The difference between s.., p.1
The Difference Between Somehow and Someway_Aly Martinez, page 1
The Difference Between Somehow and Someway
Copyright © 2022 Aly Martinez
All rights reserved. No part of this novel may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted without written permission from the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. If you would like to share this book with others please purchase a copy for each person. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people.
The Difference Between Somehow and Someway is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and occurrences are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, events, or locations is purely coincidental.
Cover Photo: Wander Aguiar
Models: Andrew Biernat and Michelle Hertzberg
Cover Design: Hang Le
Editing: Mickey Reed
Proofreading: Julie Deaton and Julia Griffis
Formatting: Champagne Book Design
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
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
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Other Books
About the Author
Bowen
Three days after the plane crash…
When I was a child, my mom used to wake me up for school the same way each morning. She’d tiptoe into the dark room, settle on the side of my bed, and then sift her fingers through the top of my hair until I finally roused to peaceful consciousness.
I had no idea what day, week, or month it was, but it had been years since she’d woken me up like that. Yet, as my brain emerged from the darkness, I was still absolutely certain her fingers were the ones gliding through my hair.
“Bowen?” she said, her voice thick with emotion.
On instinct, I opened my mouth to reply, but it was too dry for words to pass through. What the hell? How much did I drink last night?
Her palm smoothed across my cheek, the warmth drawing me further from slumber.
“Come on, baby. Time to wake up,” she whispered urgently.
“’Kay.” I finally forced the one syllable through the desert of sand in my throat.
She let out a choking sob. “Go get the nurse. Hurry.”
The nurse? What the fuck?
At some point during the night, my eyelids had been replaced with lead shields. They were impossible to raise, but I tried anyway, waging an entire war to open them a slit.
“Oh, Bowen.” My mom appeared in my limited line of sight. Dark circles hung under her red tear-filled eyes.
My dad sidled up beside her, equal parts relief and hell on his face. “Oh, thank you, Jesus.” Tears leaked down his cheeks, causing a wave of confusion and alarm to crash over me.
I’d never seen my father cry before. Why now? What could have possibly—
Everything suddenly came back to me in a rush.
The deafening metal on metal.
The blood-curdling cries.
Bodies strewn across the runway.
The all-consuming panic as I rabidly searched to find her.
The hopelessness as I gave her CPR.
Remi.
Remi.
“Remi!” My whole body roared to life. Pain exploded in my chest as I attempted to sit up, but it was nothing compared to the agony inside me.
My dad pinned my shoulders to the bed. “Son, stop. You’re going to hurt yourself.”
I’d gotten my height from him, but he was no match for the adrenaline engulfing me.
“Get off me,” I seethed, my voice raw and jagged—just like my heart. With a hard-casted forearm, I tore the nasal cannula from my face before turning my frenzy onto the IV and blood pressure cuff. Everything fucking hurt. And that was not limited to the physical.
Where was she? Was she okay? Oh, God, she probably needed me, and I was laid up in a Goddamn hospital bed. Useless all over again.
While the monitors blaring with alarms mixed with my mother’s tearful prayers, Tyson came running into the room followed by another white coat and several nurses.
The doctor started calling off orders I couldn’t make out amid my panic, but Tyson interrupted him.
“No. No. No,” he pleaded. “Just give me a second and I’ll calm him down. I swear.” He didn’t wait for an answer before diving around my father, who was still fighting to keep me in the bed, and thrust a phone in my face. It was the most heartbreaking picture I’d ever seen, but his words stopped me in my tracks. “She’s alive.”
Head to toe, heart to soul, I froze, staring at his phone.
God. My Sally. She was covered in wires, both of her eyes blackened, casts covering her arms all the way up to her shoulders, and a tube went down her throat. If she was alive, it was barely, but if there was even one beat left in her heart, I needed to be there.
After sucking in a breath as deep as my aching chest would allow, I grunted, “Where is she?”
“She’s across town at Grady, and she’s stable. I’ll fill you in on everything, but you need to relax and let the doctors look you over. On top of the broken arm and lacerations on your legs, you have a punctured lung. They put in a chest tube, and if you don’t chill, they’re going to sedate you again to prevent you from ripping it out. Nobody here wants that. So please. I’m begging you. Take a deep breath and let them do their job.”
Growing up, Tyson had never been the family’s voice of reason. But, despite the fact that he had specialized in plastic surgery, he was the only person I knew who had actually been to medical school. I needed information on Remi, and he was the only one I trusted to give it to me straight.
Swallowing hard, I sagged into the bed as much as my stiff body would allow. There would be no relaxing, but being sedated wasn’t an option either.
“Fine,” I rasped.
My dad held me for a second longer, his honey-brown eyes that matched my own searching my face. He blew out a ragged breath and then finally released me.
