“You did, Samantha,” Evelyn added, stepping over and pulling her into a hug. “Thank you.”
Sammie gave a small nod into Evelyn’s shoulder, as her eyes appeared to glisten once again. James reached across to give a friendly pat on Sammie’s back while the women embraced, and Nick felt his chest expand with an overwhelming sense of the feeling he wouldn’t allow himself to articulate yet. He did, however, allow himself an audacious amount of hope that there would be many more moments like this to come. A whole lifetime of them, plus many others that he’d yet only seen in his dreams.
* * *
At some point, Nick deduced that they were leaving the hospital. Apparently, he’d been given a heavy dose of pain meds, as well as a sedative, probably in the hopes that he’d sleep throughout the entire seven-hour drive back to Austin. The last thing he remembered was being hoisted into the third row of his SUV, legs outstretched across the seats, and torture device securely packed with multiple pillows, and Sammie climbing into the second row, smiling at him and patting his hand.
It seemed she was talking to him, but he couldn’t quite understand her. The only thing he could liken it to was the few times he’d been totally intoxicated in his life—that stage where the room literally spins and you feel the need to grab on to something for fear that you’ll topple off the edge of the earth.
And since he was about to topple off the edge of the earth, he decided clutching her hand was a good idea.
“Babe,” he slurred. Apparently he was now calling herbabe.“Don’t let me fall, ‘kay?”
She smiled and rubbed her palm firmly across his shoulders. “You’re not going to fall. You’re going to take a nice nap, and then we’ll be home.”
“Hoo-oomme,” he hummed.
“Yup. So just close your eyes. I’ll be right here if you need anything.”
“Hmmmm…”
And that was it for a while. There was no dream this time, only a light show in his mind’s eye. When the light show ended, he found himself being wheeled into his parent’s first-floor guest bedroom, and then helped into the bed by his dad while Sammie and his mom used more pillows to prop up his legs.
There was a discussion among the three of them about the torture device. Something about cleaning the pins. Apparently, they’d all been given a crash course in what seemed to be a lengthy, meticulous process.
And then he heard something that immediately caught his attention.
“…going to go home now,” Sammie said to his mom. “I’ll plan to come by every day after work.”
“Sammie,” he uttered as urgently as he could. “You’re leaving?”
“Yeah,” she said, leaning over his face and combing back his hair with her fingertips. “I need to go see my parents. They’re worried. And I have to go back to work tomorrow. I missed a whole week already.”
“Oh.”
“I told them we had an emergency, but I do have to get back at some point. I’m going to come see you tomorrow, though. So you rest until then. Don’t give your mom too much trouble.”
She giggled, but he was clueless as to what exactly was funny about her leaving. He reached for her waist, pulled her close, and pressed his face into her stomach.
“Babe, I need you. You can’t—”
“I’ll be back,” she promised, hands cupping the back of his head for a moment, and then she kneeled down to the level of his face. Her eyes were suddenly red-rimmed and watery. “We’ve had quite an unexpected adventure, haven’t we? Leaving is pretty much the last thing in the world I want to do right now, but I need to take care of a few things. I promise I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Okay,” he attempted to say but found that his voice was caught behind a lump in his throat.
With that, she placed her palms on his cheeks, kissed his lips, then his forehead, and finally wrapped her arms around his shoulders to hug him tightly.
After an embrace that didn’t last anywhere near long enough, she stood, quickly hugged both of his parents, and then walked out the door.
He let his head sink backward into the pillow and his gaze drifted to the ceiling. He couldn’t tell if it was the drugs amplifying his emotions or if his heart had actually been ripped out just then, but whatever it was, he decided it was more than he cared to process at the moment so he closed his eyes. The spinning feeling returned, lulling him back into a slumber, and he was happily greeted by the familiar slideshow of events that made up their life together.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Samantha
Tap, tap, tap-tapwent the pen in Samantha’s hand, ticking off the seconds before she could leave the office.
Four forty-five … four forty-six … four forty-seven.
