Dream & Dare (16 page)

“RAINBOW CUPCAKES!” Connor shrieked and clapped his hands.

Both Hoosier and Bibi laughed.

“Inside voice, honey,” Bibi said. “And rainbow cupcakes it is.”

“YAY! YAY! YAY!” Connor didn’t have an inside voice. He squirmed in Bibi’s arms, and she set him down and turned him loose.

He scampered off, and Hoosier came to her and hooked an arm around her waist. “You look
good
, Cheeks. Got a hot date?”

“I do. I’m havin’ supper with a couple dark and dangerous men.” She brushed her fingers through his beard. “You?”

“Nah. Just a quiet night in with my family.” He bent down and kissed her. “Best night I can think of.”

~oOo~

Not long after Hoosier and Connor had left in their little pickup, with Connor strapped in his booster in the jump seat, Margot called and asked if Bibi and Connor wanted to go to the garden center. Margot and Bibi were both avid gardeners. It was one of the few things Connor let Bibi have the time to do well. He loved to dig in the dirt and bury treasure, and they could be in the yard for hours.

But she was looking forward to a day at home, enjoying some quiet. And baking rainbow cupcakes later. “Not today, Margie. Hooj took Connor to the garage, and I’m just gonna stay home and be quiet.”

Margot and Blue had just started trying, but they didn’t have kids yet, and Margot wasn’t working. She had quiet time to spare, and got manic about filling it. “Really? And do what?”

“I don’t know. Read. Relax. Bake Connor some cupcakes. Just be quiet.”

“Um, okay. You sure?”

“Yep.”

“Then…would it be okay if I borrowed your van? Blue can drop me off on his way in, but he needs the truck today, and I—”

Bibi cut her off with a laugh. That had been an invitation with an agenda; Margot needed her wheels more than her company. “It’s fine, darlin’. Sure, swing by and pick it up. I don’t need it today.”

“Thanks, Beebs. I’ll be over in half an hour?”

“Sounds good.”

“You’re the best. I love you!”

“I love you, too.”

~oOo~

After Margot left with the van, Bibi made herself a fresh batch of sweet tea. When it was ready, she poured herself a glass and took a couple Midol. Then she pulled down her secret stash of Lorna Doone cookies, and took her treats and the latest MHC book,
Loves Music, Loves to Dance
, out to the patio. She made herself comfy on the padded chaise lounge and got down to enjoying her unexpected day to herself.

She’d been reading, engrossed, for a couple of hours when she set the book down and came inside to use the bathroom and refill her tea.

It wasn’t until she was in the kitchen, setting her glass on the counter, that she realized something was wrong. At first, she didn’t know what had her neck prickling, but she followed her instinct and froze, listening hard.

She heard a creak. And a shuffle.

Someone was in the house. Not Hoosier; he would have looked for her right off, before he’d done anything else. Besides, Connor was impossible to miss. If he were home, she’d know it.

Margot wouldn’t have come in uninvited. She’d have come around the back if Bibi hadn’t answered the door. Besides, the front door was locked.

Wasn’t it? Had she locked it again when Margot left with the keys to the van?

Then it really hit her—oh God! A stranger was in the house!

Another creak, and a sound she couldn’t make out—coming from another direction. More than one person was in this house with her.

Bibi’s heart rate quadrupled, and her knees buckled. But she grabbed the counter and kept her feet. She had no choice but to deal with this on her own. She looked at the phone on the wall, but what good would that do? Hoosier was ten minutes away if he flew like a crow. And if the intruders didn’t already know she was here, they would when she called 911. There were at least two of them. Her best bet was to retrace her steps and go out the back door, then run like hell. She could go next door and ask Mrs. Johnson for help.

But the back door was in the dining room, and that felt far away now. Miles away.

Still, it was the best plan. The only plan.

There were guns and ammo seeded all over the house, out of Connor’s reach. But not here in the kitchen. So she pulled the cleaver off the magnetic strip on the wall behind the range and turned.

Another creak. Was that closer? Were they coming?

Trying to be as quiet as she possibly could, feeling sure that her frantic heartbeat could be heard all through the house, Bibi held the cleaver up in two shaking hands and eased through the kitchen, toward the doorway to the dining room. A little hall separated the rooms, and she paused, trying to recall the creak she’d just heard. Had it been out here?

She inched around the doorway and turned to check the hall.

There was a man standing right there, at the doorway, his back against the hallway wall. He’d known she was there.

Without thinking, Bibi struck out with the cleaver. It glanced off the man’s face and then sank into his arm. He roared and pulled his arm back, letting the cleaver slice through it and clear away. Then he swung at her, hitting her hard in the face. So hard. She’d never been hit like that before. The world went off-center, and then, for a fraction of a second, she didn’t know why she was falling or why her face hurt, as if the blow had knocked her knowledge of its source right out of her head.

The man dropped on top of her and kept hitting her. She could feel warm splashes and drips, but she didn’t understand what they were. All she could understand was that she needed it to stop. She tried to curl up, away from the hurt, but then she was being dragged by her hair down the hallway, and she finally found her voice to scream.

