Page 3 of About Yesterday (Foothills #5)
Speak of the devil
“I know I’ve said it a couple… hundred… thousand times, but Cole?” Jeremy said with a laugh laced into the thick gravel of worry in his voice. “Please come home.”
Home. The word spiraled in Cole’s mind like a leaf in a windstorm, still, silent until it was sucked against the overwhelming pull. Each time he refused the invitation, it chipped off another piece of him.
He held the phone to his ear, carefully over the steri-strips holding together the laceration on his cheek, the itch from the freshly removed stitches still prickling around the wound.
Every joint in his body ached, every wound.
His side where he had a dozen more stitches not due to come out yet.
His shoulder nagging to stretch outside of the sling.
His ankle throbbing inside the walking boot.
Pushing off the threadbare sofa, he stepped over loose boards and stopped in front of the window.
The amber streetlights glowed with an eerie ambience in the misty smog. Sirens wailed, engines squealed, but his crevice of a view of the city was motionless, no one daring to step out at night. Not in this neighborhood, anyway.
A far cry from the crisp air of Foothills, his home for the few years of his life he could almost call normal .
Before he could respond, he heard rustling and whispering on the other end, muffled at first, but achingly familiar. Another voice came on. “Cole? It’s Ellen. Are you okay?”
A whiff of a smile lifted his cheeks, tugging on the wound, sending throbbing jolts across his jaw. “Yeah, Ellen. I’m okay.”
“No you’re not, you’ve got that thing in your voice,” she said, the fierce woman more convincing than the ones who had strung him up and tortured him until he broke. Sounded dramatic, but hell, he’d forgotten what normal felt like.
The side of his mouth lifted, and he shook his head, backing away from the window. “I, uh, took a few hits, but I’m fine. Just got back to my apartment.” Safehouse, but she didn’t need to know that.
“A few hits?” she said hoarsely, her delicate soprano simultaneously murderous and airy with worry. “What does that mean? Cole. You need to slow down before something… before…”
She didn’t need to finish the sentence. That something had happened, and he shouldn’t still be alive.
“I, um…” The words dangled from his uvula. The outer corners of his eyes burned. “I quit my job.”
Tornadoes sucked in air less dramatically, the pair of his former foster parents probably spinning with confusion at the foreign phrase. “Whuh—what?” Ellen said, and the phone rustled again. “Great. Oh my gosh. Wow. Okay.”
“Cole, did you say you quit?” Jeremy asked, his voice little more than a whisper, as if afraid he hadn’t heard right. “As in, you’re…?”
“I mean, you’ve only asked a few hundred thousand times, but if you really mean it, I want— need —to come back.
“ More than he’d needed the transfusion.
The heavy drugs to sedate him enough to reset his shoulder without him deliriously fighting back.
Or the walking boot and crutches for the ankle injury he’d earned from jumping out the three-story window.
And definitely more than he needed the “bonus” his employer had offered in the attempt to reverse his resignation.
Gushing profusely, Ellen hiccupped a surprised laugh. “Of course we mean it. We’ve meant it every day since you left. This is your home. It always will be.”
Sinuses filling fast, he puffed a small breath through pursed lips and nodded, the swelling under his eye burning as salty tears flooded down his face. “K. I’ll, um, see you tomorrow afternoon. I’ll send you my flight info.”
“You’re coming now ? I… that’s… Oh my gosh, Cole.
We can’t wait to see you. Jeremy will pick you up at the airport.
I’ll have your favorite cookies ready. I’ll get to fixing up your old bedroom.
“ Ellen talked so fast, he could picture her strawberry blond curls bouncing as she searched the house to start preparations before he’d even hung up.
“See you soon,” he said again, clicking off before he could wimp out.
Ten fucking years, with a few brief visits back to the only place he’d ever even considered calling home.
Before the Perrys took him in, he’d bounced around from his mother’s to his grandmother’s, juvie, foster homes, group homes, but nothing stuck.
Until the Perrys. With a heart too big for his own good, Jeremy Perry had taken in dozens of foster kids over the years, always short term for those who were in limbo between permanent placements.
Until Cole. No one else would tolerate the teenage boy with a record for stealing cars before he’d learned to drive, and the personification of the “fight or flight” response.
He’d do anything for the man who couldn’t hit a nail on the head with a sledgehammer.
