Loving You Always (7 page)

S
he’s breathing on her own,” Meredith said into her phone, lowering her voice. She sat down in one of the waiting room’s now-too-familiar plastic chairs.

It had been a week since the accident, and the doctors had been justifiably concerned that Kerris still wasn’t consistently breathing on her own. The punctured and collapsed lung had definitely complicated things, but this morning she had drawn clear breaths on her own ever since they took her off the ventilator. The doctors seemed to be leveling with them when they said Kerris should be waking up any day now. They couldn’t be sure how severe the head injury was until she was awake and they could assess her speech, lucidity, memory, and functionality.

Meredith waited for Walsh’s response on the other line. He had stayed away. She knew what it had cost him, but since Mama Jess’s rebuke in the room last week, Walsh had not darkened the hospital door again. In exchange, he demanded daily updates.

“That’s incredible.” Meredith could hear Walsh’s voice, nearly devoid of breath and loaded with relief. “That’s my girl. She’ll wake up soon.”

“That’s what we’re hoping for.” Meredith noticed Cam getting off the elevator and walking toward her. “Look, I gotta go.”

“Cam?” It sounded like Walsh had tightened a belt around the name.

“Um, yeah. I’ll let you know if there’re any changes.”

“You do that,” Walsh said. “And when that happens, I won’t stay away. I’ll have to see her for myself, awake and responsive, at least once before I go back to New York.”

“Gotta go.”

Meredith didn’t acknowledge his assertion before hanging up. The next time she was lonely on a Saturday night and feeling sorry for herself, she’d remember that having two men in love with you might be worse than having no one at all.

“Hey, Cam. How goes it?”

“Tough.” He pressed his lips together and ran a hand over his haggard features. “It’s been hard balancing work and being here. They’re understanding about it, but I had accounts I was handling. I went ahead and resigned. Just seemed easier for everyone.”

“You resigned?”

“Yeah, we have private insurance, and it’s pretty good.” Cam coupled his assurance with a frown. “So if you’re worried about the hospital bill…”

“No, that wasn’t it. I just…it’s your job. I wasn’t expecting you to quit.”

Meredith couldn’t help but feel she wasn’t getting the full story, but the stiff mask of Cam’s face warned her not to press.

“Like I said, it’s been tough,” Cam said. “Thanks for the text, by the way. Breathing on her own, huh? She’ll be home before you know it.”

Meredith touched his arm to stop him before he entered Kerris’s room.

“Cam, are you okay about…about the baby?”

For a moment, Cam’s face, the torture in his eyes, broke Meredith’s heart. Kerris hadn’t revealed many secrets, but Meredith suspected demons chased them both, and Kerris and Cam had been banking on the baby to bring them some measure of peace.

“I can’t do this right now.” Cam’s eyes, already bloodshot, watered. “It’s too much to keep together, and if I talk about the baby…I’m fine.”

“I’m so sorry.” She dared to probe just a little bit more, placing her hand on his arm to stop him. “I know you and Walsh have had a hard time, but—”

The change on Cam’s face stopped Meredith. All signs of vulnerability disappeared, like a dark hand had smothered the pain.

“You don’t know shit.” Cam sifted grit into his voice, hostility in the eyes narrowed on her face. “Do you know how it feels to know your best friend loves your wife? Has a connection with her you can’t even touch?”

She stared at him, taken aback by his sudden vehemence.

“And you just couldn’t resist running and telling him everything.” Cam had peeled away the mask, all signs of sorrow gone, anger on full display. “You brought the devil right to my doorstep.”

“Cam, they’re friends.”

“Friends.” Cam shook her hand off, derision shading his voice. “Is that what you call it?”

“I know Kerris has never been unfaithful to you, so don’t even imply that.”

“How would you feel if you walked in on your husband and best friend crawling down each other’s throats? Answer that, then come talk to me about being faithful.”

Meredith couldn’t hide her stunned expression. The bitter hurt darkening Cam’s eyes made a mockery of the small smile crooking his lips.

“Oh, she never told you that’s why Walsh and I are done? Wonder what other secrets she’s got? Not so perfect after all, is she? When your wife doesn’t love you, faithful is overrated.”

“Awake?” Walsh pressed, making sure he’d heard Meredith correctly. “She’s awake, you said?”

“Um, yeah.” Something in Meredith’s tone was more reserved and less approving than he had ever heard. “I just thought you’d want to know.”

“You thought I’d want to know? That’s an understatement. I’ve been camped out here for a week waiting for this.”

“Yeah, about that. Can I ask you something?”

