White Lies Read Online Free PDF Page A

could have checked on Steve's condition by phone. Whatever Steve
had gotten himself into must be extremely important, and Payne wanted to be on
hand the instant he recovered consciousness, if ever.
                  Payne left her to enter the room on her own,
saying he wanted to talk to someone. Jay nodded absently, her attention already
focused on Steve. She pushed open the door and walked in, leaving Payne
standing in the hall practically in midsentence. A wry, faintly regretful smile
touched his mouth as he looked at the closed door; then he turned and walked
briskly down the hall. Jay stared at the man in the bed. Steve. Now that she
was seeing him again, it was a little hard to accept that he was Steve. She had
known Steve as vibrant, burning with energy; he was so still now that it threw
her off balance. He was still in the same position he'd been in the night
before; the machines were still quietly humming and beeping, and fluids were
still being fed into his veins through needles. The strong scent of hospital
antiseptic burned her nose, and suddenly she wondered if, in some corner of his
mind, he was aware of the smell. Could he hear people talking, though he was
unable to respond?
                  She walked to the bed and touched his arm as
she had the night before. The heat of his skin tingled against her fingertips
despite the coolness of the controlled temperature. The mummylike expanse of
bandages robbed him of individuality, and his lips were so swollen they looked
more like caricatures than the lips of the man she had once kissed, loved,
married, fought with and finally divorced. Only the hot bare skin of his arm
made him real to her. Did he feel anything? Was he aware of her touch?
                  "Steve?" she whispered, her voice
trembling. It felt so funny to talk to a motionless mummy, knowing that he was
probably so deep in his coma that he was unaware of everything, and that even
if by some miracle he could hear her, he wouldn't be able to respond. But even
knowing all that, something inside compelled her to try. "I.. .it's
Jay." Sometimes he'd called her Jaybird, and when he'd really wanted to
aggravate her he'd called her Janet Jean. Her nickname had evolved when she'd
been a very young child. Her parents had called her Janet Jean, but her elder
brother, Wilson, had shortened it to J. J., which had naturally become Jay. By
the time she'd started school, her name was, irrevocably, Jay.
                  "You've been hurt," she told Steve,
still stroking his arm. "But you're going to be all right. Your legs have
been broken, and they're both in casts. That's why you can't move them. They
have a tube in your throat, helping you to breathe, and that's why you can't
talk. You can't see because you have bandages over your eyes. Don't worry about
anything. They're taking good care of you here." Was it a lie that he was
going to be all right? Yet she didn't know what else to tell him. If he could
hear her, she had to reassure him, not give him something else to worry about.
                  Clearing her throat, she began telling him
about the past five years, what she'd been doing since the divorce. She even
told him about being fired, and how badly she'd wanted to punch Farrell Wordlaw
right in the nose. How badly she still wanted to punch him in the nose.
                  The
voice was calm and infinitely tender. He didn't understand the words, because unconsciousness still wrapped his
mind in layers of blackness, but he heard
the voice, felt it, like something warm touching his skin. It made him feel less alone, that tiny, dim contact.
                  Something
hard and vital in him focused on the contact, yearning toward it, forcing him upward out of the blackness,
even though he sensed the fanged monsters
that waited for him, waiting to tear at his flesh with hot knives and brutal teeth. He would have to endure that
before he could