Nowhere But Here (Thunder Road #1) (24 page)

“But you’re tired.”

“Stay,” she demands in the kind of voice that causes me to immediately comply. “I’ll give you another clue tomorrow. This one should be easy to figure out, especially if you can convince Oz to help you.”

“You realize that this is a messed-up scavenger hunt, right? You have to admit it’s a little deranged. What do you do for birthday parties around here? Load up piñatas with snakes? You are, by far, the strangest group of people I have ever met.”

I expect Olivia’s witty comeback, but nothing. Odds are she’s heard the same distant rumble of motorcycles that has caught my attention. “Maybe that’s Eli.”

And what’s weird is the happy anticipation of seeing him again. Does it make me a bad daughter if I’m looking forward to the next few days?

The sheets shift and then my hand begins to tremble. A deadly cold overtakes my body. It’s not me that’s shaking. It’s Olivia. Her body flinches uncontrollably. Quaking in a way that’s unnatural. Her eyes roll back in her head and her arm drops off the bed.

I hover over her as I hold on to her hand. “Olivia!” She continues to shake and panic bursts inside me. “Olivia!”

Terrified to leave her, unsure what to do, I turn my head and scream, “Oz! I need you!”

Her body still twitches under my touch and she needs help and I don’t know what to do. Her body moves closer to the edge and I lean over her to prevent her from slipping off. My eyes search frantically for a phone and when I come up empty my head whips over my shoulder again. “Oz! Plea—”

My cry is ripped short as a large man in black leather barrels into the room. Fear spikes into my chest and as I shield Olivia with my body, he speaks. “How long has she been seizing?”

I blink at the familiarity of the voice. It’s Cyrus. My grandfather. Her husband. He rushes to Olivia’s side of the bed and his eyes dart to mine. “How long, Emily?”

“A few seconds,” I answer. A dip on the bed and Eli’s by my side. He attempts to tear me away from Olivia, but I dig my fingers in. If I let go she’ll fall. If I let go she could die. My throat burns and wetness fills my eyes. “I turned the air conditioner on and I shouldn’t have and we talked and this happened.”

“Holy fuck,” another guy mutters as he enters the room then yells down the hallway, “Someone call Izzy.”

The convulsing stops. Cyrus crouches next to Olivia and brushes a finger slowly along her cheek. “Olivia?”

She opens her eyes, but there’s no awareness there and what frightens me more is how her hand remains lifeless in mine. “Is she okay?”

Cyrus looks up at me and then behind me. Nausea rages in my stomach. This man is huge. Death-defying. He should be answering yes. He should be able to fix her. That’s how strong he is, but he’s not fixing her. His eyes are glassed over and he’s a mirror of Olivia—broken.

“You were real strong staying with her,” says Cyrus in this gentle voice. Too gentle. So gentle that I check to make sure that Olivia’s chest rises with air. It does. Her eyes are still open, but this feels final. “Why don’t you let me take over?”

“She asked me to stay.” My voice sounds hollow. Echoed. As if I’m floating. Detached from the entire situation.

Fingers in a black glove slide along the hand I’ve linked with Olivia’s and then slowly extract my hand from hers. In a heartbeat, my body moves and I’m in the arms of someone as they carry me out of Olivia’s room.

Oz

EVEN IN ELI’S
arms as he carries her away, Emily’s hand stays outstretched toward Olivia. Tears pool in her eyes and a pulse of protectiveness races through me. I step forward and Dad pounds a hand on my chest with such power that it nearly knocks the wind out of me. “Let Eli take care of his daughter.”

“Emily screamed for me. She wants me.” She needs me. Her panicked voice still rings in my head. She called for me right as Dad, Eli and Cyrus walked up the porch after returning from their run. It was almost a fight as the four of us raced to get to Emily and Olivia.

Dad’s towering over me like he’s willing to take a swing and he motions to my fisted hands. “Get it together.”

I ram a hand through my hair, trying to silence the noise in my mind. Running in here, seeing Emily losing her shit, watching as Olivia’s body twitched like she was some washed-up fish on the shore. I bend over, slamming my hands on my thighs. Jesus. This isn’t it. This can’t be it.

“How far out is the ambulance?” I ask.

Cyrus is still crouched on the floor next to Olivia. His forehead rests on the mattress and Olivia weakly raises her hand and touches his gray hair. “You have to be strong for me.”

