Page 309 of Cross Checked
Steve helped me to the bedroom because the walk from the elevator to the apartment had apparently qualified as an Olympic event. By the time I sat on the edge of the bed, sweat had gathered along the back of my neck, and my vision had done one brief, irritating pulse around the edges.
Bliss saw it and crouched in front of me, hands on my knees, looking up with that fierce, terrified tenderness I would never survive if I kept seeing it too often.
“You’re pale.”
“I’m always pale. Manhattan money. No manual labor.”
“Don’t joke if you’re about to pass out.”
“I’m not about to pass out.” I paused. “Probably.”
“Cade.”
“I’m fine, Pip.”
“You are recovering from being stabbed by a psychopath. A very dead one you made an art project out of.”
“See? Recovering. Strong verb.”
Her face crumpled for half a second before she shoved it back into place, and I hated myself a little for pushing.
I leaned forward carefully, ignoring the pull in my side, and brushed my thumb beneath her eye. “I’m sorry, Pip.”
She breathed out through her nose. “For what? Almost dying or being irritating while recovering?”
“Both?”
“That’s fair.”
I smiled.
She pressed her forehead to my knee for one second, just one, like she needed to hide there.
Then she stood and turned bossy again, which I greatly preferred because crying Bliss still made me feel like someone had shoved a knife into the only place Luke had missed. She got me settled against the pillows. She checked my medication schedule. She argued softly with the nurse about when I should eat. She made me drink water. She glared when I said the bed was big enough for two and told me organs first, flirting second.
Honestly, tyrannical.
And for the first time since the hallway, being ordered around by Bliss Bennett felt less like proof I was broken and more like proof I had made it back to the life waiting for me.
Epilogue
Several months later…
Cade
Spring showed up in Michigan like it expected applause for doing the bare minimum.
The snow had finally retreated from the edges of the roads. The trees outside the Saginaw high-rise had started pushing out stubborn green buds like they were as tired of winter as the rest of us. The river below caught sunlight in broken flashes through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the penthouse, and for the first time in months, the world outside did not look like something I had to survive.
It looked like something waiting.
I hated how poetic that sounded, but almost dying had apparently made me annoying.
Recovery had been ugly at first. Humiliating in the beginning. There were weeks of pain so sharp I woke up sweating through sheets. Weeks where breathing wrong felt like being stabbed all over again. Weeks where Bliss hovered with a medication schedule color-coded so aggressively even my doctors respected it. Weeks where the first time I walked across a room without needing to stop, everyone acted like I had personally won the Stanley Cup on one lung and spite.
But by spring, the doctors had stopped looking surprised when I beat another benchmark and started looking personally offended by my refusal to behave like a normal patient.
My lung was strong. My abdomen had healed better than anyone expected. My scars still pulled sometimes when I twisted too fast, and my body still knew the difference between the manI had been before that hallway and the man I was now, but the difference did not feel like weakness anymore.
