chapter sixteen

I wake up the next day feeling like I've fallen out of a plane without a parachute. I've been feeling like that for the past week or so, though, so I'm kind of getting used to it.

JD is the one who woke me up, throwing open the guest bedroom door and proclaiming that we're going to take a trip. He wants to go to my cover apartment so we can move all of my stuff out. I've already been issued an official notice by the headquarters in D.C that I need to vacate the property within the next three days, so I might as well get it over with sooner rather than later.

I groan my way through sitting up in bed. "You're gonna have to give me a few," I tell him, swinging my legs around to place my bare feet on the floor.

"You still super fucked up?" he asks, looking me up and down. "You went on the op with us yesterday, though."

"Was a personal matter," I reply, dragging myself to my feet. I sway once I'm actually upright, and he places a stabilizing hand on my shoulder to save me from crumbling to the ground.

"A personal matter?" he parrots back.

"Complicated. You already know everything I want you to."

He pouts slightly. "I barely know anything," he says.

"Exactly." I flash him a dry grin as I regain my own balance enough to stand up straight without help.

We take his Camaro to the apartment and park across the street. It's a reasonably nice neighborhood so thankfully we can take our time. I fumble for the keys to the place with uncoordinated fingers for a second before I'm finally able to get them into the lock.

The apartment is just as empty as I left it. I drag the boxes from the closet out into the hall before disappearing into the bedroom to make sure I'm not forgetting anything important.

JD is standing by the kitchen when I get back out into the main area of the apartment. It takes me a second to realize why he's gone so uncharacteristically silent, but the sight of dried blood on old gauze and bandages makes it clear.

"These are from your arms, right?" he says quietly. "I thought that was from the Rivera guys."

A dry bark jumps out of my mouth.

"It actually technically was," I reply.

"You know, not telling anybody about anything isn't very good for you."

I sigh loudly, squatting gingerly to take a seat on the couch. JD is the closest thing I have to a best friend on the team. Max is cool, sure, but he's more of a mentor than my best buddy. JD is like my League version of Atlas.

"You know that guy we have in custody at the tower right now? Rowan? His father and some of the other members caught us sneaking around when we were hooking up, or whatever. They grabbed me off the street and, long story short, his dad forced him to burn me. Bad."

JD's face contorts into a twist of anger and concern. He isn't the most serious guy, so what happened to me must sound even crazier from the outside than it does from the inside.

"That's really fucked up, Lake," he says seriously. "I'm kind of surprised that you're still jumping through hoops to keep him outta jail."

"He's a good guy, really. This whole thing just got so complicated so fast," I insist, but I don't meet his eyes as I speak.

I still can't look at Rowan without being reminded of what he did. It always takes me a moment to be rational and remember that he really had no choice. I could have easily removed myself from that situation if I really wanted to. Doing that would have given me away in an instant, though, and that's probably just what Alexander was trying to do. I have a lot of things to have nightmares about. The scars on my chest. Getting shot. My mom's brother, Ashton. Rowan burning the flesh from my arms is just another incident that has unfortunately joined the lineup.

"If you say so, kid," JD says. The conversation thankfully ends there.

We head back to the tower. JD helps me move everything I had in my guest room on the common floor up to my actual suite. JD moves literally everything, actually, because he doesn't let me carry anything after I wince in pain a time too many. I can finally say that I officially live in the tower full time, which is kind of great. I've always preferred having a place to call home, no matter how dysfunctional it may be.

/-/-/

I spend most of my time sleeping during the next few days. My body takes that time to catch up with healing the myriad of injuries it's sustained so recently. The sleep doesn't go uninterrupted. Nightmares that haven't visited me in years have once again become a plague, and they're accompanied by new ones. Getting shot it actually quite traumatic. That "instant recovery" every person who's been shot in a movie or on a TV show has totally pisses me off now.

I mostly keep to my suite all day. Sometimes I hear the pitter patter of tiny feet and remember that Bella's here now. That means Rowan is around, as well, which may or may not be a contributing factor to my continued isolation. I still have yet to talk to him. Any time I've meandered out into the kitchen or living room on the common floor and seen Rowan, I've turned and practically ran from the room. Call me a coward but I just got shot and seriously burned so I'm pretty sure I deserve a break.

My doctor from the hospital has given me the okay to start a modified form of physical therapy tomorrow. My enhanced healing means that I can't go to just any physical therapist so my doctor has recommended I switch out my weekly training with Max for some lighter activity.

I meet Max on the training mat as we usually do. He tosses me a warm smile when he enters the room after getting off of the elevator.

"I figured we could start with some basic stretching since you're still walking around looking like a kicked puppy," he says, keeping his tone playfully light.

I sit across from him on the mat as he guides me through some leg and back stretches. I feel looser than I have in a while once we're done and he decides that we'll wrap up this week's session with some leisurely knife sharpening.

"You've been spending a lot of time in your suite, kiddo," he says as we slide our respective blades across the sharpening blocks. "I figured you would've jumped the second you had the chance to speak to that guy of yours with the way you were throwing yourself on the line for him."