For the baker who baked cookies to compel him to stick around.
Not just any cookies, but peanut butter cookies with chocolate chips and topped with sea salt, crispy on the outside and gooey in the middle, perfectly balanced in every bite.
Three years with the Perrys, and he had spent the last ten grateful for every damn day of normal with them.
Cole confirmed the ticket to SeaTac and forwarded his flight information along to Jeremy.
No personal items cluttered the studio he used as a safe house after the job had gone to hell.
He plucked his wallet from the stool at the side of his bed and stuffed it in the back pocket of his jeans, his phone in another pocket.
His dominant arm secured in an immobilizer, he maneuvered his left arm into the sleeve and hoisted the jacket around his injured right shoulder.
Flipping the sweatshirty hood of his denim jacket up, he walked to the door and dropped the key on the arm of the sofa.
Night suffocated the streets. Not even the alley cats wanted to hunt the rats that rustled in the dumpster. Uphill toward the bus stop, he hobbled on the cushioned ankle boot, the crutches they’d given him impossible to use with the shoulder, reaching the stop as the bus rounded the corner.
No other riders on the bus tonight, except the guy passed out in the back, but Cole didn’t have the energy to sit down, knowing he’d have to go through the process of getting up again.
He clung to the vertical bar with his good arm as the bus bounced over train tracks, rounded the bend away from the waterfront, and sailed smoothly down the thoroughfare.
Lights filtered from within the fog, expanding, the airport gradually coming into view.
Before the bus came to a stop, he pushed forward, swapping his grip from pole to pole until he hit the front, climbing down the steep steps as the doors opened.
Boarding pass ready and passport in hand, he made his way through security, reached the terminal with seconds to spare, and was the last one on the plane.
Packed with sleepy families getting the fuck out of this volatile country, spirits were bright as the plane lifted off the ground.
Sleep was a bitch who smacked him upside the head a few times on the flight over the Atlantic.
Groggy as hell and twice as disoriented, he rubbed the fatigue from his eyes.
The other travelers passed him with a wide berth as he trudged up the jetway, his pace painfully slow, his ankle fucking throbbing from too long below his heart.
The customs officer studied him warily, finally lifting a curious look at him. “Are you okay?” she asked.
He knew he looked worse than he felt. “I will be,” he answered, feigning a smile he knew wasn’t the least bit convincing. “Thanks.”
“Good,” she said as she lifted his passport and compared pictures. “Welcome home, Mr. Falk.”
Knife to the heart, her words lodged in his chest. “Thanks,” he said, inhaling as much oxygen as he could draw in.
Outside security, heading toward baggage claim where nothing would be waiting, he stepped onto the escalator. Rising. Nearly there.
Jeremy stood at the top, grinning wide, every tooth in the man’s head brilliantly flashing just for him.
No words came to him, as nothing could possibly have been enough. But that might have been because of his concussion.
Instead, Cole hobbled off the escalator, Jeremy walking carefully toward him, as if afraid to knock him over or scare him away, and Cole threw his good arm around the closest thing he’d ever had to a dad.
Fiercely, holding him so damn tight, Cole didn’t fight the wet stuff blurring his vision and burning his cheeks.
Jeremy hugged him back just as hard, sniffling a wad of mucus.
Both drew back, and Jeremy beamed a wet smile. “I knew one of these days, you’d decide you were ready.”
He shrugged, the effort pinching his shoulder. Every time Jeremy had asked, he’d wanted to say yes more than anything. But how did you bring the black cloud that coated your goddamn soul around people who were bright and sunny and kind to a fault?
“I’d rather have figured out it was time before I got my ass kicked,“ he said, the corners of his mouth rising, the left side lifting higher than the right as he teased the man.
Jeremy hooted a laugh and wrapped his arm back around him, squeezing his shoulder.
Cole winced and quickly tried to hide it.
Jeremy’s smile dipped into a scowl filled with sympathy, and he lessened his grip. “Is there a single part of you that didn’t get hurt?”
Glancing down over his own body, Cole huffed a laugh and shook his head. “I don’t think they missed a spot.” Ankle splittingly on fire, he started toward the parking garage.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?”
Cole shook his head subtly, keeping his eyes trained straight ahead as they walked at his epically slow pace. “Not today.”
Jeremy walked along with him and said, “You really quit, then?”
“Unemployed and homeless,” he admitted.