Level Hands: Bend or Break, Book 4 (27 page)

“I can come home. Go back to work. Help.” He didn’t even need to think about it.

“No, you fucking will not.” Mari pissed off was a fierce, short fighter with tangled hair twisted into a knot that looked like something ancient warriors might have worn to scare their enemies in battle. “Who do you think that helps in the long run? Nobody.”

He knew what she meant. Didn’t need it spelled out for him. Full-ride scholarships to elite colleges didn’t fall out of trees, he knew. At least, not a second time. If he came back to Chicago, he was looking at begging for his City Sports job again, at the barely-over-minimum wage the nonprofit paid, or picking up shifts waiting tables somewhere. In the long run, a degree from Carlisle meant everything.

“We can talk about this more later.”

“No, we can’t.” His sister stood on tiptoe, and he automatically bent down so she could kiss his cheek. “We’re glad you’re here, Rafi, but we don’t need you to stay. I promise.”

There weren’t enough chairs in Lola’s hospital room for everyone to sleep there. Not that there was much actual sleeping, what with the nurses coming in every half hour or so to check on things. Rafi had been surprised to see the computer in the corner of the room, where it seemed every detail of his sister’s care was available at a keystroke. No more hanging a clipboard with printed forms at the foot of the hospital bed. Probably no one had done that for ages, but the image was stuck in his head from a TV show or something.

He’d followed one of the nurses, an older white woman with short blond hair and wide hips, out into the hallway after her midnight visit. Not knowing—what might happen next, what they were worried about, what they weren’t—was driving him crazy. He’d offered to share his peanut M&Ms and quizzed her on what she was doing when she typed at that computer station. She had work to do, no doubt, but was patient with him, explaining about the need to keep an eye on the swelling in Lola’s smashed leg, because too much would crush her blood vessels, depriving her foot of blood, which could potentially lead to a need to amputate.

The hangover from the adrenaline rush he’d had at that news was keeping him awake in the lounge at 2:00 a.m.

“Don’t freak out,” the nurse had said, a hand on his arm stopping him from sprinting to Lola’s room to whip back the sheet over her legs to check whether or not they were more swollen now than ten minutes ago. “There are several things the doctors will do in that scenario, from surgery to relieve the compartment syndrome to external fixation.”

He’d made her spell those words so he could look those procedures up on his phone, and, holy shit, they were gross. The surgery the nurse mentioned was basically cutting slits in Lola’s leg to relieve the pressure, which made him want to gag.

Then he saw the pictures of an external fixator and had to close his eyes until the dizziness went away.

“They drill giant screws into her shin and thigh bones and then use a rack to stretch her leg to ease the pressure on the crushed bones. I mean, they drill right through her skin and muscle and bone, like a cyborg,” he’d said to some poor dude at the vending machine. Rafi had been standing there, trying to figure out how to get the dollar bill into the slot, because his brain was too tired to figure out which way was up for Washington.

Pretty sure he’d scarred that guy for life.

Pretty sure he’d scarred himself for life.

He couldn’t stop looking at the pictures he found online—and people were fucking strange, taking pictures of their bloody cyborg legs in the hospital and Instagramming them, for Christ’s sake—and reading articles about how the procedure worked. He’d found that the more he read, the easier it got to look at the pictures, actually, because he started to understand what he was seeing and that let him relax.

Not enough to sleep, of course, but he stopped freaking out about his sister losing her foot or most of her leg to amputation.

Which meant that he was at least half asleep on the couch in the lounge, lights turned down as low as they would go, when the cushion dipped at his hip as somebody sat on it and a hand slid into his.

“Hey there.”

Even half asleep he would know that hand anywhere, that rough palm with calluses not yet fading despite Denny’s weeks of inactivity. But he could be dreaming Denny’s hand in his, so he kept his eyes closed and breathed deep, because he didn’t want to wake up yet.

“I saw Mari. She gave me the keys to her place and told me to take you home for six hours of sleep or she isn’t letting you back in Lola’s room.”

“Can’t leave.” He didn’t have the words for it, knew he was still wrangling with his fear that Lola had died and he was blocking that knowledge, pretending it had never happened.

The sheer relief of admitting that thought out loud shocked him awake.