I don't say anything for a few moments, listening instead to the scrape and grind of our blades. What exactly can I say to that? How can I explain myself without completely giving Rowan and I away?

"Just because I helped him doesn't mean he's 'mine'," I snark. "He deserved the break we gave him. Sometimes wish someone looked twice at me when I was a kid like I did for him."

"You probably wouldn't be where you are right now if someone was around," Max says gently.

"Yeah, maybe. But I'd surely be a lot less horribly disfigured if someone had."

Max may not completely know what I mean by that, but the words shut him up, anyway.

/-/-/

I was bound to run into Rowan eventually. I was the one who practically begged for him to be allowed to stay in the tower, so it's not really fair for me to be annoyed.

It's around six when I wander down to the common floor to see if Flint is interested in ordering Chinese food for dinner. I instead find Rowan and Bella making cookies in the kitchen.

I whirl around on a dime, fully intending to sneak away like I've been doing since they got here. Something tells me that Rowan hasn't really been fooled by my escape acts, but he still has yet to call me out on it. A tiny voice stops me this time, though, and Bella isn't the kind of two year old someone can say no to very easily.

"Lake!" she practically shrieks, bouncing up and down where she's sitting on the kitchen counter. She manages to pack more happiness into that one little word than I've probably ever felt in my entire life. Bella Rivera is like a little ball of sunshine, and it's this that keeps me from turning and running like every fiber of my being wants me to do.

Instead, I turn. I tug the happiest expression I can physically manage onto my face as I do, and can tell that I've already sapped most of my unofficial daily allotment of energy just by doing so. My days are getting longer and easier as time goes on, but things are still kind of hard for me right now.

"Bella!" I exclaim back. She giggles loudly and claps her hands onto her cheeks, grinning widely. Jeez. I've only seen the girl once before. How has she managed to take such a liking to me so fast?

"We're making cookies," she proclaims. "You gotta help us!"

"I gotta, do I?" I say, my voice settling easily into a playful tone. I chance a glance up at Rowan's face, avoiding his eyes and instead focusing in one his forehead. That's a trick my old public speaking professor taught me when I took his class freshman year. I never thought I'd use it as often as I've had to in the past few weeks.

"You really don't have to," Rowan reasons, shaking his head and poking Bella lightly on the nose.

"Nah, it's okay," I find myself saying without really thinking. "It'll be fun."

I move my gaze to the disaster of a kitchen before me. They already have all of the flour, sugar, and salt together. I help Bella crack a couple eggs into the metal mixing bowl and make sure to pick out the stray pieces of shell from the batter afterwards. Rowan pours in the vegetable oil, and I don't realize what's next in the recipe until he's already uncapping the bottle for it. Vanilla extract. The smell hits my nose before I can stop it, sweeter than it has any right to be.

My stomach flips. I can practically feel all of the color rush away from my face. Right. There's vanilla extract in practically ever baked good on the planet. How could I possibly forget that?

"Excuse me," I force out, moving past the pair of siblings covered in dusty flour handprints to get to the bathroom down the hall.

I shut the door. My knees smash into the tiled floor with bruising force just in time for the contents of my stomach to explode into the porcelain bowl before me. My entire frame shakes with the dry heaves following the initial spew. They eventually die down enough for me to collapse back against the cabinet under the sink.

There's a knock on the bathroom door and my fogged brain is unsure of who it could be for a second. It opens before I have to wonder for very long. Rowan. Of course. He shuts the door behind him before he sits down across from me, his back coming to rest against the bathtub.

I spend a few silent moments avoiding his gaze. "Are you okay?" he says finally.

"Peachy," I quip back automatically. "Sorry."

"It's cool." He doesn't say anything else, like he's letting me take my time.

"The vanilla, it makes me gag," I say, like it explains everything. He just blinks, earnest expression unchanging, and nods to let me know he heard me. "My mom...when I said something wrong or something she didn't like, she would make me drink it. Like. Spoonfuls. It smells nice, yeah, but it tastes disgusting, so."

Even someone as well trained as Rowan can't hide his horror at my explanation.

"That's awful," he says.

"Yeah."

We're quiet again. He looks like he wants to say something really bad, so I wait, unsure of what he's thinking.

"Listen, Lake..." he begins, and, oh, there it is. The beginning of the "sorry's." I can tell just by the tone of his voice. There are a lot of sorry's that need to be exchanged on both sides, but I don't have the brain power to deal with that yet.

I pull myself to my feet quickly. I move a little too quickly if I'm being honest, but I want to stop this conversation before it truly has a chance to start. I'm not ready, not yet.

"Tell Bella I wasn't feeling well," I bite out. "I'll see you around."

I open the bathroom door and disappear down the hall towards the elevator without waiting to hear his response. I ride the lift back up to my suite with plans to fall right into bed. I've had enough social interaction for the day. Screw dinner. I've lost my appetite, anyway.