The doctors and nurses took over after that. For several minutes, they reattached tubes and wires and took my vitals. The doctor had at least a dozen questions and just as many explanations, but my mind was still with Remi at a hospital on the other side of the city.
I was fine—or at least I would be. During the lulls in their examination, I found out it had been three days since the crash. It took my family a full twenty-four hours of thinking I was dead to get word that I was one of the lucky few who had survived. Since then, Tyson had been sleeping at the hospital around the clock along with my mom, and Dad and Cassidy had been holding down the fort at home with the dogs.
I was grateful beyond measure to have such an amazing support system, but it wasn’t me I was worried about. When the doctor was finally done and the nurses left the room with the promise of coming back with pain medicine, I laid into Tyson.
“Now, what’s going on with Remi? Why am I here and she’s at Grady?”
My mom sank to the side of my bed and held my good hand. The trauma of the last few days had dimmed her usually bright smile.
Tyson stood at the foot of my bed, his arms crossed over his chest, and calmly answered, “There were about forty survivors initially. First responders spread everyone out to hospitals across the city. That’s why it took us so long to find you.” He cleared the emotion from his throat, and I gave Mom’s hand a squeeze when her eyes welled with tears again. “There are only thirty-one of you left now. Six in critical condition. It’s”—he shook his head—“been a nightmare.”
I could definitely agree with him there. “Get to Remi. How is she?”
He sighed. “She broke multiple bones in each arm and had fractures on her clavicle and ribs. But all of those will heal. The biggest concern for her now is the swelling on her brain.”
A vise cranked down on my chest, and fears I never fathomed I’d need to have crashed into me like a tidal wave. “Her brain?”
“It appears she took a hard hit to the head. Her CT and MRI look promising, but they’re keeping her in a medically induced coma until they can get the swelling under control.”
My stomach churned and the weight of the entire world settled on my chest. As if she hadn’t been through enough already. As if the entire universe hadn’t been hell-bent on destroying her. Now she was fighting for her life in a different way. And God, I prayed with every fiber of my being that she still had enough fight left in her.
I covered my face as tears leaked from my eyes.
Why was everything so fucking hard?
Was one fucking day to catch our breaths too much to ask for?
Tyson patted my leg. “Listen, she’s young and
Okay was such a relative term. Only weeks earlier, we’d been in the hospital after she’d tried to kill herself for the third time. Did that constitute as okay too just because she’d survived? What about all the months before that when the woman I’d fallen in love with was barely recognizable, so filled with fear and pain? Was that the goal? To go back to that? Because quite honestly, it wasn’t the world I wanted her to wake up in.
Though, as long as she woke up, I’d take whatever version of Remi I could get. No matter what the universe threw at us, I would never give up on that woman. We were a team. Through and through. We hadn’t gotten married yet, but I’d already vowed for better or worse a hundred times over.
I didn’t need perfection in our lives. I just needed her.
I sighed, scrubbing a hand over my face to dry the tears. Now was not the time to be defeated or wallow in the injustices of a cruel world.
People had died—a lot of innocent people had died.
But Sally was alive, and so was I. We could figure out the rest later.
The knots in my stomach tightened when a thought struck me. “Aaron?”
“He’s fine, honey,” my mom answered immediately. “He was very lucky and walked away with nothing more than a few stitches.”
“Oh, thank God,” I groaned.
Aaron was a good guy who had become a good friend, but as awful as it was, my relief was purely selfish. No matter how bad things had gotten between Remi and Aaron, losing him would have been another hurdle she couldn’t handle.
“I have to see her,” I declared.
Tyson tossed me a warm smile. “You will. As soon as we can get you out of here, I’ll take you there myself. But until then, you have to concentrate on healing yourself. She’s going to need you, Bowen.”
Who knew whether he was right or not. I’d attempted to help her for over nine months, failing at every turn. The hits just kept coming.
But the only thing I knew for sure was that I’d never stop trying.
Not for my Sally.
Not for Remi.
Not for us.
Bowen
As I stood in my living room, pissed off beyond all reason, my cheekbone throbbed from the fist Mark had landed on my face. I was going to end up with a nice bruise and plenty of swelling, but I was all out of fucks to give from the entire interaction. He could be mad and call me every insult in the book, but there was no changing my mind.
“I’m not leaving her. We’re done here.”
Aaron’s eyes nervously flashed between us.
“The fuck we are!” Mark boomed, his hulking body flexing beneath his Rusty Nail T-shirt. “What the hell is wrong with you? She’ll remember. Have you even stopped to think what that will mean for her? You’re essentially sentencing her to a life of darkness and misery all over again. Move the fuck on! She isn’t the only woman in the world, Bowen.”