Pain exploded in her head, and—

~oOo~

Bibi woke up in a sweat, her heart pounding so hard that she was legitimately worried that she was having a heart attack. Oh God! Oh God! Not again!

Sitting up, she made herself focus and think. She was in bed—not her bed, not the bed she’d shared with her husband, but a bed, not a splintery floor. The room was pretty, and on the table at her side was one of Faith’s small sculptures.

She was safe, in Faith and Demon’s guestroom. It had been a dream. And a memory. Both.

A memory she hadn’t relived in years.

She lay back, relieved and depleted, and Blanca, one of the myriad cats that prowled this home, inside and out, jumped up on the bed and sat looking at her. She held out her hand, and the pretty little white miss bumped her head into Bibi’s palm, purring.

There would be no more sleep tonight. There never had been with those memories alive in her head. She snapped on the bedside lamp and picked up her book and her reading glasses, and Blanca curled up at her side.

At least the cat could sleep.

~oOo~

Bibi wasn’t in the mood the next day to keep up her chatter and storytelling for Hoosier. She was too old to pull all-nighters, and those memories always did a number on her, and the result of that equation was that she was enervated and depressed.

After a long stretch of quiet, Hoosier squeezed and pulled on her hand, a habit of his that she’d been interpreting as him asking her if she was okay.

She found a smile and stuck it on. “I’m okay, baby. Just had a rough night last night.”

He pulled and squeezed again, looking hard into her eyes.

“I’m fine, Hooj. Just gettin’ old, I guess. I need my sleep, and I didn’t get much last night. All this rememberin’ we’ve been doin’s got stuff dredged up is all.”

She must have been truly exhausted, because she didn’t realize that she’d said something provocative until Hoosier had her hand so tight in his grasp that her knuckles cracked.

“Ow, Hooj, what—oh.” His face was racked with anguish, and his understanding of exactly what she’d meant was vivid in his eyes. “Oh, honey, no. I didn’t—don’t go there, okay? There’s nothin’ good there. I’m fine, and memories like that don’t have teeth. We’re past it all. We need to get past
this
now. I need you to get better. I’m so goddamn lonely. I need you to talk to me, Hooj. Please. You’re here, I see you here, but I’m still so lonely. I miss your voice.”

And then she was crying, sobbing, and she couldn’t stop. “I miss you so much. Everybody’s bein’ great. They all love us, and they’d do anythin’ for us, I know. But you’re it for me, Hooj. Without you with me, my world is nothin’.” Giving in utterly to the emotion, she dropped her head on his shoulder. When he put his arms stiffly around her, her sobs became wails. “Please, Hooj. Please.
Please
. Please. I don’t know what else to do but beg. Please come back. Please come back. I love you so much. I love you. I love you.”

Her cheek lay on his chest, her forehead on his throat, and she felt it before she heard it—a tensing of his muscles. She was drowning in a flood of sorrow, but still something registered about that tension against her face. Then she felt his jaw move, and she heard him grunt.

Tears still staining her cheeks and leaking from her eyes, Bibi sat up and looked her man in the face. His cheeks were flushed and dampened by his own tears, but his expression was one of intent concentration.

“Hooj?” she whispered. “Hooj?”

He opened his mouth and then closed it again—but in a different way. He’d pursed his lips, almost as if he intended to kiss her.

“Buh,” he breathed.

Was that a word? “Oh God, Hooj, please. You can do it. You’re the toughest son of a bitch in five counties. You can do it. Please. Oh, please. I’m here, baby. Talk to me. I love you.”

“Buh…etter. Luh-ove…y-you…bet-ter.”

DARE

TEN

When Hoosier forced the words out, Bibi’s sobs redoubled, and she dropped her head to his chest, her hands digging into his shoulders. He tried to hold her, to comfort her, but his efforts, he knew, were insufficient. Making his body do what he wanted it to do took exhausting concentration.

For more time than he could fathom, for endless, infinite time, he’d been trapped in a body that didn’t understand him, and that he didn’t understand.

Hoosier’s memory and comprehension wavered, and had for as long as he could think. People would come to him, and his knowledge of them would sometimes be acute—like Bibi, always Bibi, he’d never not known his Cheeks—but at other times, with other people, they would seem to wink in and out of his consciousness, flickering before him like images on a badly-tuned-in television. He would know, and then he wouldn’t, and then he would again. And sometimes, he would only know that he
should
know.

The most maddening part of his unstable understanding was how very keenly and stably he understood what he’d lost, that there was a life full of people and things that he had once known.

He knew. He knew the things he should be able to do. He knew that the people who came to see him, who filled his room, were his people. Even when he couldn’t reach his memory of them, he knew it was there. And it had been driving him mad.

That had been improving, however—and, lately, it had been improving steadily. His life had been filling in its colors and its details. Bibi had spent weeks—maybe longer; time was a thing Hoosier had difficulty tracking—sitting with him, talking to him, and as she’d reminisced, he’d reached into the dark space in his head and pulled out memories. Even in the black nights when he was alone, he could reach back and pull new memories, connections to the things she’d recalled for him.