“Hey.” Denny’s smile was a curve in the dim light. “Nurse Nikki said to tell you, and I quote, ‘There is no visible increase in the swelling, so there’s unlikely to be any need to decide on whether or not to try external fixation until later today.’ Hope that means something to you.”

“It does.”

“She also said, ‘Please get him out of here so I can get some work done.’” Denny smiled at him. “But she said it really nicely. I think she likes you.”

“Yeah, right.” He was just what she needed. Some college kid grilling her about treatment options in the middle of an overnight shift. But Denny was here. Or else he was asleep and this was the best dream ever. And he knew he’d said some shitty things way back in the morning hours that he ought to apologize for, but nothing mattered like squeezing the hand in his and getting a squeeze back. His eyes stung.

“I mean it. But you know what you can do to make her like you even more?” Denny held Mari’s keys up in the air and swung them in front of Rafi like a hypnotist. “Come home with me, Rafael Castro. You are getting sleeeeeepy. Very sleepy.”

Rafi was tempted. He knew his sisters had been forcing themselves to take shifts sleeping at home. They were all aware this wasn’t going to be a short visit for Lola, and hyperorganized Sofi had dealt with her stress by making a schedule on a Google calendar and sharing it with all of them while Rafi had been in the air somewhere over Ohio.

Denny had more guilt trip yet in his bag of tricks. “Seriously. Mari said she won’t feel like she can leave until there’s someone well rested here to be in the room when the doctors talk to Lola, and she wants your fresh perspective. They’re all dizzy with information right now.”

And there was the thing he needed to give himself permission to leave. If it would help Lola for him to go home and get some sleep, then he could allow himself to do it.

Outside in the open-walled parking garage, Rafi sucked the clean night air deep into his lungs.

Okay, so it was Chicago, and the clean night air smelled like exhaust from the nearby highway mixed with the scent of chocolate from the Behr’s candy factory, but anything was better than the disinfectant-and-sick-people smell of hospitals.

It took them twenty minutes to find Mari’s car, because her memory was clearly for shit when parking in a crisis, but eventually they were in the beat-to-hell Mazda, zooming through the quiet streets to the familiar building off the main drag in Pilsen. As if they’d agreed to it, neither of them said a word about their argument in Rafi’s dorm room. Or in the gym on Tuesday. Or even how extraordinary it was for Denny to have followed him to Chicago.

Not talking meant not acknowledging all the shit that had gone down between them, and right now that seemed the safest way forward. Denny was here, with him, and Rafi didn’t give a shit about the rest.

Denny had come home with him dozens of times during the months he’d stayed with Cash in Chicago, so Rafi didn’t need to give any directions after they found parking. When he fumbled with his keys at the apartment door, Denny took over, unlocking the knob and the dead bolt and then securing them after they entered, leaving their shoes on the mat in the hall.

Sister in the hospital or not, Rafi knew better than to wear his shoes inside, and Denny had smiled at him and toed his own lace-ups off too.

They slung their bags in the corner of Rafi’s room, stumbled through pissing and brushing teeth in the dark, sharing the tight bathroom space as if they’d always done it that way.

Stripping off and falling into bed with Denny felt like heaven now, if only because they were in his king-size bed and had space to stretch out both of their six-foot-plus frames. The last time he’d tried to share a bed with Denny had been the unsuccessful attempt to share his twin in the dorm. He dragged the comforter over to his side, and watched Denny climb cautiously onto the bed. Denny had taken the sling off but held his arm carefully to his chest.

“Need extra pillows?” Rafi asked, eyeing the way Denny settled onto his good shoulder, facing him.

“Nope.”

Rafi tangled their legs together and tugged Denny over to him, careful not to jostle his arm. Denny’s hand slid down to Rafi’s ass, and he opened his mouth against Denny’s in the dark. They didn’t need words for this.

Soft. For all his muscles and calluses, Denny’s mouth was soft and yielding under his, offering heat and comfort in equal measure. Rafi snaked his fingers into Denny’s hair and tightened them until Denny gasped into Rafi’s mouth. He wasn’t trying to hurt, just needed to hang on to someone as tightly as he could.

