"It's- it's not that," he's quick off the line with this response, his sudden change in demeanor catching you entirely by surprise, as the warmth and ease returns to his voice without much to proceed the change, almost as if the shift in conversation had been all he'd needed for the informality that hover perilously close to being outright intimacy to come flooding back in.
But that being said, you're not foolish enough to let yourself be blinded to reality by the turnaround, it had been too easy, it had been too simply won, which you'd come to learn meant that, in Max's case at least, he was merely momentarily distracted, and more than like retreat back to the frame of mind he'd been in previously.
"Okay? So, if it's not that, then what is it? I just figure, I guess it was more of an assumption really, that you'd only called to talk about the whole boyfriend, girlfriend thing, especially considering the hour and all-"
"Uh, Kaia and I- Kaia's hurt... She's- She's hurt and it's because of me."
"Wait, I'm sorry- What?" You ask him without really knowing what it is that you'd just said because the shape of every word as it rolls off the tip of your tongue is just a little off kilter, each feeling foreign in your mouth, the sound strangely distorted even to your own ears, like the notes that they should be composed of have suddenly become discordant.
It's disquieting the way your brain is still operating on a delay that's not only disproportionate to what you know for a fact should have been necessary, the certainty about which reaches you from some distant corner in the back of your mind, but it just feels wrong, like somehow whatever it was that Max has just told you has sunk in skin deep and now crawls in your veins, stealing the warmth from your blood as it goes, leeching away the color from the room around you.
"I couldn't get her to sleep, I tried everything but nothing made any difference... so we went for a drive since that always worked with my youngest sister," Max explains with such restraint and forethought that even through the lag time your mind is currently operating at, it's obvious that for every detail of the night that he forces himself to remember is more painful than the last and costs him dearly, "and some tourist with more car than they could handle, lost complete control when they were flying down the city street and took a blind corner at speed... into the oncoming lane- struck the passenger side- pinning the back of my car against a bollard-"
Like a switch has been flipped, understanding suddenly flickers to life inside your mind and you're left gasping for air as the cruel, harsh lines of reality are cast into brutal, immaculate relief by the light of comprehension.
"But she's alive? Because you're alive," you breathe into the phone in a voice barely above a whisper, shaken to the core by the horrific realization that Max wouldn't be alive and breathing to make this phone call if the worst had come to pass, knowing with absolute certainty that if the daughter had been taken then the father would have followed by any means deemed necessary.
The monstrous thought shouldn't have been comforting, but it was, and you clung to it with an ironclad grip.
"She's alive, I'm alive... everyone is alive," Max confirms with venom in his voice, a chill stealing through you as he continues, "though if you ask me, the fucker that hit us doesn't even deserve to still be breathing."
"I'm glad no one was hurt," you say honestly, too focused on getting more detailed information out of him about Kaia's status to care about the inherent morality of what he'd just said, "Can I talk to Kaia or-"
"He put my daughter in the hospital but there's not a scratch on the bastard," he says sourly, not bothering to even acknowledge what you'd said in the slightest, "but yeah, I just thought you should know. Sorry to wake you."
Not A Scratch On That Bastard
Start from the beginning
