Ace of Hearts, page 1
A NineStar Press Publication
www.ninestarpress.com
Ace of Hearts
ISBN: 978-1-64890-552-0
© 2022 Lucy Mason
Cover Art © 2022 Jaycee DeLorenzo
Published in October 2022 by NineStar Press, New Mexico, USA.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact NineStar Press at Contact@ninestarpress.com.
Also available in Print, ISBN: 978-1-64890-553-7
CONTENT WARNING:
This book contains depictions of abuse of an adult child by a parent, stalking/harassment, kidnapping/abduction, references to alcohol abuse, and vomiting.
Ace of Hearts
Lucy Mason
Table of Contents
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
To everyone who’s ever thought they’re broken. You’re not. You deserve to take up space and be loved exactly as you are.
Wednesday, 6:42 PM
Yay sports! Do the thing! Win the points!
10:39 PM
37-24. Going to regionals!
Thursday, 10:13 AM
Did you hear about the pickle incident in the cafeteria?
10:13 AM
???
10:15 AM
It was kind of a big DILL
10:15 AM
Get it?
10:16 AM
DILL? Ba-dum-CHA!
10:17 AM
OH MY GOD, FELIX, we can’t be friends anymore.
10:23 AM
Don’t be jealous just because my pun game is so strong ;D
11:11 AM
Make a wish.
11:12 AM
I always do.
Yesterday, 7:16 PM
GO GO REGIONALS GO!
11:10 PM
SO? How did the game go?
11:41 PM
Felix?
11:53 PM
Everything okay?
Today, 12:18 AM
You’ve NEVER not answered. Please let me know you’re safe.
12:39 AM
I’m going to start calling the hospitals and morgues and I’ll kill you if you were just at home sleeping off the game and ignoring me!
12:42 AM
Felix. I’m scared.
12:42 AM
Please be okay.
Chapter One
Hesper
IT WAS NOT my Felix Morlan lying in the hospital bed, tangled in the sterile white sheets. He was the bravest, funniest, most cheerful man I knew, strong enough to make up for it when his friends were weak, and this wasn’t him. I brushed his dark hair away from his forehead, which was glistening with sweat, pain hazing over his eyes.
“Sorry I scared you, Hes.” His voice cracked, and I handed him a Styrofoam cup filled with cold water and ice chips.
“I’m just glad you’re…”
Okay? Of course he wasn’t okay. One of his teammates had shown me a replay of the hit that had hyperextended his knee and destroyed his ACL. It had been on mute, and Felix was wearing a helmet that obscured part of his face, but the contorted expression of agony was seared into my memory. He may or may not have blacked out from the pain; I wasn’t sure because I quit watching, unable to stomach it.
“Want me to call the nurse?” I asked tentatively.
He turned his head away, but not before I caught the shine of tears gathering in his eyes. His leg was wrapped heavily in dressings, but I’d seen it when he came out of surgery, exhausted but too frightened to sleep while I waited. The skin around his knee was swollen, an angry red color where staples held the surgical wounds closed. I’d sat by his bed, sketching on the small pad I kept in Calamity, my old Jeep, while he slept off the anesthesia. But he was awake now, and he twisted his calloused hands in the sheets.
“They’ll be keeping me for observation for a few days. Go home and get some rest.”
“Nope.”
“Some of the guys from the team will stop by and—”
“Nope,” I reiterated firmly, crossing my arms.
It was a policy we’d had with each other our whole lives, and it didn’t change even when we’d moved halfway across the country together for college: we had nobody else here, but we had each other. He’d watched my back, and I would watch his. Felix and I had been best friends since we were old enough to walk and talk. Now, his mom was in jail while his dad was busy raising his six younger siblings, and I had run away from Missouri to avoid getting an order of protection against my own father. We’d basically raised each other. I wasn’t running away at the first sign of trouble.
“Show me.” He held out one hand for my sketch pad and I clutched it to my chest. “Come on.”
Normally this was fine. I’d draw tables covered in leaves, teacups and books and pocket watches and chunks of amethyst and rusty old keys, the kind of things I found aesthetically soothing. But I’d been doing something different while he slept, trying to erase the memory of his pain in the video replay of his injury. I’d drawn the slightly blocky angle of his jaw, his mouth turned up in half a smile, a five-o’clock shadow dusting the sides of his face. I’d drawn him happy, my best copy of the way he looked in my favorite memory of him.
I contemplated crumpling the page before he could see it.
Instead, I flipped back to an earlier page where I’d been doing a study of the trees outside his hospital window, light filtering through them in an orange haze as the sun rose. I hadn’t been able to quite capture it with the small bag of pencils I had on hand, but it was enough that he got the idea.
“Remind me again why you aren’t going into this?” He sounded clearer than he had in several hours, his eyes focused on my sketch pad. It was an uncomfortable feeling, to see someone marvel at my work. Like being under a microscope.
