Playing it Kale (The McCain Saga Book 4) (21 page)

CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE

The gray morning follows the orange-haze
night.
 
Shadows creep across the ceiling.
 
Every once in a while,
there’s the sound of a car whizzing by.
 
The sound of footsteps down the hall as someone heads to a destination
this morning.

I’m not sure how long I’ve been lying
here for.
 
After tossing and turning for
so long, I finally grabbed my phone and plugged in the earbuds.
 
So here I lie, staring at the ceiling,
listening to the soundtrack from Moulin Rouge, and thinking of molecular
biology.
 
Of how cells split and I wonder
if that’s a painful process, and then think how stupid that is.
 
Cells can’t feel pain.

I jump hard when my phone, which is
lying on my chest, starts vibrating.
 
Once
my heart calms down that it’s just a call, I look down to see Drake’s name on
the screen.

“Drake?”
I answer.
 
My voice reflects all the
shock I feel inside.

“Thank Zeus almighty you answered,” he
spills out all in a rush.
 
There’s
emergency and emotion in his voice.
 
“I’m
sorry, I know it’s early, but I just…
 
I
thought you would want to know.”

“Drake, what’s going on?”
 
I stand up and go to the window, looking down
over the waking city.

I hear Drake give a hard sniff and it
takes him a second to reply.
 
“Kale
hasn’t been himself the last few days.
 
He’s seemed angry, upset.
 
Which is understandable right now.
 
But last night he told Mom that he was going
to see this friend from high school.”

And something twists in my stomach.
 
The only friend I’ve heard him talk about
from high school is Collin, and he’s not a good one.

“They’re still trying to puzzle out
everything that happened last night,” Drake says, his voice getting rough.
 
“But they’re pretty sure drugs were involved
and…”
 
He takes another hard sniff, and
it takes him a minute to reply.
 
I just
want to grab him round the throat and shake the rest of the story out of him.

“There was a fire,” he finally
continues.
 
“It was pretty bad.
 
It looks like Kale’s friend accidentally
started it, but he was burned really, really bad.
 
Right now they’re not sure if he’s going to
survive or not.”

“Damn it, Drake,” I hiss as my free hand
raises
to my forehead, and I slowly pace in front of
the window.
 
“Is Kale okay or not?”
 
And finally, after keeping it together for so
long, my voice cracks.

I hear him take a deep breath on the
other line.
 
“No,” he says.
 
“He’s not.”

I sink to the floor, right there.
 
My limbs go numb.

“He tried pulling his friend out of the
house,” he continues.
 
“The guy would
have died in the house if not for Kale.
 
But Kale caught fire himself.
 
They think he rolled as soon as they got outside and got out most of the
flames, but not before he got burned pretty badly himself.”

Tears start rolling down my eyes.
 
I imagine Kale, trying to be the hero to
someone who maybe shouldn’t have been saved.
 
I imagine the flames and how he must have screamed.

A sob works its way out of my chest, and
I press a hand to my mouth.

“He was in surgery last night,” Drake
says, emotion heavy in his own voice.
 
“They’re keeping him asleep for most of the day today while they keep
cleaning him up.”

“How severe were the burns?” I manage to
get out.
 
My parents worked with burns
once in their research.
 
Not much bothers
them, but even they had a hard time dealing with the pain the patients were
experiencing.

“Eighty percent of them are second
degree, non-thickness.
 
But it looks like
the fire kept burning by his hip, stretching up toward his stomach.
 
There’s some second degree,
full-thickness.
 
And one small spot that
is third degree.”

Slowly, my brain, my body, goes back
into action and function.
 
I start
gathering things.
 
Throwing
them into a bag.
 
“Which hospital
is he in?”

And I hear him give a relieved
sigh.
 
“Harborview.”

“I’m on my way,” I say.
 
“Thank you so much for calling me.”

“Of course,” he says.
 
“Should I send Sage or Julian to pick you up
from the airport?”

“That’d be great, thank you,” I say as I
finish packing and head out into the hall.
 
“I’ll let you know when I’m getting in.”

We say our goodbyes, and I pound on
Tony’s door, so grateful that he lives next door.
 
“Tony!” I shout.
 
“We’ve got to go!”

We hopped on the first flight that was
leaving with seats available, which was twenty minutes after Tony and I arrived
at the airport.
 
I wore sunglasses and a
fedora, a plain gray long-sleeved T-shirt and black jeans.
 
As non-descript as I could manage.
 
Tony looked like a twitchy-nervous
tweeker
, watching for recognition and crowds.
 
Cause
we were flying
a general, every day coach flight on Southwest.

But we boarded, and no eyes turned
toward us.
 
It was still early, only seven
a.m.
 
Everyone is bleary eyed and already
asking for pillows so they can go back to sleep.

But I’m wide-eyed and awake.

I stare out my window as we fly over the
west coast.
 
I tear my napkin to shreds.
 
I’m not thinking about the repercussions of
taking off without telling a single soul.
 
I’m not thinking about the interview I’m going to miss at eleven-thirty,
or the meeting I’m supposed to have about the tour at two.
 
