Jerk It by Lani Lynn Vale

CHAPTER 22

Hakuna Masquata.

It means nice booty.

-Text from Murphy to Mavis

MURPHY

Everything hurt.

From the tips of my toes, to the skin of my teeth.

When I opened my eyes, the last thing I expected to see was my wife.

I don’t know why I expected to once again be in that hovering state, but I had.

To find myself in a bed, with wires all around me, and my wife on the bed asleep with Vlad in her arms at my side, was a little bit…saddening.

I didn’t know why, though.

I just had a feeling that I was missing something. That I’d left a very perfect place to come back here. And it was a little sad that I wouldn’t get to go back for a while.

But I didn’t stay sad for long.

Because then my wife woke up.

When she saw me looking at her, her entire face lit up like she hadn’t quite expected to see me awake yet.

“You’re awake!” she cried out.

She did it so loudly that Vlad woke with an angry cry.

“I don’t want to be.”

Vlad, following the sound of my voice, turned to survey me.

His eyes lit with excitement, and that sadness of leaving that wonderful place that I’d just been ripped away from dimmed a little bit.

He reached for me, and Mavis stopped his angry leap.

“No, baby. Not today. Your friend is hurt,” Mavis cooed.

Vlad wasn’t having any of it.

I reached out a hand, one that had wires and tubes hanging off of it, and grinned when Vlad laid his entire face in it.

“Hey, bud,” I said softly.

Vlad cooed, not lifting his face.

“What happened?” I asked after a while, lifting my face to find Mavis staring at me with tears streaming down her cheeks.

Mavis swallowed hard.

“You got your heart,” she answered softly.

I frowned. “I did?”

I looked around the hospital, only then realizing that my chest hurt like a motherfucker, and I didn’t feel like I was dying any longer.

That memory of the night, what felt so long ago now, that I knew I was about to die, rolled over me.

I couldn’t lift my face out of the pillow. My arms felt like lead. And I couldn’t even make out the sound of Mavis’s voice.

“How?” I rasped.

I felt like I was left out of the loop.

“A heart became available,” Mavis choked on the world ‘available,’ causing me to frown. “I got you to the hospital. Dragged you out of my front door actually. You might have some scraping and bruising from that on your back because you’re a big dude, and I had no help at all. Got you to the hospital on the floor of my van that, might I add, I rammed into the stone steps at the front of my place and needs body work. They did the heart transplant. You survived.”

I frowned at the word ‘survived.’

Had I?

“Who?” I wondered.

My eyes had fallen back closed again, and I couldn’t help but notice how tired I was.

“I don’t want to tell you,” she whispered.

My eyes popped open, and without thought, I closed them again as a memory assaulted me.

“Jasper.”

Her eyes widened.

“You…how?” she gasped.

I closed them again as peace assaulted me. “He’s in a much better place.”