“She is to me,” I shot right back.
“Oh, fuck you. Don’t feed me that shit.”
I took long strides toward him, my rage igniting all over again. “I don’t have to feed you anything. This is none of your Goddamn business. You want to tell her the truth? Fine, I can’t stop you. But you know good and damn well I would never do anything to hurt her. She came to me. She’s falling in love with me. She doesn’t remember, but maybe she doesn’t have to.” I stabbed a hand into the top of my hair, my heart pounding in my chest as the memories of the past ravaged me. “What if we can have it all? I told her about everything that happened to Sally and—”
“You what!” Aaron exploded.
“Jesus Christ.” Mark dropped his head back and stared at the ceiling.
“She’s fine,” I declared. “She doesn’t have the emotional trauma to connect to the experience anymore. I told her about it, she thought it was sad and cried, and then we moved on. If we play our cards right, we can give her back the memories slowly so, when she does remember, her mind will have had time to process them without the trauma of it all overtaking her.”
“I’m sorry,” Aaron smarted. “I seem to have missed the part where you earned a medical degree.”
“This isn’t about medicine or doctors. All the therapists and prescriptions in the world weren’t enough to save her. This is about Remi. Come on. Think about it. Nobody on this Earth knows her better than the three of us. When she came back after she was kidnapped, we weren’t prepared for the fallout. She faked smiles and told us she was fine, all the while spiraling down into her own private hell. By the time we really figured out how bad she was, it was too late. But this time, it could be different. We know what to look for, and God willing, we can stop it before it consumes her. This is our second chance.”
“You’ve lost your damn mind,” Mark whispered.
“Maybe, but that happened a long fucking time ago. The first time I’d thought I’d lost her. The second time. The third. The fourth. Not even to count the morning I woke up, knowing the love of my life was only a few miles away but gone all the same.” I stabbed a finger in his direction. “I always said if she remembered me, there was nothing that could keep me away. She’s in there, Mark. She doesn’t realize it yet, but she’s in there. We aren’t talking about if she remembers anymore, it’s all about when. And I don’t know about you, but I can’t just sit around and wait to see how it shakes out. I’m going to be here for her. The way it always should have been.”
“I agree,” Aaron interjected, stealing my attention.
Mark turned a murderous gaze onto his friend. “The fuck you do!”
“Trust me. Nobody wants her to remember less than I do.” He shook his head, shame filling his face. “We’re all trying to protect her. But that’s where our role ends. She wanted him before she was kidnapped. She wanted him after. For fuck’s sake, she was going to marry him. And with absolutely no memory of the life she had with him, she’s trying to build a new one. We don’t get a say in this.”
A victorious grin split my face.
Mark stared at him as if he’d suddenly grown two heads, but deep down, he knew, with Aaron on board, his argument no longer held any weight.
He could hate me for the rest of my life, but as long as I had Remi, I wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep over it.
Clearing my throat, I walked past them to the door, which was still wide open. “Good. Now that it’s settled, you have to get the fuck out of here. Remi should be here soon, and I need to start dinner. Heads up, it’s safe to assume she won’t be home tonight—or any night in the foreseeable future.” I was finished putting other people’s feelings ahead of my own when it came to the woman I loved—the only woman I’d ever loved. If that came across as curt or selfish, I didn’t care.
“Are you gonna ask her to move in?” Aaron asked cautiously.
I filled my lungs with oxygen, waiting for them to burn before exhaling. Moving in was where it had all started falling off the tracks before. If anything was going to trigger her memories, it would be that. But despite our relationship moving at lightning speed, we weren’t there yet. Not this time.
“Eventually. I’ll let you know before I do.”
He nodded with gratitude.
Mark’s jaw ticked at the hinges, but when he spoke, his anger had morphed into concern. “And what if you fuck this up? Where does that leave her?”
Now that I could respect.
Honestly, the idea of failing her again haunted me on a minute-to-minute basis. But what were my choices? When she hadn’t been a part of my life, I’d believed wholeheartedly that I was doing the right thing by staying away from her. Allowing her an opportunity for the fresh start she’d so desperately needed—and deserved.
But then she’d come back to me, more hell-bent than ever. And that made two of us, because the second I’d shown up at her office with the cactus, I’d made a commitment to her all over again whether she knew it or not.
“With me,” I answered, leaving no room for argument. “It leaves her with me. Where she belongs. If everything falls apart again and we end up right back where we were before the crash, I’ll still be here for her every single day. For as long as she’ll have me.”
He let out a string of expletives under his breath and pinched the bridge of his nose. “This is so fucked.”
It always had been. I believed I was the one who had originally pointed it out though. Nobody had listened then, and I wasn’t about to let it get in my way now.