Walsh paused in packing up his laptop and files.

“Sure, what’s up?”

“Cam said something today that kind of threw me for a loop. He asked me how I’d feel if I walked in on my husband and best friend down each other’s throats.”

“Do you have something to ask me, Meredith?”

“I think I just did.”

“Ask me a direct question and I’ll give you a direct answer.”

“Did you and Kerris have an affair?”

“No, we didn’t, but we kissed, and Cam walked in on it. I’m on my way to see her. Any other questions?”

“I wish I hadn’t even called you. This is awful. No wonder Cam is bitter.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.” Walsh’s words scissored into hers. “I can’t undo what happened.”

“Walsh, maybe you should just—”

“I’ll be back in New York soon, and everyone will be happy.”

Walsh wasn’t sure if either of them believed the words, but that was where he left it.

Once at the hospital, Walsh eased the door open, holding his breath and stepping quietly into the room. Meredith’s warning still rang in his head. It would be best for him and Cam not to run into each other. He just hoped Kerris would wake up before he needed to leave.

He settled down in the hard plastic chair, his eyes never leaving the small, embattled figure so still against the sheets. The facial scratches and scrapes, though still evident, were healing, and the bruising wasn’t as prominent.

“Walsh.” Kerris mumbled his name, twisting her head a little fitfully on the pillow.

Shocked by what he’d just heard, Walsh leaned forward, reaching for her hand, squeezing gently.

“Hey, sweetheart.” He met her dazed eyes with a smile. “I’m here.”

“Walsh?” Kerris’s frown pulled at the scratches on her forehead. “What are you…are you…”

“You were asleep and called my name.” He hoped he’d disguised how much satisfaction that brought him. “Is it okay that I’m here?”

Her eyes drifted over his shoulder to the open door, returning back to his watchful stare.

“Cam knows I’m here.” Walsh answered her silent question, continuing when she raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Well, kind of. We had our run-in before you gained consciousness. He knows I’m in town and not leaving until you’re out of the woods.”

She shot him a look sprinkled with reproach.

“What?” He released the hand he was still holding, leaning back to settle in the chair. “What do you expect me to do?”

“Act normal?” Her smile was as teasing and affectionate as he could expect considering she was wired up à la Frankenstein.

“Normal’s never worked for me.”

He held her smile for as long as he could before sobering. She had provided the appropriate responses, but something was missing. A spark. A vibrancy. And it wasn’t just the plastered arm and leg and wrapped ribs. There was something…vacant in her eyes. Then he remembered. He stroked her hand and touched the wooden bracelet Iyani had given her. The one that matched his own.

“I’m sorry about the baby.”

She looked back at him, her composure wilting around the edges until it disappeared all together, leaving tears like standing water in her eyes.

“I don’t know what else to say, so I’ll just leave it at that.” He refused to look away from her naked pain. She hadn’t flinched at his when his mother died. “I’m sorry, baby.”

B
aby. He’d called her baby.

At Walsh’s endearment, the tears Kerris had checked welled over, the salty wetness stinging her face where angry scratches remained. She swiped at the tears, dismayed when still more leaked out, refusing to be dammed. After months of feeling the baby—a girl, she had found out—move around inside, she felt so alone with her empty womb.

Walsh strode over to the door and turned the lock. He crossed back to the bed, shocking her when he carefully climbed up beside her unplastered right side and slipped his arm beneath her. It was the most awkward, uncomfortable…tender and cathartic embrace she had experienced since that night in the gazebo when he’d baptized her in her own tears. She’d shared the tragedy of her past with him, of how TJ had violated her. Walsh had called her a miracle, healing places she’d thought beyond anyone’s touch.

She leaned her head into his strong shoulder, startled by the sound of her own wrenching sob. Her fingers clutched the sleeve of his shirt in a desperate claw. She burrowed into him, feeling some measure of peace for the first time since she’d opened her eyes to the debris of her life.

This should have been Cam sharing her pain, reaching in to soothe her heartache. She knew it, but couldn’t bring herself to pull away from the man who seemed to always provide the perfect solace. Cam had slipped into the room earlier that morning and she had pretended to be asleep. He had stood silently over her, his guilt, his anger, his resentment, almost palpable. She had breathed it in, feeling it course through her barren soul, leaving a noxious trail in its wake. So her eyes had remained closed in a cowardly game of opossum.

“We didn’t know it was a girl,” she said into the silence Walsh’s comfort had allowed her. “We hadn’t even chosen a name.”

“You hadn’t thought of anything?”