How I’m supposed to meet my road crew
today.
 
Any of that.

All I can imagine is Kale, lying in a
hospital bed, and how much pain he must be in.

A few stray tears roll down my
face.
 
Tony reaches over and laces his
fingers through mine.
 
I look over at
him, into his strong, always tough face.
 
And there’s support in his warm eyes.
 
“You’re going to get through this.”

But his words aren’t reassuring.
 
Cause
he doesn’t say
Kale and I will get through this.
 
He
doesn’t say everything is going to be okay.

Just that
I
will get through this.

And that finally breaks me.
 
After keeping it together, I crumble into his
strong arms and loose it.

Two hours and fifty minutes later, we
land.
 
The sky is gray and covered in
clouds.
 
It’s raining lightly.
 
I text Sage that we’re in,
and she replies back that she’ll be to the pick-up area in just a few minutes.

My shades go back on, despite how dim
the day is.
 
I always walk close to Tony,
hanging just slightly behind him.
 
But
miracle of all miracles, we make it through the airport without being
recognized.

Neither of us checked a
bag, we each only carry a backpack, and
we head
straight for the pick-up area.
 
And there
Sage is, waiting at the curb.
 
She jumps
out when she sees us and pops the trunk.

“I’m glad you came,” Sage says,
embracing me in a hug.
 
Before it would have felt weird, coming from her.
 
Sage isn’t the hugging type.
 
But now, after everything that’s happened to
her family in the past week and a half, she’s a little softer.
 
“Thank you for bouncing back and forth so
much for us.”

“Of course,” I say as I slip into the
passenger seat and Tony is relegated to the back.
 
It feels weird.
 
“How’s he doing?
 
Is he still asleep?”

My phone starts buzzing.
 
I look down at it.
 
It’s Hadley.
 
Again.
 
I’ve already got seven voicemails and ten missed calls.
 
Twenty-eight text messages.
 
I hand it back to Tony, who slides it into
his pocket.

“They thought it best if they kept him
unconscious for a few more hours.
 
They’re saying most of the burns aren’t as bad as they originally
thought they’d be, so that’s a positive side, I guess.”
 
She shakes her head as she pulls back onto
the road and we head out of the airport.

“How has he been, since I left?” I ask
even as my internal organs do a transformation from pink and squishy to steel
and hard.

Sage glances over at me and there’s
hesitance in her eyes.
 
“He’s not been
good.
 
For the first day or so, he was
just quiet, like before.
 
But then he was
just annoyed and angry, about everything.
 
I didn’t want Mom to have to deal with him acting like that, so I made
him
come
stay with us.
 
Even Julian couldn’t get him out of his funk.
 
I was worried about him, but I never thought
he’d do something so idiotic.”

Her words are harsh, but these times are
dire.
 
“He hasn’t answered any of my
calls this whole week.”

Sage nods again.
 
“I kind of figured.
 
Any time I’d bring you
up,
he’d try to change the subject.”

And that is like a thousand needles to the
heart.

“The burns to his upper chest, neck, and
face should start to heal pretty fast,” the doctor explains to me.
 
“There will be scaring, but nothing
disfiguring.
 
The burns to his hip and
lower abdomen though are going to take some time.
 
The skin graft may or may not take, so it
will be a bit before we know if we’ll have to redo it.”

It’s both worse and better than I was
expecting.

Kale lies there, medically asleep, in
the hospital bed.
 
He’s got a cannula in
his nose, feeding him extra oxygen.
 
He
wears a gown, but only barely.
 
Most of
his body is exposed.
 
Showing
the angry burns.

They stretch from his right hip, up his
lower stomach, mostly off to the side.
 
This is where the burn is the worst.
 
And apparently where the fire kept burning after he
collapsed.
 
There’s a five by four
inch skin graft there, and that’s where there are white, leathered edges of
third-degree burns.
 
From there, the burn
stretches up, licking up over his right breast.
 
It claws its way up the side of his neck.
 
And it creeps up just over the edge of his
jaw, barely onto his lower cheek.

The burns aren’t as extensive as I
expected them to be.
 
I had imagined his
whole body covered in angry, wet, red skin.
 
Hair burned, melted skin oozing everywhere.
 
But it’s just that one strip.
 
That one, painful-looking
strip.

“I just need a relationship status to
put on his visitor records,” the doctor says as he flips a chart open and
starts writing my name down.
 
“You’re his
girlfriend, correct?”

“Yes,” I reply with every confidence in
my voice.
 
Because he hasn’t told me
otherwise, and damn him if I’m just going to let him ignore me into a breakup.

“Okay, thank you,” he says with a nod as
he dismisses himself.

I want to cry.
 
I want to be angry with him.
 
I want to yell at him and to hold him and to
just…just…make it all better.

But only two tears make their way
out.
 
I sink into the chair at his
side.
 
I pull his hand into mine, careful
not to disturb the thermometer on his finger or the IV going into his arm.
 
I rest my head on my arm and just look at
him.