The Bad Boy with a Heart of Gold

✖ Chapter 38 ✖

Brilliant grey eyes greeted me when I entered the room. It had been a month since the day when the least exciting event had been my high school graduation. The family welcomed baby Ariel, a healthy girl with all her fingers and toes and her dad's eyes and lungs that could only come from her mom's side of the family. If that wasn't enough, Sawyer opened his eyes again and-

He was okay.

Not perfect, never the same, but he was alive and with his faculties. That was a lot more than the doctors had expected.

"Good morning, ex-princess," he said from the bed he was confined in. The right side of his body was broken from what the doctors and the police believed to be his father's attack with some sort of pipe. It wasn't going to be easy for him to regain mobility.

I sat to his left and pulled out a pack of cigarettes from my purse that I extended to him. Sawyer's jaw slackened and he picked it up with his good hand with something akin to reverence. But then he read what the pack actually said.

"Chocolate cigarettes?" He groaned.

I laughed. "You actually though I, Aurora Maria Martinez Fernandez, was going to give you actual cigarettes?"

Never mind that this was a hospital and he was in no condition for smoking. Hopefully ever again.

"You troll," he said, but there was a smile on his face and I was happy I put it there.

"How are you feeling?" I asked, taking out a cigarette from the pack and unwrapping it. I put it between his lips and he leaned back against the pillows, no doubt pretending that it was the real deal.

"Kinda stiff," he said as he chewed. That made me choke and he laughed. "But that also might have something to do with how hot you look right now."

"Oh my God, Sawyer!" I wanted to smack him but I knew I couldn't. "Stop."

There was absolutely nothing hot about the overalls I wore, covered in splotches of paint and holes. I'd been working pretty hard the past couple of months on expanding my arts horizons and had joined a couple of summer classes at a local college. One was about classical portraiture and the other one about clay work. I now had the courage to do something like this since Sawyer bought me two cans of spray paint.

He opened his mouth in a way that told me he wanted a second chocolate stick. I obliged because all vices considered, chocolate was one I would happily indulge him on. I watched him eat. He'd lost a lot of weight and muscle from months of being confined to a bed, and it showed on his face. It was pale and gaunt and he often refused to shave, which meant he usually carried a bit of a beard until the nurses and I convinced him to get rid of it. Rinse and repeat.

Although the casts and bandages around his limbs always shocked me, it was actually the one around his head that wrenched my heart the most. With the surgeries he'd had to endure to get rid blood clots and patch him up together, they'd had to shave his entire head. Gone were the locks of blond hair that I used to run my fingers through. I leaned forward and ran my hand across the patch silky buzz cut that wasn't under wraps.

"I can't get used to this," I said with a sad little sigh. I cringed when I realized that didn't sound too encouraging. "I'm sorry, I mean—it's just-"

"No, I get it," Sawyer said, facing up to the ceiling. "It fucking sucks."

His left hand had clenched around the bed sheets and I picked it up in my hands. Gently I loosened his fingers until I could entwine them with mine.

"But he will never be able to hurt you anymore," I whispered.

Sawyer stayed silent for a few long minutes until he said, "Not physically, at least."