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That was the last thing I heard before the world faded away and I was out.
Chapter Ten
I was moving, and not because I was moving myself. I tried to lift my head, but couldn't find the strength to do so. My body was curled up and pressed against something warm. Hard bands were wrapped around me under my knees and upper back. Someone held me in the strength of their arms. They held me so close and secure that I wasn't jostled even the slightest bit as he walked. I only knew we were moving because I felt the air shift against my skin as we moved through it.
I groaned softly as I raised my hand to my head and pressed it against my temple.
"Hurts," I mumbled.
And it did hurt. My entire head hurt. Why did my head hurt? And why was I being carried around?
"What happened to me?" I continued to mumble. "Where's Ty?"
I remembered being with Tyson and going outside to look for that damn cat, but I was drawing a blank on anything after we walked around the corner of the house and stepped into the back yard.
"Binx?" I said in a quiet voice.
I winced at the sound, and even that hurt my head. But I had to know. I had to make sure Tyson had found Binx, because I didn't want to upset Dash. I had gotten him stabbed, I didn't want to lose his cat on top that. He didn't blame me for the first, and I felt he'd lay the blame on Tyson for the last. So, I had to find that damn cat.
My head pounded, and I felt I was missing something important, but the more I thought about it and tried to remember, the more my head throbbed in horrible pain. And, I realized the back of my hair felt wet. "Tyson?" I asked quietly, hoping and praying to whatever holy deity was real that it was Tyson's arms that were holding me so tightly.
"Shhh," said a male voice full of gravel. A voice that was most certainly not Tyson's voice.
My eyes flew open and I blinked quickly, over and over again. My eyes wouldn't focus, and the harder I tried, the harder my head throbbed. I closed my eyes, scrunching them up tightly. The few seconds I'd had my eyes open had been enough, though. I'd seen that face a hundred times over, but never in person.
I had a polaroid of him when he was a young man sitting on top of my dresser. I looked at it every day, and I'd memorized that face, those eyes, that hair. I had memorized everything about the man who'd been looking for me for years, the man I'd been stolen away from. The man who was my biological father, if he and Vivian were to be believed. If I'd only had Vivian's word to go on, then I wouldn't have trusted it. And it wasn't even Rain saying he was my father in the letters that made me a believer. It was his eye color that was identical to my own. It was his hair color that was identical to my own. It was his cheek bones and his eyebrows and basically every single physical attribute about him. His DNA definitely ran through my veins. But even that wasn't what made me a believer, it was more than that. It was more the voice that had carried through his written words in the letters that had made me believe this man holding me in his arms could be exactly what he claimed to be; my father. There had been no doubt in my mind that he sincerely, wholeheartedly, loved the girl he was talking about in those letters he'd written to my fake mother. Looking at the pictures let me know I was related, but it was his words that had sold me on the idea. I had been searching for him ever since, because I desperately wanted to have someone love me the way he loved that girl in those letters. He loved her enough to never, ever give up on her, and he'd been searching for years.
If someone loved you enough to look for you for years, and never, not ever, give up on the hope of finding you because you were just that important to them, then didn't that make you something special? I thought Rain's actions didn't only tell me a good deal about just who Rain Kimber was as a human being, but I felt it might have said a little bit about me too. I wanted to be worth all the time and effort he'd put into getting me back into his life. It's part of the reason I had been bleeding myself every single day for weeks now. I felt like he'd earned it from me, like he more than deserved it because of how hard those letters claimed he'd been looking for me, searching for me for years. That kind of devotion deserved just a little bit of devotion back, I thought.
"Rain," I breathed out. Just saying his name had my throat closing up with emotions.
He was here, actually here and holding me in his arms.
I pried my eyes open and forced myself to look up at him. Tears spilled out of my eyes and glided down my cheeks. I didn't care that my head hurt or that the wetness at the back of my head was more than likely blood. I had hit my head on something, and it had made me lose time, and I didn't even care.
"Rain," I repeated on a breathy whisper.
Rain kept walking forward and didn't look down at me when I'd said his name, but he did close his eyes, and his face twisted, like he was in some sort of pain.
"Don't talk right now, baby girl," he said in that deep gravelly voice. "We are going to get you some help for your head. There's a lot of blood leaking out of you, and we've got to put a stop to it. One of those boys should at least know how to take care of you." He ended on a mutter that sounded as empty of emotion as I'd ever heard in a voice before.
Baby girl, he'd called me.
Quinton called me baby and I loved it. Rain calling me baby girl, even though it might have been throwaway for him, I didn't care, because it wasn't throwaway to me and I loved it. I wanted to hear him say it again, twelve hundred more times, and hoped I didn't bleed to death and miss the chance.
"What did I hit my head on?" I mumbled. "And why won't it stop throbbing?"
"A brick," he muttered back. Then, even quieter, "Here we go, baby."
"What the-" Tyson said loudly, almost shouting.
"Who are you?" Dash yelled, and I winced. Not only because their yelling hurt my already in pain head, but because it was the first time I'd ever heard Dash raise his voice. He didn't need to get loud to get his point across, usually. It was just glaringly obvious.
"What's wrong with her?" Tyson asked, and his voice rose alarmingly higher in volume. "She wasn't back there long enough for something bad to have happened to her. And where in the hell did all of that blood come from?"
Oh boy.
If he could see the blood, then there must have been a whole lot of it. I silently cursed the fact that I didn't have dark hair to cover it up.