Somewhere in the middle of kissing Denny, Rafi drifted off, struggling through the night to stay asleep. He couldn’t keep his eyes open, but he couldn’t quite let go of worry long enough to slide completely under.

In the darkest hours, he woke up with Denny plastered to his back, overheated and sweating under the comforter now. He kicked it off, trying not to wake Denny, who had a hand shoved down the front of Rafi’s shorts, which was the kind of thing you’d think a guy would wake up for.

Apparently Denny had enough range of motion for that.

Moving the covers was enough to rouse Denny though, and his voice rumbled through the dark. “Time to get up?”

“Nah. Just restless.” He tried to settle back to sleep, but now that he was awake, his brain was racing, revisiting everything Nurse Nikki had told him and coming up with new questions for her.

“Stop it.”

“Sorry. Wait, what?”

“I can hear your brain churning. Stop it. You’re supposed to be sleeping.”

“I can’t,” he admitted, and tried to roll back a little into Denny’s embrace without making it look like that’s what he was doing, and without bumping his shoulder.

“Snuggle on up in here, man,” Denny said while scooting closer too. Busted. Damn. But then Denny’s husky voice was in his ear again. “Maybe we can think of something to distract you.”

Rafi rolled away as Denny reached for him. “Be careful with your arm.”

“My arm is fine.”

“Bet your therapist wouldn’t say that,” Rafi scolded, then turned over so they faced each other again. Denny should stay still, but Rafi didn’t have to. Rafi pushed his sleep pants down far enough to kick them off before doing the same to the body next to him in the dark. Then he grabbed Denny’s hip and pulled until their legs tangled together again and the press of a hard, bare cock against his own pushed every other thought in the world out of his head. He reached down between them.

Denny groaned as Rafi took him in hand. “I swear, one of these times it’ll be me taking care of you. And not because I’m pissed at you in the backyard of some party, like I’ve got something to prove.”

Rafi stiffened at the memory.

“You get better and you can jerk me off all day long,” Rafi said, ignoring the fact that he didn’t know what they would do tomorrow or where he would be in a week, much less whether or not Denny would be there with him. Nothing had changed after all, except for the worse.

Denny’s hand rested on his arm, moving as Rafi moved. They rubbed against each other, hands gripping and soothing, mouths licking and sucking, until they both came, gasping softly against each other’s skin. Rafi scooped his pants out from the foot of the bed and wiped the two of them off with the balled-up fabric before tossing the pants to the floor.

Then he let Denny be the one to pull, until Rafi’s back was pressed against his chest, Denny’s arm resting on top of his as he tried to turn his brain off for the rest of the night.

Horns and steel drums blasted Rafi out of bed in the morning. Habit had him leaping to slam down the volume before one of his sisters woke up and strangled him. Then he remembered that he and Denny were the only two in the apartment.

The music was pouring through the door to the hall. He followed Marc Anthony’s voice to the kitchen, where Denny was at the stove in a pair of boxer-briefs and his sling, swinging his hips and dancing barefoot while he stirred what smelled like frying onions.

Rafi stopped in the kitchen doorway, hands at the top of the frame to pull a stretch out of his spine.

This was maybe the fucking cutest thing he’d ever seen.

Denny executed a spin that would have been the perfect move until he tripped over his own feet when he spotted Rafi watching him. “Shit! Jesus Christ, you startled me.” He smashed the spatula against the counter’s edge as he caught himself with one hand.

The grin that stretched Rafi’s face felt like it had been born there, struggling to find its way to life. His bare feet didn’t slip enough on the linoleum floor tiles to get his best dance moves on, but he didn’t let that stop him. Grabbing Denny’s hand with the spatula pressed between their palms, he swung him close, always careful about his shoulder, and danced him to the end of the song.

Then he spotted what was on the plates lined up next to the stove.

“Aw, you made mangú?” Rafi clasped his hands over his heart and clutched his chest. “You’re killing me here.”

Denny’s cheeks pinked as he ducked his head, focusing on the pan. “I texted your sister to find out what I could make for breakfast and she told me she had some in the fridge. The onions are almost done, and you can have fried cheese or salami too. Thank God I didn’t have to cut any of this up. You’d’ve been out of luck.”