thirty seconds so that the US Marshals could come in and break things up.”

“They should have been there sooner.”

“And my father should have listened when you showed up on my doorstep. We can't live in the should-haves and what-ifs, Maeve. There are too many of them; it'll drive us crazy.”

“Will you keep calling me Maeve?
Can
I keep calling you Char?”

“You can call me anything you want; I just want to hear your voice. When you went unconscious—and I couldn't wake you up—that was the scariest moment of my life.” He shut his eyes, shook his head, like he was trying to clear away the memory. “They did your CBC twice, and the platelet count was too
low to even register. The doctors were worried about brain bleeds, and you wouldn't wake up. You wouldn't.”

“Look at me.” I put my hand on his arm and waited until he did. “I'm okay. I'll be okay.” I thought of the people I'd lost so far, the people I had left to lose. “You are not optional. You are essential to me. To my life. Do you know what I mean by that?”

He leaned down and his lips barely brushed my forehead, the same spot he'd first left his mark on me. “Yes. Yes, I do. Now sleep. I won't go anywhere. I promise.”

Time does heal all things. Days passed, my counts stabilized, my physical injuries mended, and Dr. Castillo took one last CBC, kissed my cheek, and then headed back to New York and his own family. “You call me. I won't demand daily, but at least two, three times a week. And I'll be checking in with these doctors, pincushion, so you be caref—
behave
.”

His exit, my healing, served to sharpen the focus on all the other aspects of my shredded life. The pain receded to be replaced by panic, the type that clawed me awake with worries half-formed on my lips.

“I don't know anything. I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know where I'm going to live—”

“I thought Vice President Forman offered you a place at his house,” Char said from his spot beside my bed. He never seemed to need context for my fears, no matter how random or
interrupted our conversations were by sleep, medicine, his new Family responsibilities, his dual vigils at his father's and my bedsides, or Whitaker's endless questions.

“He did. But … can I live there? With Bob and his family?”

“I don't see why not.” He pointed toward a stack of newspapers Bob and Whitaker had brought earlier. The headlines told my story, or told the version we'd agreed upon. They included words like “hero” and “brave.” Told how “The Last Landlow” or “The Lost Landlow” had been working undercover with the vice president to catch the bad guys who killed her family and to end illegal corpse transplants. I was officially—and publicly—pro–Organ Act.

Char fiddled with the sheet beside my hand. His fingers so temptingly close to mine, but since he was holding back, I felt like I needed to.

“You think I should move in with them?” I'd already had this conversation with Dr. Castillo and Bob … so many times with Bob.

“Yes, I think you should,” he reassured me. “You'd be safe—I have to admit, that's what makes me happiest.”

“Whatever, you're just glad I'd be in DC—and really close to Georgetown.”

He tried to look serious for a minute before relenting and letting his sheepish grin escape. “I've already Google-mapped a dozen routes from my dorm to Number One Observatory Circle.”

If I agreed, I'd be close to Char, I'd get to see Kelly and Bob. And, who knows, maybe Caleigh could become a friend. Also,
I'd be in a place where I could be useful—working to change policy.

I couldn't imagine going back home to the estate. I didn't want to deal with the Family, not that there was a Family left. Miles had told me a couple of the clinics were operating autonomously, but most had shut. He was enjoying early retirement but said he'd help with whatever I needed and bring Thumbelina when he came to visit me in DC if I moved.

Of course Nolan was also in DC and calling and sending the most clichéd bouquets and chicken soup with get well cards on which the sole writing beyond the preprinted sentiment were my name and his. Oh, and “sincerely.” No doubt if I moved in with Bob, Nolan's and my paths would intersect—but at least now we weren't stuck in a teacher-student dynamic. Maybe, just maybe, he'd be more tolerable as an acquaintance.

“I can pretty much walk away from the Family Business forever,” I mused aloud. Except for him. Except for Maggie, who'd called and given me a scathing lecture before bursting into tears and telling me, “Next time you do something stupid, at least
bring me with you
.”

“I kind of am too. I feel so guilty about it,” said Char.

“Hey, your mom is
insisting
you go to school. I was there, I heard her.”

“But I don't know how this will work—me being across the country at school and my mother in charge of the day-to-day decisions for the Business and my dad's care—but she doesn't seem daunted at all. She's already drawing up plans for shifting more capital to research … and I don't know what else I could do.”

“It's only for—” I looked at him with a smile. “How many years is med school?”

He grinned back. “Say yes to the vice president. Come to DC with me.”

I traded a grin for a bitten lip and new worries. It sounded great in the hypothetical. Too great. “If I say yes, and I probably will, that's not even my biggest fear.”

“What is?”

“
Us
. Is that lame? With everything else that's going on, I'm worried about you and me.”

The corners of his mouth twitched, and he looked down, trying—and failing miserably—to cover the fact that he was beaming. “Whatever the opposite of lame is, that's what that is.”

“I'm serious. I don't know you. I barely know you at all.”

“You will.”

“But I
don't
right now. And how can I have feelings for someone I don't know?”

