Chapter 13

Watching my daughter leave through the doors had been the hardest thing I'd had to deal with. It made fighting my feelings for Abby feel like peanuts. I knew I wouldn't see my Bailey again for months, because one of the other favors I asked of Joey was to never bring her back here again.

But I was sure of one thing – once I saw the way that Abby and Bailey warmed up to each other and lit up in smiles when they interacted, I knew what I was doing was the right thing.

So a week later when she came in and slammed a yellow envelope on the desk in front of me, it was a shock.

“What the hell were you thinking?”

The slap of the envelope against the wood and papers snapped me out of work-mode.

“Huh?”

“Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about.”

I shrugged, because even though she thought I should, I had no idea why she was so upset.

“Go ahead,” she said angrily. “Open the envelope. You certainly have a penchant for opening my mail anyway.”

I rolled my eyes. “Will you ever get over that?”

“Probably not.”

I opened the envelope and removed the papers. The first thing I recognized was the letterhead – my lawyer's.

“One hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” she said, before I had even finished reading. “Someone anonymously donated a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to me, completely out of the blue. It even has its own bank account, waiting for me. And I only know one person who could have that kind of money to donate.”

She looked at me accusingly.

“You don't know that this is from me,” I said defensively.

“Really? You made God-only-knows how much money from selling all those albums and you're the only person I've recently told about my financial troubles with school. Math isn't my strong suit but I know two plus two equals four.”

“Give me a calculator and a few minutes and I could argue with that if it will benefit me.”

She pursed her lips slightly in my direction.

“I have medical training. I know all the ways to kill a man – all the many painful, bloody ways. I won't hesitate to use them if you insult my intelligence.”

I backed off.

“Fine. No need to get violent. It was me. Are you satisfied? You lose your sense of humor when you're mad.”

“You know what?” she said. “I'm not satisfied. What in the hell were you thinking? Were you trying to pay me off for something?”

I scoffed. “No.”

“Are you trying to get yourself in trouble? Or get me in trouble or even fired?”

“No, Abby.”

“Then what in the world were you trying to do?” she yelled. “Throw your money around? Did you see a charity opportunity or a tax break when you looked at me? Poor broke Abby, she can't afford to go back to school so let's give her some money and be a hero!”

I was more than shocked at what she was saying.

“Is that really what you think of me? Wow, Abby.”

“What else could it be?” she asked. “You come in here and know me for a couple of months and all of a sudden you give me all this money like I'm some damn charity case.”

“And you're so off-base.”

“Set me straight, then,” she said, with a challenging tone. “If I'm so off-base, set me back on track. You didn't give me the money to cause trouble or do a good deed, so why did you do it?”

She was slowly walking closer to me with an intent look in her eye, pinning me between the wall and her.

“I know what it was,” she said. “You thought if you paid for me to go to school, I'd be so grateful that you could get inside my pants. You'd ride in and save the day and it would make my panties melt right off me.”

She was looking me in the eye with a fiery and seductive but mean look, one I had never seen from her.

“You have to be the white knight that makes women melt into your arms. You have that effect on women, and you need to save them, am I right?”

I wasn't known for losing my temper, but she had gone too far. I could feel my blood pressure rising.

“You want to know why I gave you the money?” I asked.

“It would be refreshing,” she said snidely.

“I gave you that money because I love you.”

Her face softened, but she said nothing.

“I love you so much that it physically hurts, because I can't touch you. I have so much more freedom in here than I expected, but I still might as well be in chains all day. I thought maybe if I knew you could go back to school and I got to see you happy, it would make that pain stop. It hurts worse. The way I saw you with my daughter last week is how I always imagined my life with her would be after she was born. And I can't do anything about it.”

I waited for her to speak, but she continued to stare at me.

“I ended up in prison trying to save my ex. I gave up my rights to my daughter trying to save her. I'm done trying to save people. Now all I want is to get back to my daughter and see you happy. I'm not saving shit anymore, because all it does is come back to bite me in the ass.”

With her face inches away from mine, I could see tears in her eyes.

“Now you know,” I said.

Her stare continued, but her face had turned from heated to unreadable. Before I knew it, she had walked away from me and rushed out the door.

I sat back down at the desk and stared at the papers I had been working on moments before, but eventually I gave up and held my head in my hands. Abby had gone too far, but so had I. I had been pushed to my breaking point. Unfortunately it was her who pushed me there, and I had taken it out on her.

The atmosphere had changed so drastically, so quickly. I never blew up at women like that, but I was realizing that I wasn't the same person now that I was before I got here. I had become afraid that I wouldn't be capable of going back to myself once I got out. I didn't know whether I would be able to go back to my normal life, and raise Bailey like I had before.

Abby came back ten minutes later, but she said nothing. I went back to my work and she went back to hers; we both avoided looking at each other, and neither of us talked for hours. She went to another room to eat her lunch instead of coming to sit with me at the desk. I tried to keep to my own space and give her some of her own, while she busied herself – but I didn't dare look over to see what she was doing.