“Well, I thought…maybe after Cam if it was a boy, and if it was a girl…”

“If it was a girl…”

“Amalie.”

Walsh leaned back to glance down at her, a small smile settling on his face.

“That’s beautiful.”

“Different, huh?” Her voice broke in half on the words.

“Perfect.”

“Did they…um, do you know if they put a name on the death certificate? Or the grave or anything?” She held her breath, waiting to hear the name her little girl had carried with her to the other side.

“No, you were still out, and I think they’ve left it blank.” He frowned. “You and Cam haven’t talked about any of this? I know only because Meredith mentioned it.”

“We, um, haven’t spoken.” She squeezed the bridge of her nose. Even that ached, along with every other part of her wrecked body. “He came this morning, but I was asleep.”

“Oh.”

Walsh packed so much into that small word, and she ignored every bit of it. He was the last person with whom Kerris could discuss her marital problems. She leaned her throbbing head heavier against his shoulder.

“I don’t want to be here.”

“In the hospital? You may be going home next week.”

“Not the hospital.” She fiddled with the matching bracelet encircling his broad wrist. “Here. Alive.”

“Don’t say that.” He grabbed her trembling chin between his thumb and index finger, less gentle than she would have expected.

“It’s true.” She couldn’t look at the harsh planes of his face. Fresh tears tracked down her cheeks. “I wish I’d broken to pieces against that tree.”

She gave in to the tears, her shoulders shaking and despair rattling her chest with every choked cry. Walsh touched the hair she knew must be limp and dirty by now.

“Kerris, remember when I was kidnapped?”

“Of course.” She sniffed, giving up on any dignity in these most intimate moments. “It was awful.”

“How would you have felt if I had died in Haiti?”

It would have gutted her. She would not have been able to hide her devastation from Cam or Jo or Kristeene or anyone who might have been around when she received that news. She would have collapsed and wept like a widow. She shook her head from side to side, her eyes locked on his.

“Yeah, that’s what I would have felt if you hadn’t made it. Worse.”

“Walsh—”

“No, you listen to me.” He planted a beam of steel in his words. “It was me in that chapel last week begging God to spare you. And it would’ve been me who would have died inside if you hadn’t made it. So don’t tell me you wish you weren’t here.”

“It’s so hard.” She didn’t mean to moan, but the hurt had to escape somehow. “I don’t think I can do it.”

“You have a long road ahead of you. Some rehab and some hard days. Maybe some counseling? If you don’t want to do this, it’ll be that much harder.”

“I know, I just…” Her voice trailed off on a hiccup, tears clogging her throat.

“Kerris, at my mom’s funeral, I let you go. I did the right thing. You were pregnant. You were Cam’s.”

Kerris gulped, hoping he wasn’t about to go there. She didn’t have the strength.

“I don’t have that resolve anymore. Not like I did.” She felt his lips in her hair. “I came too close to losing you for good, and I can’t promise to always let you go.”

He let his head fall back beside hers against the pillow, giving her a sideways glance full of things that frightened her.

“Hearing you say these things, I can’t leave you like this.”

She tried to ease away a little, as much as the limited motion her two casts and the bindings around her ribs would allow.

“Walsh, you have to.”

“You have to promise to try. If I even hear from Mama Jess that you’re not trying, I’ll be back. Don’t test me. I’ll come back and take care of you myself.”

“Walsh, you don’t have to do that. You can’t do that.”

“And am I supposed to trust Cam to do it?” The molten anger she realized he’d been carefully hiding from her slid under the shield guarding his composure.

“Walsh, he
will
take care of me.”

“He needs to do a damn better job of it.” The brambles in his voice scraped across her nerve endings. The anger he didn’t bother to hide made his big body hard and unforgiving. She was cuddling a stone wall.

“And maybe I need to do a better job taking care of him.” Kerris ran a finger along her hospital ID bracelet. “Maybe I need to be a better wife.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He nudged her when she didn’t respond.

“Nothing.”

She refused to reveal what she knew Cam would see as the ultimate humiliation: the fact that she had called Walsh’s name in her sleep. The guilt of that ate away at her.

“You’d better go,” she said after they’d lain there huddled together for a few more moments, words unnecessary.

“I don’t want to go.” His lips brushed her ear with the words.

And I want you to stay forever
, she thought, wondering if the pain in her torso was a broken rib or a broken heart.

“Please go.” She denied herself the stolen pleasure of leaning up to kiss the hard line of his jaw.

The door closed behind him a few seconds later, and she swallowed her heart’s rebel wail.

Please stay.