“You know the parts of me that are the truest. The parts that no one else but you has ever gotten to see.”

“You don't know me either,” I whispered.

“I know you're scared of dragons … but not coconut-flavored coffee.” His lips twitched in a self-amused smile before settling into an expression much more solemn. “I know you spent so much of your life being told to sit on the sidelines, yet you were brave enough to make it on your own in New York, brave enough to fly across the country to save me.

“I know you make friends everywhere you go. That your smile melts my heart. That you love your family so much. That
you doodle anatomical hearts and flowers. That you eat your toast with honey and are
not
a diabetic. That you sigh in your sleep.

“Most of all, I know I'm in love with you.” He stated it firmly. Without hesitation.

“I—” Everything inside me felt calcified. Everyone who loved me most was dead. And my own emotions were scattered like a handful of sand held up in a breeze. “How do you know?”

“What?” He blinked. Swallowed. This wasn't the reaction he expected.

“How do you know you love me?” My true question was trapped beneath my tongue:
How do I know if I love you
? So I asked a lesser version, “And what if you change your mind?”

“I won't.” His gaze was a caress, roving over all of me, making each part of me ache with a desire for his fingers. But he was holding himself back, gripping the arms of his chair, and saying each word clearly. “I've fallen in love twice in my life. Once with a girl during a pretend game of hide-and-seek, and once with a girl who swept me off my feet on a New York City sidewalk.”

“I believe
you
swept me off my feet, actually.”

“Semantics.” He smiled. “I know I'm going to fall in love a million times in my life.” I was too surprised to form the word “what?” or remember how to exhale. “Maybe more than a million … but it will always be with
you
.”

Garrett had claimed to know me, but he hadn't loved me. Not really. He wanted to protect me. He wanted to use me for my connection to the Family. He wanted to save me—and pretend that erased the fact that he hadn't saved Carter.

I looked away from Char while I contrasted my feelings for Garrett with those for him.

It was hard to call them both the same word: “feelings.” One set was as ingrained in me as my fingerprints. Garrett's presence in my life predated my memory. He was one of the last parts of my life from
before
.

And he was partially responsible for that. I couldn't forgive him. It didn't matter who his little
f
family was, that he'd been raised by a father who considered shooting Mick and knocking him unconscious acceptable cover-story collateral damage, or with brothers who made him feel like a weak failure, an outsider. I couldn't forget his bystander role in making me an orphan.

Or his face as he crumpled on the ground embedded with a bullet meant for me.

Or the fact that he hadn't stayed around to let me thank him and have the first of so many discussions we needed to have. Maybe he was scared of the things I'd say, the things he would have had to. Or maybe he was scared for his safety. I hated that I didn't know. That I may never know.

That I hadn't gotten to say good-bye.

There wouldn't be a clean break. I could no more sever him completely than I could untangle my DNA and remove whatever combination of nucleotides spelled out my skin's tendency toward purple.

But that
wasn't
love.

At least not in the romantic sense.

“You know me.” Char said it like a plea. Like a pledge. Like a prayer. “You know everything that's important. We lied, but
we weren't pretending. At least I wasn't. Everything I told you about me and you, everything
we
shared, those were the most real moments of my life.”

I heard his chair scrape closer, but I couldn't pull my eyes away from the textured surface of the ceiling tiles. His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper, “I wasn't pretending. Were you?”

The unguarded silliness of teasing him about coffee flavors, his sweet tooth, or his corny jokes. The candid opinions of our all-night conversations. The way he explained and loved all things scientific, but had watched a fairy-tale movie to better understand me. How he believed I could do anything, pushed me to define and pursue my dreams. The way his touch made me feel solid. Reassured me I wouldn't slip away. That I was made of flesh and bone and had words with weight. Words worth listening to. Feelings worth considering. Skin worth touching.

And running through my veins, settled in every cell, was a desire to listen, to consider, to touch. To know and learn, to be surprised and challenged by this guy today and tomorrow and all the days beyond that.

The sensation of tearing my eyes from the ceiling and settling them back on his felt like coming home. I put my hand on top of his, plucking lightly on his fingers until he loosened his grip on the chair and flipped them over to interlace with mine.

“I love you.” It didn't come out as the whisper I expected. The hesitation didn't creep in until I added, “But I have no clue where that leaves us. I'm lost.”

I tightened my grip on his hand.
Lost
, but not
alone
.

“We'll get to know each other,” he said.

Our faces were identical: dopey, love-drunk, smiles of relief and happiness.

“There's one thing you
have
to understand, though,” I said.

He sat up straighter. “Okay.”

“You don't get to decide if something is too dangerous for me. That's never
your
decision; it's mine. I get why you ran from New York; you thought you were keeping me safe and away from all this, but never again.”

His face was as somber as it had been the times he let me join him at his father's bedside. The beeping and clicking of hospital machinery so loud as he stood statue still, and the closest he'd come to accepting comfort from me was to rest a few fingers lightly on the handle of the wheelchair I'd been seated in.