Page 91 of One Night With You

‘All right, all right,’ she decides. ‘Just drive steady, okay? And take breaks. I don’t want anything happening to you, too.’

I’m operating on pure adrenaline. I don’t stop the whole way up the motorway, I just put my foot down and turn the radio up loud and let the words of songs I don’t know wash over me. I try not to think about what I saw. Jackson’s leg at that angle. The blood. The screams of the woman on the bike, which were awful. Until they stopped because she passed out and everyone thought she was dead. Then her silence was worse.

When Ruby opens the door of her flat to me, I hold her tighter than I’ve ever held anyone.

‘It’s okay,’ she tells me, her voice muffled by my armpit. I cry, and I hold her some more, and we end up on the floor of her hallway in a tangled embrace until I finally stop, and she says, ‘Let’s have some tea, shall we? Come on.’

I’m shattered and end up falling asleep on her sofa, waking up to fresh coffee and a clean T-shirt folded on the edge of the sofa, on top of the throw she told me she got in Thailand.

‘Morning,’ I say, barely able to open my eyes. They feel practically welded shut in puffiness from the crying.

‘How did you sleep?’ she asks, and she’s barefoot in black skinny jeans and a V-neck T-shirt, not a scrap of make-up on her.I want to wake up to you every morning,I think to myself, and she smiles at me softly as if she can hear my thoughts.

‘Fine,’ I croak. ‘Deeply. Is there any news?’

‘Candice called me,’ she explains. ‘She has him on the Find My Friends app and saw he was at the hospital – a nurse answered his phone. So she’s at the hospital now – said she was his sister. He’s in an induced coma. They need to give his body time to heal, and they think it’s better that way.’

‘It was so bad, Ruby. Honestly. It was just awful. I know it sounds like he’s going to be okay but God, in that ambulance I just kept thinking, if he spent his last day on earth at an antenatal class with me, I will personally have to cross over into the afterlife and swap places or something because …’

She sits on one of the dining room chairs the wrong way, her arms across the top holding on to her coffee cup. Her eyes are wide and soft, her hair falling in waves down her back.

‘You don’t have to make a joke you know,’ she says.

‘I’m not,’ I tell her. ‘I thought he was going to die.’

She nods. ‘I’m sorry you had to go through that.’

‘Me too,’ I say, and the image of him on the pavement blasts behind my eyelids once more, seared onto my brain.

‘We’re still not allowed to visit,’ she says. ‘I called. So maybe we don’t go down today? We await the bat signal?’

‘Okay,’ I say. I’m still basically asleep.

‘Do you want to move to my bed?’ she asks. ‘It’s comfier.’

I look at her. I feel like we should be at the hospital, waiting. But I’m tired. So, so tired.

‘All right,’ I say, wearily. ‘Maybe just for another hour.’

I stand up and head towards her bedroom, and as I pass her I reach out to her shoulder. I do it without thinking, reflexively. She responds quickly, putting her hand on top of mine kindly and I lace my fingers around hers. I pull, just a little bit, and she stands up. She follows me, climbing into bed with me without a word so I can wrap my body around hers from behind, clutching her closely, listening to her breathe.

39

Ruby

Nic and I hold hands through the winding corridors of the hospital as we find Jackson’s room. We’ve been touching in one way or another since this morning, when we cuddled in bed. It helps. Everything feels dream-like, or only half-true. His hand was reached out to behind my neck as we drove, or my fingers held his belt loops when we stopped for coffee. It’s like if we don’t hold on to the other, we might float away, and so we take turns in acting as gravity for the other, so we don’t disappear like Jackson almost did. It’s the same when we see Candice in the waiting area on his corridor – I fling myself at her like I might never let go. Everything feels thin as paper and transient as air. Life is too fickle, too easily gone. I want to wrap everyone I love in cotton wool and keep them close forever, so everybody is fine and nobody can hurt.

‘I know,’ Candice says, into my hair. ‘But he’s fine. He’s going to be fine. The coma will let him heal. But he will.Everything looks hopeful, the doctors say. Tentatively, anyway. They won’t know for sure until he’s awake, but the signs aren’t bad.’

I’m crying, she’s crying, Nic is crying – we’re sad and relieved and still anxious to see him and hear his laugh, hear him tell a stupid joke or issue an inappropriate comment.

‘I’ll go and find a nurse,’ Nic says to us, wiping at his eyes. ‘I’ll see what the visiting situation is.’ He leaves Candice and I to it, walking right past the nurses’ station and back the way we came. My heart leaps at his emotional intelligence, that even in a time like this he knows how to do the right, thoughtful thing.

‘Have you seen him?’ I say to Candice.

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘He doesn’t look … you know. He’s sleeping, but it doesn’t even really look like him. He’s tired. His body is recovering from the shock, I think. Broken leg, sprained wrist, some cracked ribs. Everything else is swelling. Trauma from the impact.’

‘Nic said it was horrible. He was beside himself.’

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