I was looking through papers when I heard her curse out loud and the sound of metal drop to the floor. I looked over to see her holding one of her fingers.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“I cut myself,” she said, still avoiding looking at me directly.

Hesitantly, I walked over and pulled her hand away and saw a cut at least an inch long at the base of her thumb. The long sleeve of her shirt was quickly soaking up the blood from her finger.

“It might need stitches. We need to get it cleaned, just to make sure.”

She tried pulling her hand away from me. “I'm sure it will be fine.”

“Would you stop being stubborn and let me clean it up?”

She paused, but stopped pulling her arm away and let me lead her over to the chair. I pulled a few cotton pads and some disinfectant out of her cabinets and sat down in my own chair in front of her.

“I hate blood,” she said when I pushed her sleeve up to her elbow.

“You're a nurse, and you hate blood?” I said, laughing a little.

“Well I can handle it when it's other people's blood, but my own makes me sick.”

I looked at the cut, and even thought it was small, it was bleeding quite a bit.

“You better look away then,” I said.

She was silent while I cleaned the blood off her finger and applied pressure to it to stop the bleeding. Occasionally she looked down at the cut, but she would quickly look away.

“How does it look?” she finally asked.

“It's still bleeding,” I said. “I can't tell. How did you cut yourself anyway?”

“I was cleaning my instruments because that's what I do when I'm upset. I guess I got too aggressive and I cut myself on the surgical scissors.” She chuckled. “What a klutz, right?”

“Maybe you should rethink cleaning sharp instruments when you're upset,” I said, smiling at her.

After a few moments of silence, she said, “I'm sorry for everything I said earlier. I'm so sorry.”

I shook my head. “Don't worry about it. We both lost our heads. I shouldn't have said the things I did, and I should have asked you about the money first.”

“You know I would have said no anyway,” she said. “My pride – it's huge. It gets in the way a lot, keeps me from asking for help and accepting it gracefully – without yelling and insulting famous pop stars.”

I chuckled.

“It's a lot of money,” she said. “It will take me years to pay all this back.”

“I don't want you to pay me back. Call it a thank you gift, for all that you've done for me since I've been here.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“A hundred and fifty thousand dollars is your idea of a thank you gift?”

“Well, I wanted to go with a bottle of wine, but Joey refused to smuggle it in for me.”

I looked up to see her smiling at me, which did a lot to loosen my mood and the tension in the room.

“What if the prison thinks you're paying me off for something?” she asked.

It was one of the first things I had thought about. I had watched reality crime shows a few times when I was waiting up for Brayden to come home, and one of the most intriguing was about a prisoner who had seduced one of the guards into a relationship with him and asked her to help him escape. I knew I'd never do that, and I knew Abby never would either, but it could be taken that way.

“If they don't know about it, they can't think anything,” I said. “None of the money has my name on it yet. It came out of Joey's bank account and into my lawyer's hands, who set up the account, almost like a trust. They could trace it back to Joey, but they can't prove he's doing anything wrong. If I'm not doing anything wrong here and I'm keeping myself clean, there should be no issues. You just can't say anything to anybody about who gave you the money.”

“How am I supposed to explain where all this money came from?”

“Tell them a distant relative died and left it for you or something. Don't tell them the truth and it should be okay.”

That seemed to satisfy her curiosity, and she was quiet while I finished cleaning the cut. Once I had cleaned all the blood off her hand, I looked closer at the cut.

“Well, you've stopped bleeding,” I said. “It's not that deep so I don't think you'll need stitches.”

“How did you get so good at this?”

“I have a daughter. She's a walking, talking accident waiting to happen. I may not have medical training, but I'm a dad who is well-trained in princess Band-Aids and boo-boos.”

She smiled at me, and I started soaking a fresh piece of cotton with the disinfectant. When I pressed it to the cut, she flinched from the sting. I caressed her wrist with my thumb, and it didn't go unnoticed by her.

“When did you fall in love with me?”

I looked up at her and tried to swallow the lump in my throat.

“I don't know. Somewhere between the day I pulled my head out of my ass and the day Damian told me, I guess.”

She looked at me curiously.

“Damian told you?”

“He said he saw the way we looked at each other and he knew. I thought he was crazy, and he was talking to hear himself talk. You know Damian.”

I chuckled, but she didn't.

“How long have you felt this way?” she asked.

“A couple months. Maybe longer. I didn't intend to tell you about it, ever. I intended to finish this out and move on with my life.”

“That night you came in here,” she said, “I was here late trying to do all this paperwork. I was finally getting ready to go home for the night and I stopped to talk to Roberta before her shift ended and the night guards came in. I looked over and I thought I saw you laying on the floor. It was weird, so I had Roberta follow me over to check on you. By the time we got you in here, the Oxycontin had slowed your heart rate way down and you were barely breathing on your own. I've been a nurse here for seven years and all that time, I've never had something like that happen. I was terrified.”

