Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 146548 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 733(@200wpm)___ 586(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146548 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 733(@200wpm)___ 586(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
He blinks and tears fall down his sharp cheekbone. “You will?”
“Yeah,” I nod. “You’re stuck with me, wolf scout. I’ll annoy the shit out of you every single morning for decades. Longer, and our kids will take your side because you’re good and lovable.”
He breathes deeper. “We have kids?” His iron-willed eyes drift to imagine this future, our future. “How many?”
A rock lodges. “As many as you want,” I say, never lying to him. “And when I agitate you and I really hit a nerve, you’ll joke about how you wish you died in this car crash.”
His lip wants to lift. “Romantic.” He coughs, then grits through pain. “Fuck.”
His skin is starting to discolor, and as I look out in the rain, Oscar is running towards me with an umbrella and the kit.
“…Farrow,” Maximoff chokes.
“Shh,” I whisper.
“...I don’t want to die…” His neck strains.
My chest is on fire. “That’s good, wolf scout.” I nod. “Because I’m not writing down your will right now.”
Maximoff stares upward. “Thanks…like you write anything down…”
I grab all the medical supplies Oscar collected. He snaps open the umbrella and shields rain from us while I work.
I tear open antiseptic and cleanse the site. Then I take out the needle catheter from the kit. Quickly, I run my finger over the top of the third rib and the second intercostal space, midclavicular line on the right side.
My hands are shaking.
In all my life, my hands have never shook.
“Take a second, Redford,” Oscar tells me.
I breathe out. Relax, Farrow.
My hands steady.
No more hesitating, I insert the needle catheter, and a rush of air expels like the burst of a balloon.
Maximoff inhales deeper, and his right lung finally has movement. I keep the catheter in place and remove the needle. He’s more stable. And now, all I can do is wait for the ambulance.
I hover over him again. “Better?”
He nods once, taking another breath. He’s still in a lot pain from multiple fractures. Our eyes latch for a heady moment as a flash strikes the air.
As the night sky rumbles above us.
Maximoff stares out in a short second before he looks back at me and says, “That’s us.”
I don’t follow. “Plato talking to you again?”
He groans, then coughs.
“Relax,” I tell him, ambulance sirens blaring in the distance. And it’s only when lightning cracks the sky and thunder roars again do I realize what he meant by that’s us.
Thunder.
Lightning.
My brows rise. “I’m lightning then, and you’re thunder. You always follow me every time I appear.”
His lips lift in a choked laugh. “You’re right…you will annoy me to death.”
My chest swells, and I can’t hold back. I lean down and kiss Maximoff, gently, on the lips, and he tries to kiss back and even sit up. But I don’t let him.
Later.
There will be a later. There has to be one.
7
MAXIMOFF HALE
A heart rate monitor lets out quiet beep beeps. An IV is hooked in my vein, connected to bags of fluid, and I ended up asking Farrow what the nurse clipped to my finger: a pulse oximeter.
I’ve been dazed for a while.
Maybe since I was put on a stretcher and wheeled into an ambulance and brought to Philadelphia General.
I think about how I’ve been stalked, threatened bodily harm and death. How I’ve crashed my motorcycle dozens of times, back-flipped into ravines, skydived, wiped out on a snowboard, eaten pavement after skateboard tricks, swam in strong ocean currents, and after all these things, all this damn time, I’ve never been afraid to die. And then tonight.
I was afraid.
I was fucking terrified.
My mortality, my fragile life, just crashed against me, and I remember that I’m only twenty-two. I remember that I can’t control the direction of anything, and I’m a passenger to the universe—but God, this ride can’t end for me. Not here, not now.
I wasn’t ready.
I’m not ready.
I begged and pleaded to receive one more minute with Farrow. I’d been surrounded by the love of family for twenty-two years, but I didn’t even get a full year with the love of another man, a companion, a soul mate—and maybe I was being selfish.
Asking for more when I’d been given so much already.
But then I thought about how he never had a family that really loved him for him. And I thought, if not for me, don’t do this to him. Don’t gut him.
So I’m not returning this second chance, this extra time. Maybe it’s why I can’t stop staring at him now.
Then again, my brain has always been obsessed. I’m pretty sure he knows that too.
“Aren’t you supposed to be reading to me?” I ask Farrow as he clutches a paperback in one hand, my paperback, and flips a page. “You know, out loud.” I sit up as best I can on the firm hospital bed.
Farrow has claimed a seat at the end of my bed.