One Last Time (COMPLETED)

As Night Comes

After spending two hours anxiously shifting in the car, Tanner finally dropped me off without saying a lot. I could tell by his expression that he was as concerned as worried as I was, but someone had to be with the babies, and since Chandler had explained that Parker refused to see anyone outside of me, it'd be my body sitting next to Parker's for the next couple hours. With a quick kiss, Tanner gently touched a hand to my back and whispered something about keeping him updated before he leaned back into the passenger door and watched me enter the hospital.

I felt his eyes still burning into the back of my head long after I'd walked in and gotten Parker's room number. They'd moved him from critical to a regular room, but the second I stepped in I had to question why. He looked as if he'd been hit by a truck. His left shoulder was bandaged, propped against a stack of pillows beside him. His right eye was bruised and swollen and he looked as if he couldn't open it if he tried. The rest of his face was marred with cuts and lacerations.

"Park?" I whispered, touching my hand to the chair beside his hospital bed. His left eye fluttered open and he grumbled incoherently under his breath before he finally managed a tangible sentence.

"Are you really here or did they dope me up again?"

Any other time I would have laughed at the weak joke, but right now all I wanted was to crawl into the bed beside him and hold him.

"I'm here. Tan dropped me off. He's going to run by the apartment and sit with the kids until I switch off with him and he can be here with you."

He grunted. "Too many words. I don't have the energy to process all of that."

"I'm sorry."

He raised his brow. "For what?"

"This." I made a gesture toward his current state. "Whoever shot you was trying to shoot me."

"Mia, I would take a hundred more bullets if it meant you stayed alive." he said it so clearly, so honest, that I winced. "If. . . I wish every night that I had been there when Maya died. I would have been able to fight them off, and if not, died trying so she could get away."

I approached the side rail of the bed and reached out to brush a lock of blonde hair out of his eyes. "I can't lose you too, Park. You don't get to go around playing superhero. I just. . . they should have just gotten to me. Then you and Tan, and the babies-none of you would be in danger."

"They were tailing me," he said, trying to sit up. But he let out a hiss through his teeth and touched his free arm to his lower abdomen. "in some black beater. I tried to lose him a few times, but when I finally pulled over at a park and got out, I think he was expecting you to get out too, because he stepped out of the car too, only he was in a hoodie and some kind of kids Halloween mask, so I couldn't identify him. He panicked, you could see it in the way his hand trembled slightly when he lifted the gun to shoot me."

I grasped the bed rail tightly with one hand and closed my hand into a fist against his forehead. "I should have—"

"You were where you needed to be. Safe." Parker said before I could finish. "I wasn't even thinking about me and my injuries the entire ambulance ride here. I was relieved that it was me and not you. I wasn't able to save Maya, but I can protect you, Mia. I have to."

I caressed my thumb along his temple. "You're going to get yourself killed, Parker. The guilt you feel about what happened with Maya, it's not worth you losing your life over to save mine."

"Bullshit." I was glad that he only had one good eye with the daggers he was sending me. "Mia it's not just about Maya and not being able to save her. It's years and years of indirectly hurting you. Years of loving you enough to keep my distance. I'm a disappointment from an even more disappointing family, and I'll be damned if I let you, or those kids, ever feel a fraction of the hatred I have for myself. Protecting you, protecting Max and Mickey, it's something I have to do."