“No steady paycheck,” I reminded him, counting the reasons I’d rehearsed to people a hundred thousand times off on my fingers. “Deadlines would push me to create when I didn’t feel like it. I would grow to hate it if I had to do it for a living. The pressure would be too intense.”
I didn’t list the other reason. Sometimes it took every ounce of energy I possessed just to get up in the morning. Sometimes I simply didn’t have enough inside me to both function and create. Art was my escape. If I turned it into another source of stress, where would I hide when the rest of the world got to be too much? What would I do to restore the balance?
“Those are all good reasons,” he agreed begrudgingly, and he reached back over to hand the pad back to me, twisting slightly to do so.
He didn’t say a word but the set of his mouth and eyebrows told me he’d moved wrong, in a way that would have left him screaming if he hadn’t been so heavily medicated. My chest hurt, my lungs burning because I just couldn’t get enough oxygen in, because I couldn’t breathe looking at the way my best friend suffered. This was the sort of thing you read about in the paper or heard about on the news. It happened to other people, sure. But it wasn’t supposed to happen to Felix.
Despite the chill outside, Calamity’s seats were sticky with heat from the afternoon sun when I left the hospital, and I wiggled my phone charger in the adapter, praying it would connect. I ran the battery down the night before, frantically making calls to find out what had happened and where Felix was, and I’d sent one semi-panicked email to my boss explaining I wouldn’t be in today, but I wasn’t prepared for the onslaught of messages when the screen lit back up. I scrolled through them, my stomach clenching as I read increasingly worried and annoyed messages. I closed out of the message app and pulled up the internet browser. It was like worrying at a sore tooth: even though I knew it would be awful, I had to look. I had to know what Felix was going back to.
The answer, it seemed, was not much.
There was already an online article plastered on the local news channel’s website: Mustangs Star Athlete Suffers Career-Ending Injury During Championship Game. I cringed but kept reading. There were pictures. There was speculation on whether the opposing team had intentionally caused the injury. It had happened in the third quarter, and rather than stopping the game, they put in a backup player and went on to narrowly win. It even ended on a celebratory note, advertising the time and date of the next playoff game, like Felix’s whole world hadn’t just changed. I scrolled back up to the top of the page.
Career-ending.
Career-ending.
Oh, God.
My phone started to ring, and I shoved it under the jacket in the passenger seat, counting my breaths and turning the key as the Jeep roared to life, sputtering a little sadly. Emails were fine, text messages were even better, but phone ca
Zzzzt.
Zzzzzt, zzzzzt.
I slammed the radio’s off button. Gravel popped as I turned Calamity’s wheel sharply, pulling off onto the shoulder because whoever was calling wouldn’t stop. Felix’s phone was still in the locker room. What if it was his dad calling? What if someone back home had heard? What if it was a nurse calling saying something has gone horribly wrong, come back immediately? What if he needed me? What if, what if, what if?
As soon as I accepted the call, I regretted it. My boss was the father figure I never had, and he worried about me like I was his own daughter. Which was great, until it wasn’t.
“Hesper Elise Stalides, you could have been dead in a ditch and I wouldn’t have known!”
I flinched. “Sorry, Zach.”
His voice softened marginally—he knew about my phone anxiety. He spoke slowly and clearly, not in a condescending way, but enough that I didn’t have to ask him to repeat himself. “I got your message that you were on your way to see your friend and you wouldn’t be in today. How is he?”
I squeezed my eyes shut, and the hand that wasn’t holding the phone to my ear spasmed against the steering wheel, turning my knuckles ashy white.
“Oh, he’ll recover. Eventually. But I don’t think he’ll ever play football again.”
Saying it out loud made it seem real. I couldn’t imagine Felix without sports. He had initially pursued it because he knew it was the only way he could ever afford college—I felt so betrayed when he chose athletic extracurriculars over art and band with me—but it had turned into a genuine fire and passion for him. It was his thing.
And now it was gone.
“I’m sorry to hear that. Are you on your way home?”
“Yeah.”
“Do me a favor and let me know when you get there safe.”
“I will. Thanks for understanding.”
Zach hung up without saying goodbye, because goodbye was simply not a thing he did. He had told me once his grandpa would say “uh-huh” before hanging up but said any kind of farewell had too much finality. This old superstition had carried over the generations of their family. It was just a fact that my boss hung up on me every single time he called.
“There,” I said out loud to the empty, silent car. “I answered the phone and it wasn’t that bad. Stop being such a drama queen about it.”
But it didn’t feel like I was being dramatic. Talking on the phone made it feel like all the air had left my lungs, and I was suffocating, and my brain couldn’t process the words the person on the other end was saying, and then I had to ask them to repeat themselves, and they said it again, but I still couldn’t understand and they were starting to get annoyed and—
Stop. Now is not the time for an anxiety spiral. Pull it together.
