Page 96 of Until You Found Me

All she can think about right now is the dog and maybe later she’ll remember that she should have been focused on other things, like making sure Logan isn’t injured, or calling the police, or even tending to her bloody face. Yet for now, her mind remains fixated on this single subject, unable to process anything more.

“Hey, hey. It’s okay, look at me.” He curls a finger under her chin, urging her face up. “I could never hate you, and the dog is alive. I saw him moving. We’ll get him to the vet. I’m worried about you right now. Are you hurt anywhere else?”

“I don’t think so.” Her lower lip trembles and her need for contact and comfort overwhelms her.

She goes easily when he pulls her into his arms, curling loosely around him at first and then clutching tightly against his back, afraid to let go. A sob wrenches free and she smothers it into the curve of his neck, her bloody fingernails twisting in his shirt as she tries to get closer and closer while already pressed to his chest.

“I gotcha. It’s over, he’s gone,” he whispers.

There are blue and red lights flickering in her periphery, but she doesn’t move. The medics will come to them and so she exhales hard and lets her gaze drift toward the darkened sea behind Logan. When she speaks again, it’s soft and wet through her tears, her temple resting at his ear. “I remember everything.”

Chapter 21

The human body can only take so much. That’s a concept Logan is intimately familiar with and openly defiant of.

Even with diabetes, he still has a one hundred percent track record of surviving somehow. Refusing to fully accept defeat is part of what keeps him ticking, but defiance can only take him so far. Turns out the limit is blunt force trauma to the kidneys, while also suffering kidney failure.

That’s how he goes from holding Tessa in his arms while she saysshe remembers everythingto falling backward into the snow, coughing up blood. A rush of adrenaline helped him protect her, but it wears off quickly, leaving him shivering in agony.

This is it for him. He can’t keep all his parts chugging along anymore and there’s a calmness that overtakes him when he accepts that he’s reached the end of the road. His breathing is labored, a metallic tang in his mouth growing stronger by the second, and his fingers begin to numb at the tips. He is coming apart from every angle, but at least she’ll be safe now after he’s gone. It was all worth it, he thinks, grasping at her arm as she leans over him.

The fear in her eyes says this might be the last time they see each other and she could be right.

Those red flashing lights coming up the driveway turn into a rush of paramedics and firemen. They’re here to tend to the corpse at the base of the cliff, but now they’re getting a two for one deal. Tessa is urged out of the way and he groans, reaching out pitifully between the medics. If he’s about to die, he doesn’t want to do it without her beside him.

None of this should be about him and he’d feel guilty about that if he was a little more coherent. Far more important things happened here tonight that don’t involve his damn kidneys, but all of that is shoved to the wayside for the moment.

“I’ll be so mad at you if you don’t hold on.” She climbs into an ambulance beside his gurney, cups his face, and turns his head gently toward her. “Look at me, keep looking at me. We can sleep later, not now.”

“You’re the best thing that’s ever—” And then he can’t talk anymore because his insides are on fire and he’s throwing up enough blood to gag on it.

It’s a bumpy drive to the clinic. Their joined hands bounce on the gurney with every pothole until they reach the little building that’s become his second home over the years.

They don’t have the right equipment or doctors here, so his next stop is a helicopter flight to a hospital in the city. It’s all happening so damn fast that it sounds like a joke. He wonders if he died back there on the cliff only to be shunted into a weird sort of purgatory where he spends eternity in this cursed clinic.

The bill for such a massive undertaking is bound to be more than he could pay in a single lifetime. It’s an emergency though, someone tells him, so that means they have to treat him first and worry about that later. He can’t afford an Uberride let alone a life flight, but no one pays his protests any attention and a horse-size dose of pain meds quiets him down. There are doctors talking at him in muffled sounds that he can’t decipher.

When he’s presented with a clipboard, he scribbles an X across the paper without knowing why.

He’s never been in a helicopter before, he thinks absently, losing consciousness somewhere over a cluster of treetops to the sound of helicopter blades and the soft song of Tessa’s worried voice.

* * *

“It’s not happening.” Logan rubs a coarse blanket between his fingers, refusing to look at Tessa.

“What do you mean? I already signed the papers. Remembering my social security number is all it took for them to finally agree. You signed them too.”

“Yeah, well, I was drugged to the gills and bleeding out so I coulda signed a bank robbery confession and wouldn’t have known the difference.”

She gets up from his bedside with a huff. “Please don’t do this. Take the kidney, Logan. Please take it.”

“Are we gonna talk about what happened? About how you said you remember?”

“Can we talk about the doctors saying you can’t leave here until you get a transplant? About how that machine you’re hooked up to is keeping you alive? Because that’s what I’d rather talk about right now,” she snaps.

However, many times her ex got in a solid punch or kickwas enough to do him in and Logan isn’t even surprised since he was already damaged goods to begin with. Already in kidney failure before he ever got into a fistfight in the snow.

They turned down his pain meds so he can make clear decisions and he feels every inch of his body shutting down in the absence of good drugs. It all weakens and slows to a horrifying degree, and he worries that his eyes may not open after the next blink. It’s only stubbornness and sheer willpower that keep him awake long enough to have this conversation.

---