He doesn’t lift his head, only shakes it. I rock with the sight. Olivia makes a shushing sound that pierces my heart.

“How far out is the ambulance?” I demand.

No one says a thing and, except for Cyrus, they all stare at me. My father, Hook and Olivia. Each one shares a haunted expression. The type where they know you’re the only one who hasn’t received news of a death.

“Pigpen called your mom,” says Dad. “She’ll be here in a few minutes.”

The world sways. “I didn’t ask that. I asked about the ambulance.”

“There’s no ambulance,” Dad responds in a low tone.

“Why the hell not?”

“The tumor’s grown,” Olivia whispers. “And the cancer’s spread to my blood.”

I turn away as my eyes burn and I prop both hands on the wall to keep myself up. What the hell?

“We found out not long after Emily came, but decided to keep it quiet.” Dad’s footsteps tap against the wooden floor and a heavy hand gently presses on my shoulder. “Olivia wants to die here, son.”

Shit. Just shit. “They said they’d do another round of chemo.”

“It’s over, Oz,” Olivia says.

I smack my hand against the wall and my palm stings. “It’s not.”

“Jonathan,” she whispers.

Fuck this. “No!”

Dad squeezes my shoulder and I recoil with my hands in the air as a visual stop. “This is bullshit!”

My gaze immediately hits Olivia. She presses a hand to her heart, like she did when she lowered herself to my height and explained that it was time for me to go live with Mom and Dad. Just like she did when she wiped my tears away and explained that this would always be my home. That I would always be her family.

Ten years later and when I tell someone I’m coming home, it’s not to the trailer down the way, it’s to here. Olivia is my home.

“Why are you giving up?” I beg. “You swore to me you’d never give up.”

Olivia closes her eyes. A single tear escapes and slowly slides down her cheek.

She’s giving up. The person I love more than anyone else is giving up on living. She’s giving up on me.

My insides twist and all of the building hurt bursts through into anger as I punch open the door in her room that leads to the porch. The cooler air of the night crashes around me as I clutch the railing and lean over.

She’s dying. The person I love the most in my life is going to die.

Emily

MY BODY IS
set on something soft and then there’s the click of a lamp. The smell of leather overwhelms me when black gloves frame my face.

“Is she dead?” My voice isn’t my own. It’s too high-pitched. It’s too hysterical.

Eli fills my vision and my body starts to tremble. His hold on my chin is firm and gentle and it prevents me from jumping off the bed and returning to Olivia.

“No, Emily, she’s alive. This happens. Not a lot, but it happens.”

“So this is normal?”

Eli maintains eye contact, but he doesn’t respond, which is the worst type of answer. She’s dying. This is his mother and he should be with her and not me. “You should go to her.”

“No, I’m staying here.”

She’s dying. Olivia is dying. Her body is breaking down, no one can fix her, and I don’t want her to die—I want her to live. My lower lip quivers. “She’s your mom.”

“And you’re my daughter.”

I detest dead things. Dead things are cold and unmoving and terrifying, but Olivia is very much alive and I need her to stay alive. She may not be the cookie-baking type. She might scare me and act crass and rude, but I like her. I briefly close my eyes as pain rips through me. I more than like her, and I haven’t spent enough time with her. Not enough time...

“Dad’s with her,” Eli says and I spot the ache in his eyes. “He needs time with her. He just needs...time.”

Eli rarely refers to his parents as Mom and Dad. Instead, he uses their names, except when he’s hurting. I don’t know much about Eli, but I can tell an awful lot about him when he’s in pain and that’s not right. There’s something fundamentally wrong that I understand him better hurting than I do when he’s happy.

“Don’t you need time with her?” I ask.

He barely nods. “Mom understands I’m running out of time with you, as well.”

All of the emotions of Olivia and Mom and Dad and Eli and even Oz crash into me and I lower my head into my hands, but I bite my lip to keep from crying. Somehow it doesn’t feel like I have the right to cry. I’m not the one on the verge of losing my mom.

“Hey.” Eli lets go of my chin, settles on the bed next to me and wraps an arm around my shoulders, gently pressing so that I’ll lean into him. Because I’m a mess, I do, and feel worse that I’m letting him comfort me. “It’s okay, Emily. For tonight, she’s okay.”

