Page 6 of The Impact (Parachutes #3)

“You can take her from me…I’ll give you that shit. But you don’t get to keep her. Not yet. You fucking hear me?” He threatened God, prepared to be struck to his own devastation.

“Tahli, come on.” Vin tossed her limp arm over his shoulder.

“Sir, please don’t do that.”

“Tahli.” He ignored the doctor he didn’t even know had returned. “Get up, baby love. Let’s go. Wake up.”

“Mr. Hayes, we have to take her back now.”

Vin pressed his face into her arm, sense breaking through his delusions. Madness and clarity were warring. He smelled her deodorant. Kissed the inside of her elbow. Wanted her to smack his face away and tell him he couldn’t do that anymore. Tell him something in that pacifying voice. Be present.

“Baby love, please,” Vin wept into her skin, relinquishing control and masculinity, body jumping with each cry. “You gotta do that thing you do, Tahli. Where you fight for everybody else. You gotta fight this shit, Tahli.”

“Sir, listen, we really have to get–”

“No. You.” Vin stood abruptly, bullying finger marked at the doctor, two nurses cowering behind him.

“You fucking listen,” Vin sniffed, swiping more moisture from his face with the back of his hand.

“You’re…you’re the fucking doctor, right?

” Vin didn’t blink in the eye contact he watched the man gulp in.

“Fucking answer me–”

“Y-yes.”

“Okay… Okay,” Vin smoothed the doctor’s coat. “I don’t wanna make you nervous or piss you off. I know you do this shit every day. You probably do your best every time you step in that operating room, right?”

Reluctantly, the doctor nodded, fear flushing color from his face.

“But this one…” Vin aimed a thumb back at Tahli, searching the doctor’s waiting eyes for comprehension. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

He let the cryptic words sink in before adding, “No fuck ups allowed. You gotta bring your A-game. You gotta fucking…you gotta care,” the plea clogged his throat. “You got a wife, doc? Kids? You gotta care about her like that. She’s too important to too many people.”

To him. She was Vin’s fucking soul .

“I will do everything in my power to save your wife, sir.”

Vin didn’t correct him. He could see how it’d be assumed he was still Tahli’s husband. In his heart, he’d never relinquish the title. Vin rubbed his lips, confessing his thoughts onto his fingers.

“That’s not good enough.” The shock in the nurses’ eyes joined the doctor’s silence.

“I can’t–” Something in Vin’s expression made the doctor stop short. “I will save your wife. If you step aside and let me.”

Vin knew it was a promise he couldn’t uphold. Still, he released a sigh of acceptance, turning back toward the bed.

“Alright, baby love, I’ll see you after. You go get better. I’ll be here waiting. I’m not going anywhere, Tahli.”

“There’s a possibility if we get in there and can’t repair the damage to her kidney, we may need to talk about listing for a transplant – ”

“Take mine.”

“Well…that would require testing and ensuring the one you’re left with is fully viable – ”

“Take them both,” Vin demanded with arid, enflamed eyes and a constricted chest, desperation surging through his veins. “Take it all. My blood, bones, my fucking brain. Just save her.”

That was the permission Vin wearily gave before they wheeled Tahli back. Then Vin rejoined everyone who loved Tahli.

A current of guilt washed over him as he passed by his children, but he was in no state to be the strength they required yet. They were cradled in Vanessa and Leah’s nurturing, and Vin needed a minute. Sixty seconds of private obliteration. He just had to make it to solitude.

Vin bent the corner to the vending machines. The fucking vending machines. With his back to the wall, unable to take another step, he slid to a squat, elbows on his bent knees, head collapsed in his hands.

“Who do you think will die first?”

“Tahli, stop.” It’d been an hour before her scheduled hysterectomy, and she was having those pre-surgery jitters. Vin was there by her bedside after snipping at the nurse who couldn’t start an IV properly. Now, after being hurried up to wait, she was putting her nervousness into words.

