Chasing Impossible (Pushing the Limits #5)(42)

I trudge up the stairs, walking around him, holding on to the railing. My eyes keep closing on their own volition and falling down the stairs would seriously suck. Falling down the stairs and having Logan go all hero and catch me would suck more.

The stairs creak as Logan stands and then follows. I should keep going to my room at the end of the hall and slam the door in his face, but my heart causes me to pause at the first room at the top of the stairs.

It’s Grams’s room. The front room. The one her parents and before them her grandparents shared. The one she moved into once she had my father. It has white curtains that are now slightly yellowed with time. Wallpaper with fancy designs that curls near the baseboard. Furniture that was made new with the house and is all solid wood, easily a hundred years old, and could withstand plagues, wars, and natural disasters.

Logan’s body heat warms my back and I whisper, “Did she remember you? When you visited every day, did she remember you?”

Logan shifts and the heavy pause gives me the answer. “No.”

I nod because it hurts too much to acknowledge the answer with words.

“I need to see her.” But I shouldn’t. I should wait for morning. Going in now could wake her and scare her. If her mind’s not in the right place, she could go into hysterics, crying and yelling, and break what’s left of my already shattered heart, but there’s this longing ache inside me. This need to be held, to be unconditionally loved, for someone to tell me that it’s all going to be okay. All things Grams used to do before the devil cursed her mind.

A brush of fingers on my back and the physical contact after the rough day is like a good soaking in the sun. My muscles melt.

“You go in,” he says. “I’ll wait.”

Logan starts down the stairs, but I stop him. “You can wait in my room. It’s the room at the end of the hallway. I might be a while.”

“Have you eaten?”

Say no. Don’t lean on Logan any more than you have. Today was meant to drive him away.

“I’m hungry, Abby, and need food. If you don’t eat, I don’t eat, and bad things happen when I don’t eat.”

I have to work to keep the laughter to hushed sounds. “Are you a deranged gremlin?”

“Something like that. What do you say? Food?”

“Doesn’t mean I’m letting any of you back in my life.”

My heart flutters when his fingers caress my back again. Logan leans into me and his hot breath dances near the sensitive spot behind my ear. “Doesn’t mean you won’t change your mind.”

Then, as if that moment didn’t happen, Logan jogs down the stairs like touching me didn’t affect him. God, I really do hate him at times.

I take care to be quiet as I walk in, tiptoeing even, too scared that my full weight on the wooden floorboards below will create a sound that would jolt her.

Grams is lying on her back, her head turned to the side, her white hair loose around her shoulders. She’s lost so much weight over the past year that she’s a little more than a bump on the bed and within the past few weeks she’s become a mouth breather. A blessing and a curse. A blessing because I don’t have to wander too far in to make sure she’s still alive when she lies so still, but a curse because I don’t like that it’s so difficult for her to breathe.

I despise that the doctor says her weight loss is normal. That he suggests that her old age is catching up with her and nature is taking its course. As a child, I believed Grams was immortal and I still need her to be.

I had woken up and I was screaming. Even with my eyes open, I still saw her there. The woman in black. The woman who was going to take me away.

“Abby!” Grams rushed into my room, flicking the light on, scaring the nightmare away.

She eased immediately into my bed, shushing me, holding me, caressing my hair. “It’s a bad dream, child. Just a bad dream.”

I sniffled and snuffed and breathed too fast as the tears continued to stream down my face. Grams had continued to talk, her voice calm and I would focus on that sweet sound and then I would focus on her touch and how it never wavered. Grams was nothing like the woman in black. She’d never scare me.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Do we need another fort?”

I nodded and it took a few more minutes for Grams to convince me to let her go as I had clasped my fingers onto her nightgown. I did let her go, believing she wasn’t leaving, and Grams built the fort. The same fort she built for me whenever the nightmare taunted me.

One by one, each and every stuffed animal I owned was placed on the bed, creating a wall between me and the world that scared me.

“We’ll sew tomorrow,” Grams said. “You and I. Doesn’t that sound fun?”

“I’m not good at it,” I whispered as I snuggled deep under the quilt she had made for me. “My stitches are all wrong.”

“Life isn’t about perfection. It’s about spending time with you.”

I was never good at sewing. Stuck my fingers more than I completed a straight stitch. But Grams was forever patient. Forever understanding. Forever there. And because of her faith in me, I always sat still as we worked on a massive quilt together. I cherished that time together. I was hers and she was mine and somehow I belonged.

She opens her eyes and I freeze, praying she doesn’t see me. Praying that she closes them again and drifts back to sleep. But she blinks. Again. A few more times. “Abby?”