Windows down. Music up. I picked up my phone and texted Zach.
4:39 PM
I’ll get back in 40 mins. Meet at Cass’s for dinner?
I didn’t receive an answer, because he wasn’t a texting sort of man. He regularly sent me messages that said brb—as if I’d notice he was leaving his phone for a minute when we were miles apart. All the same, when I got back to town he was there at our usual table, his glasses low on his nose and thick eyebrows creased downward, tapping a pen (the audacity! A permanent ink pen!) on the sudoku puzzle in the newspaper on the table. I dropped my messenger bag and collapsed in the seat across from him. I was too tired, as if I’d run a marathon instead of sitting at my best friend’s bedside all night.
“You look rough.”
“Thanks, Zach, that’s sweet.”
He glared at me over his glasses. “Next time let me know you made it safe, okay?”
“Hopefully there won’t be a next time.”
“So, what’s your friend gonna do?”
I put my face in my hands. “Beats me. He’s gonna be so lost without football, and that scholarship was all he had. I mean, he has a work-study job with the college’s maintenance department, but…” I slid my phone across the table, the article pulled up on the browser.
Zach cringed with every new detail he read.
“Maybe they’ll let him finish out his degree,” he said doubtfully. My phone buzzed in his hands. “‘Hey, H. Jackson brought my phone. Text when you can.’ Is this the guy?”
I snatched my phone back. Adults didn’t understand what an invasion of privacy it was when they read your text messages. Despite the fact that I was twenty-one, almost twenty-two, I still thought of everyone else as a grown-up and myself as just…not. I’m an adult! I am a grown-up! I pay bills and have a job! But it was like there was some secret rite of passage to figuring out life as a grown-up, and nobody had let me in on it, so I was stuck in limbo forever.
“You’ve heard me talk about him before. We grew up together, moved out here together.”
“H?” His sizable eyebrows disappeared under his bangs.
“Yes! H, Hes, Hesper. I answer to any. This is not a surprise; you’ve known me for three years.”
“And he spells out all the words like you do.”
“Yes, like a civilized human who doesn’t think it’s too much extra effort to put the Y and the O before the U to spell you.” I stared pointedly at him, but as usual, my criticism didn’t faze him. I hated text speak.
The server, a cute blonde girl with a mean streak for most people but a soft spot for her regular customers, brought me a glass of sweet tea, ice cubes clinking merrily.
“With sugar.” Zach shuddered. “Appalling.”
While technically I was from the Midwest, we were very southern in how we took our tea. I liked it as sweet as hummingbird water; my “bless your heart” was almost always a passive-aggressive dig; I knew how to square-dance (badly), thanks to high school PE classes. You can take the girl out of Missouri, but you can’t take Missouri out of the girl.
Zach caught me up on all the library drama of the day while I made appropriate noises of rage (a student was caught eating with greasy potato chip fingers while they were handling an expensive book) and disgust (another student brought back DVDs covered in a questionable, sticky, yellow substance of unknown origin.) He had a strict no-phones-during-dinner policy, but I surreptitiously tapped out messages to Felix on my lap. If he saw me, he decided to let it slide given the circumstances, because he cheerfully chattered while we ate.
6:02 PM
I’m home. Ish.
6:02 PM
I’m in the hospital. Ish.
6:04 PM
Zach freaked, y/y?
Zach only knew about Felix in passing, but Felix knew all about Zach, because I told him everything—well, most things—for almost forever. I mean, the boy taught me to tie my shoes; I spent summers showing his little sisters how to swim; he didn’t abandon me even when we went to prom and I spent most of the night in the bathroom, shaking with my skirt bundled up in my arms and sucking in oxygen like it was running out. When he missed being crowned king because he was comforting me, he wasn’t even mad, though I was mad enough at myself for both of us.
6:07 PM
You could say that. Need anything?
6:08 PM
A burger. A milkshake. Anything but Jell-O and tasteless hospital cafeteria mashed potatoes.
6:08 PM
Seriously though. Get some rest.
He was worried about me—while he was laid up in a hospital bed with a shattered career and a decimated tendon and a boatload of pain. I had won the best-friend lottery. I didn’t deserve him. Zach and I played rock-paper-scissors, our tradition for deciding who would pay, and though I could usually see his tells, he beat me fair and square. The server zipped his card through the register’s reader, then handed it back to him along with an adding machine tape of the charges.
“You okay to drive home?”
“Yes, Zach.”
“You won’t fall asleep?”
“No, Zach.”
“You stayed up all night with your friend.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, exhaling. My neck hurt and I was exhausted and everything was falling apart at the seams, but I smiled my most convincing smile. “I promise I’ll be okay. And I’ll let you know when I’m home.”