In all this time, it hadn't occurred to me that that night could have been terrifying for her as well.

“For a while I thought you were in really bad shape. I was about to get you to the hospital, because I didn't think you'd make it here. I thought maybe I waited too late to get you to the hospital, too. That scared me even more. Then you started improving, thankfully. But that feeling I felt when I thought you wouldn't – that freaked me out. I've never felt that before. I've done volunteer work in hospitals and watched people die in the ER, but I've never felt like that. It's like...I was attached to you, I couldn't let go. I thought it was because you're you. I'd be the most hated woman in the world if I let Lance from *NSYNC die. I'd have to hide underground.”

I laughed, because it probably wasn't far from the truth.

“But then I realized that for a moment, when I didn't know if you were going to be okay, I wanted to give up nursing – and psychology, too. Everything I worked so hard for in school, everything I'm trying to work for, everything here that means so much to me – I wanted to let it all go. And those feelings didn't go away either. After you started working here with me, they got worse. When you got the flu, your fever made you delirious. I decided that night to stay here and monitor you, because you were comfortable here. You were laying here saying things that didn't even make any sense. It was actually pretty funny.”

She chuckled for a moment.

“But then that night I was sitting here and you started talking about me,” she said with a smile.

“Do I even want to know what I said?” I asked, feeling embarrassed about the possibilities.

“Probably not. It was the fever. But there was one thing that stuck with me. I started talking to you and you responded to me like you were awake. You kept telling me you loved me. I thought it was the fever, but that hurt – because I realized that I loved you too.”

I looked down and realized I still had the soaked cotton pressed on her thumb. I threw it in the trash and stood up to get a bandage.

“Don't avoid me.” She grabbed my wrist and pulled me back gently. “I just told you I loved you too and you're running away from it because you're scared. I can't let you tell me you love me and then run away from me.”

I sat back down in the seat and looked her in the eyes. After remembering how I felt in the days after the kiss, my first reaction was to run away from those feelings. But as usual, she was making me face my feelings head-on and not letting me back down.

“I am scared,” I said. “I'm in prison. It scares me to have these feelings. It scares me even more to know you have these feelings too, because I can't even touch you. We can't be together.”

Her face was like stone as she shook her head.

“They can't keep us apart forever. We can work through that.”

“This is not something we can easily work through, Abby,” I said with a sigh. “I can't make you wait around for me. You don't deserve that.”

Finally, her expression softened into a smile.

“It's not like waiting for you would be a prison sentence for me,” she said. “I see you almost every day. We have coffee together, we talk about our day, joke and make each other laugh, say goodnight before we leave. Isn't that the kind of stuff that a good relationship is built on?”

Ever since Brayden's personality had drastically changed, I found it too hard to look into the future too far. It had kept me from committing to marry her, because I stopped being able to predict anything. When I got here, it became painful to look forward to the future because it felt too far away. I had forced myself into an endless cycle of living my life day-by-day, only facing things that I had to deal with right away.

“So we have to wait around a while,” she said, barely above a whisper. “For all the other stuff, I mean. Who cares? That stuff is great, but what I have with you is great already, Lance. That makes waiting for everything else worth it.”

She sat looking at me for a few moments.

“What are you thinking?” she asked when I didn't say anything.

“I'm thinking of how stupid I've been,” I said. “I let myself get consumed by all these little things. I'm not used to being stuck in a place like this, sleeping on a hard bed. I can't just pick up the phone and call someone whenever I want to or need to. I don't get to tuck Bailey in every night. All that sucks and it's not ideal and I'd like to change it – but she's fed, clothed, taken care of and I'll get back to her soon. That alone is a miracle because if it weren't for you, I could have died.”

She looked me straight in the eyes, her expression unreadable.

“This isn't who I am, Abby. I don't let myself get consumed with this stuff. Have you ever felt like you've been hurting so bad that you've been drowning yourself? Then someone comes along and pulls you out. You're trying to catch your breath and you realize they gave you a second chance to live your life. You realize you created your problems and made them so big that you felt like you were drowning in the ocean, but you were only drowning in an inch of water.”

She smiled, and grabbed my hand.

“I didn't pull you out. All I did was make you realize that you could stand. You're capable of standing on your own two feet.”

“But why did it take me so long to figure it out?” I asked.

“Sometimes you hurt too bad.” She squeezed my hand. “It takes over your whole life. It takes time to get over things. But I won't let you go back to that.”

Before I knew it, she had pulled me in close to her and had her lips pressed against mine. Unlike the last time, neither of us were hesitant. I pulled her face closer to mine, tasting her lip gloss and smelling her perfume again, letting it finally conjure up good feelings instead of bad ones.

After a few seconds she pulled away, but held her forehead against mine.

“I love you,” she said again. “And if I have to wait, that doesn't matter to me. We'll make it through that.”

“We'll make it through that,” I said. I didn't need confirmation anymore. I knew she was right.