It was as she threw her head back, her arms wrapped around her stomach, that it hit me how much she looked like her daddy as I took a photo of her.
I remembered a time when we were walking home, and I’d fallen face first into a muddy puddle. He’d had his head at the same angle and his arms holding his stomach as he laughed harder than I’d ever seen him laugh. It was a memory I’d forgotten until that moment, and now it was one of the most precious ones I had of him.
That photo of Shanti was blown up and hung on the wall in the living room next to my favorite one of Callum.
And it was that memory alone that made that Christmas erase all the memories of the shitty ones I’d had as a kid, aside from the good moments with Callum from them. I might never have gotten it back if it hadn’t been for Carter, Mi-mi, and June, so I’d forever be in their debt for unknowingly helping to bring it back to me.
TWENTY
Carter
Walking into the hospital room where Raoul was being treated, I came to a sudden stop, making Alex and DB walk into each other behind me.
Lying on the bed, with his wife standing on one side of it, watching worriedly as the doctor treating him brought a tray of things over and put it on a rolling table, was Raoul, with a grin on his face. Given that he had roughly six large slivers of glass embedded in his arm, I wouldn’t have thought he had much to smile about. But what did I know.
“Everything all right?” DB asked, pushing past me, and coming to his own sudden stop as he saw something on the other side of the room, hidden behind where I was still holding the door open.
What’d caused me to stop was that Raoul looked like he’d merged with a dinosaur. When we’d heard he had glass in his arm, I’d thought they’d be the ordinary sized pieces we usually encountered. Instead, these were about five inches long and had shattered in different shapes.
What’d caused DB to stop was a mystery until I moved forward and peered behind the door.
Garrett leaned against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest and watched what was going on with his brother, but his eyes kept flicking to the ground where I could see Reid was curled up.
“Yeah, things are great with me, but that motherfucker’s squeamish and refuses to leave,” Raoul snickered, nodding at Reid.
“We got into this together, we….” Reid licked his lips and swallowed loudly “…get out of this together. Bad Boys for life.”
“Okay, I’m just going to numb the areas. Because the shards are all spaced out from each other, this might take a little longer than normal, but we’ll get there,” the doctor told Raoul before glancing up at Rose. “Are you assisting me on this one?”
“It’s my husband, so, yes.”
The doctor blinked at her, then looked between the two of them. “Isn’t that a conflict of interests?”
Her jaw did that ‘I’m a pissed off woman’ jut to the side, making the rest of us wince.
“I’m not operating or keeping his heart beating, I’m just passing you what you need and following what you ask me to do. I’m fairly sure that’s allowed.”
When he didn’t reply, she sighed. “Look, he’s a big fucking baby. If I’m not here to glare him into submission, you’ll have to chase him around to get it done. Do you really want someone with spikes of glass—” Reid whimpered and made a gulping noise “—sticking out of his arm running around the hospital?”
“Fair enough.” The doctor picked up a syringe and moved in to begin numbing the skin up.
“Oh, God,” Reid croaked and began panting.
“Don’t look at it,” Alex advised, taking up a position similar to Garrett’s.
“When has that ever worked,” Reid tried to snap, but it came out almost like a whimper when his eyes remained glued to the bed. “God, he just keeps pushing that needle around inside.”
Seeing a stack of bowls, I nabbed one and threw it to him like a frisbee. “Puke into that, not onto the floor, man.”
Instead, he covered his face with it, then lowered the top so he could peek over the rim at what was happening. With Rose’s help, the doctor numbed each of the areas up, and by the time he’d finished the last injection, the place he’d first injected was numb enough to start pulling the glass out.
That’s when even my stomach flipped.
Slowly, he used forceps to remove the shard, almost like he was getting some perverse satisfaction in doing it.
“There’s the first one. Gotta say, Officer Evans, that’s impressive.”
Raoul opened his mouth to reply, but a groaned, “Oh, shit,” and the sound of skin hitting the floor drew our attention back to Reid, who was now lying on his side in the fetal position with his arms wrapped around his head. “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.”