I push down my hurt and rapidly blink to keep the tears away. Eli’s strong. Olivia’s strong. I can be strong, too, but as I go to pull away, Eli only readjusts us so that we’re sitting back against the wall with me still tucked close to him.

“It scared me,” I admit, and hope it’s a plausible explanation for why I’m so messed up because I’m not sure he’d believe that I like her and I’m not sure how I feel about it myself.

“Scared me, too. Each and every time it happens, it scares the shit out of me.” Honesty is etched over his face.

“I have a hard time believing you’re scared of anything. I mean...you’re you.”

He’s a lot like his father, Cyrus. He’s big and he’s strong and basically has an entire army of scary men in black leather who ride motorcycles and carry guns at his disposal.

“I’m scared of a ton of things and all of them have to do with losing the people I love.” He pauses. “I learned a long time ago that I can’t control everything and now I’m learning I can’t control death. Sometimes I feel cursed. Like I get to watch everyone I love slip through my fingers.”

He wanted me. Olivia said he wanted me. I open my mouth to ask if I’m one of the people he’s referring to, if Mom is, but I snap it shut. I don’t know how to ask without divulging that Olivia is sharing secrets with me and I can’t take the respect Eli has for her away over my need to understand my past.

“What?” Eli asks.

“Nothing.”

“No, you were going to say something, what?”

My mind is completely blank. What can I say? What should I say? “I don’t like pulled pork. I don’t like any pork actually. It’s tough and it’s stringy and it’s a pig and...well...pigs gross me out. Which means I don’t like bacon either, so...yeah...that’s it.”

Eli blinks as he tries to understand any of the hot mess that just fell out of my mouth. He pulls on his earlobe and his face contorts as if he’s trying not to laugh. “You ate an entire pulled pork sandwich in Nashville.”

I did. “You were superexcited about me trying it and I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. I feel like that’s all I do—hurt you. I don’t want to, but I do. Even when I’m not trying to, it still happens.”

“Emily.” He lowers his head so that we’re eye to eye. “You don’t hurt me.”

“Yeah, I do. Every time I look at you, I see that you’re in pain.”

He shakes his head. “You don’t cause that. It’s something I did to myself. But thank you.”

My forehead furrows. “For what?”

“For telling me something about you.” And he leaves off how he didn’t have to ask a million questions to learn it or how he appreciates how honest I was. Hating pork, it’s simple really, but to Eli, it seems like a lot.

Crap, now I really feel bad. I’ve been here over a month, I’ve known him for seven years and pulled pork is the first real truth he knows about me. Eli and I...maybe we also need time.

A knock on my open door and Oz enters the room. “Cyrus is asking for you, Eli.”

Eli glances over at me as if he’s weighing telling Oz no, but then Oz adds, “I’ll stay with her.” He rests a hip against the door frame of my room with his hands shoved in his pockets and eyes me in a way that suggests he’d like my help.

“I’ll be okay with Oz.”

Eli’s eyebrows pull together in worry, but he quickly stands and kisses the top of my head. He then goes to Oz, cradles one hand around the base of his neck and says, “I owe you.”

Oz nods, Eli leaves, and we study each other. Men in black vests float like ghosts along the hallway. For as many people as there are in the house, there’s only a low mumble of conversation. An occasional distinct voice here and there. No panic. No hustle. No phone call to 911 or distant wail of an ambulance.

Oz watches me as if my gaze on him is the sole thing keeping him upright. Through my window, the clubhouse is lit up and beams of motorcycle lights flash into my room as more people arrive. The roar of engines the lone sound that resembles the actual chaos inside me.

“Why aren’t they taking her to the hospital?” I whisper.

Oz’s head falls back until it hits the door. “Because Olivia has made it clear that she wants to stay here.”

“What? But she needs help. She needs a hospital. She—”

Oz cuts me off. “She wants to die here.”

My mouth drops open, but no sound comes out. Dad’s mentioned this before. Hospice, I think? It’s care for people who are dying. For people who have exhausted all medical options. “But she seems so...alive.”

“Get some jeans on,” he says. “Then meet me outside.”

“Don’t you want to stay? If she’s dying, don’t you want to be here?”

“Do you?” he asks.

No, I don’t and from the way Oz’s blue eyes are begging me to move, I guess he doesn’t, either.

“Where are we going?” I inquire.

Oz glances down the hallway toward Olivia’s room. “Away from here.”