Honor

“You’re upsetting him. Move out of my way.” Key sounded annoyed and assertive. Yeah, everyone get out of her way so I can see my girl . . . my love.

The doctor’s face was replaced with the one that had saved me, the one that meant everything.

“Nassir, you got hurt really, really bad. You need to let them check you out, okay? I promise I’m not going anywhere.” Her hand reached out and brushed over my forehead. It felt really nice, so I closed my eyes and relaxed against her touch. It soothed me. It settled me, and before I knew it, pain and sleepiness sucked me back under.

It went on like that for days. I would wake up and Key would be there, touching me, talking to me, holding me, and then the doctors and nurses would get their hands in the mix and aggravate me until they had to pump sedatives into my system to get me to calm down. Eventually the ventilator was pulled out and she could touch her lips to mine. When she did she told me how close I had come to dying before her very eyes. One of the bullets had broken my clavicle and the one fired into the center of my chest had shattered when it hit my sternum and a few tiny pieces had gotten dangerously close to my heart. I’d needed immediate surgery and had barely pulled through. To make matters worse, I’d apparently had an allergic reaction to one of the heavy painkillers they were pumping into me and had almost kicked it again. It hadn’t been an easy few weeks for her but she rarely left my side and she did more to calm me down and get me to cooperate with the hospital staff than the sedatives did.

When I could finally speak without coughing or feeling like my throat was a river of fiery pain and that my words were made of razor blades, I asked her about her hair.

She raised her hands to her head and started crying. Before I could hold a hand out to her, she climbed onto the side of the bed that didn’t have my broken wing on it and put her head on my shoulder. She was delicate about it but it still hurt, not that I would ever complain. She put her hand over the obnoxiously thick dressing that was covering the center of my chest.

“I never want to see the color of blood again. Every time I looked in the mirror . . . all that red. All I could see was all of that blood flowing out of you. I couldn’t take it anymore.”

Now her hair was the color of mink. It looked sophisticated, still sexy and flirty in that uneven cut that hung longer on one side than the other, but it made her seem more refined than she had been before. Maybe a tad more grown up and mature, and after everything she had witnessed, how could she not be?

I told her about dying. I explained how I was there, ready to cross the threshold, but this time no one was there to answer the door. I told her about how there was nothing. How I was stuck and empty. I told her that the only thing that made any sense in all of it was her. I told her that in the nothing there was still the memory of how I felt about her. I told her that when I burned on the pyre of pain and agony, I remembered that her love was worth it and then I told her that she was what I needed to live for. She was what I had always lived for.

She was crying silent tears. I could feel them hitting my skin where the hospital gown was twisted between us. I found her hand with mine and squeezed.

“I probably have never done it right, but I have always loved you, Keelyn Foster.”

“Neither one of us got it right from the start, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try harder from here on out. I love you too, Nassir Gates. We’re bound to figure it out eventually.”

Maybe that was the point. There wasn’t a right or wrong way to love, there was just understanding that it was there and trying your best to treat it like the fragile, valuable, precious thing that it was.

I rubbed my thumb along the inside of her wrist and told her I wanted to talk to Dovie when I was released from the hospital.

Of course, she didn’t want me anywhere near the redhead. She told me that Bax would freak out if I so much as looked sideways at his shy and sweet girlfriend. She was right, so I asked her to do me a favor. I told her that she needed to let Dovie know about the situation with Tyler French’s little sisters. Those poor girls were really the biggest victims in all this tragedy. I told her that I wanted to make sure the girls got in with a good family, and I wasn’t above dropping some cash around if that’s what it took. Dovie worked with Social Services and the foster families in the Point, so I knew she could get me the information I needed to make sure those kids didn’t have to suffer any more consequences of actions that weren’t their own.

She nodded and told me she would take care of it. She was already a few steps ahead of me in fact, and it wasn’t just those girls she was interested in making sure had a better shot at a good life. She was so fucking impressive. I wanted her because she was my equal in so many ways, but I loved her fully and completely because she was always going to be better than me in so many other ways.

Key also told me that the cops had gone to the older French’s house to check on the dad when she explained why the kid wanted to shoot me in the first place. They found him where I left him, trapped and angry as hell, and still ranting about how I needed to be arrested and thrown in jail for breaking and entering. But the cops were on their game and the reasons why his kids had been taken away were no secret to them, so once they pulled him free it was the deranged and crippled man who found himself in cuffs and hauled away.

When she was done talking about justice and fairness, we stayed there on the hospital bed until we both fell asleep.

I was stuck in the hospital for another week and I think the staff was onto the fact that I was running a criminal enterprise while under their care. It wasn’t like I bothered to hide it. Chuck came by once a day to fill me in on what was going on at the club and with the other businesses, and Race kept popping in and out to check on me. Seemed like once I was out of commission he had done what any good partner would and stepped up to the plate to juggle all my ventures, even the ones he didn’t want anything to do with. Maybe that whole partners-not-friends line was starting to get a little fuzzy. I’d never really had a friend before, but if Race wanted to be the first, I knew I could do a whole lot worse. Also, according to Chuck, my lady had switched from sexpot to cutthroat businesswoman in my absence. I told him there was no switching. She had always been savvy and smart; it was just that these qualities were often overlooked because of the length of her skirt. I picked her as my partner, in business and in life, for a reason.