“Why? It’s reality. Look, just remember all my accounts and the extra life insurances. One of us has to go first, Vin. If it’s me – ”

“It won’t be.”

“You can’t know that, Vin.”

“I can.”

“How? You’re not God.”

“No. But I’m Dalvin Isaiah Hayes. Matter of fact, I’m Dalvin Hayes married to Tahli Hayes. And Dalvin Hayes knows that the second Tahli Hayes exits this earth, Dalvin Hayes’ world stops spinning. So, there’s no you first. It’s either me. Or it’s us. That’s good enough for you?”

After some delay, she replied. “What about the kids?”

“Vanessa’s got ‘em.”

“Or Lola’s got ‘em,” she joked, igniting Vin’s chuckle.

“Yeah fucking right. Like I said – ”

“I know, I know,” Tahli smiled lazily. “I get it. You can’t live without the kid.”

“Dalvin.”

Vin’s jaw flexed. Not at his visitor, but at being disturbed from sweeter memories.

“I need a minute,” he answered Tahli’s father without opening his eyes, hands clasped against his forehead. Lose it. He was about to lose it.

“Alright.” Vin waited for the sound of departing steps. He cracked his lids to find Robert leaning against the wall, stare launched down at him. After a challenging eye battle, Vin let his hands and shoulders drop.

“I feel like I’m fucking dying.”

“I know,” Robert replied evenly. “I know,” Tahli’s father repeated, swiping his brow. “I can’t believe this shit.”

“No. You don’t get it, I…” Vin cupped his hands to his mouth, creating an impromptu oxygen mask.

“I’ll never be able to live with myself if…” Vin forgot how to breathe properly. “Yo, if she doesn’t pull through this shit…and I wasn’t there to protect her…I’ll never fucking forgive myself.”

There was a silence weighted with Vin’s shame and Robert’s judgments.

“Neither will I,” Robert broke it to mutter. “I’ll never forgive you, either.”

Vin’s furious eyes shot up to him, a disrespectful response tucked but leaking through his glare.

“I walked my daughter down the aisle and gave her to you,” Robert reminded him. “I trusted you, Dalvin. You promised me, no, fuck that…you gave me your word!” Robert’s voice hiked in an anger audibly spiked with fear.

“You think I didn’t know what you were into?

Where you came from? Shit, you told me yourself you were freshly home from prison, Dalvin.

You think I didn’t have in mind the kind of man who I felt was worthy of my Tahli’s hand and that you were nothing like it?

But then, I spoke to you. In a real way.

You came and asked me for my daughter, and I saw that look in your eyes.

The same look when you told me you had gotten her pregnant, and you wouldn’t even leave her side for a second .

That look told me that when I was no longer around, Tahli would still have a real man who, come hell or high water, would protect her.

That no matter how much she pushed him away, he wouldn’t budge.

That’s the man I gave my daughter to. Not some chump that lets her drive in a rainstorm. ”

Mouth balled, Vin consumed all of Robert’s razor-blade reminders.

“Tahli’s fucking impossible at times. So, I sacrificed the degree and career you should have had and overlooked the prison gang tattoos and street dabbling, all of that superficial shit.

But don’t think I didn’t know what the fuck they meant.

I had clients who came from the same units.

Still, I knew when it came down to it, Tahli had a fighter.

Somebody who was going to go head-to-head and fight with her. Fight for her.”

“Tahli doesn’t want me to fight for her. She wants to marry the perfect nigga that never fucks up–”

“I didn’t give her to the perfect nigga!” Robert surprised him by bellowing, commanding Vin’s gawk. “I gave her to you . So, if you’re the man that you said you were...the man that I think you are... you’ll fight for her.” That rendered Vin speechless.

“If- No, when …she makes it through this. You better do just that.”

“Do what?” Vin dared for clarity, and Robert met his glower.

“Fucking fight for her, Dalvin.”