Page 8 of A Love Unfaltering

“Well, you must have missed me or something to wait in ahospitalfor me,” I said, grinning. “Youhatethese places.”

She brought the chair she was sitting in over next to the bed and sat down beside me, the tears already beginning to roll down her face.

“You’re a miracle man. That much is obvious. You’ve got somebody upstairs watching out for you,” the nurse said, pausing and looking at a couple of the screens on the monitors around me and writing a couple of things down on her clipboard. “You got out with only a couple of cracked ribs, and it could’ve been much nastier than that.”

I nodded, even though none of it felt real. I could feel the pain throughout my body with the cracked ribs, and I could see Amy next to me crying as she held onto the edge of the bed, but my brain didn’t realize that I had almost died.

“You’ll be allowed to leave within a couple of days if you keep being this lucky,” the nurse said, flashing me a smile before heading back out into the hallway to record me being awake.

And so, Amy and I were left alone in the hospital room, a million unspoken things between us.

“They called me and said you’d been in an accident. I was so scared,” she eventually said, and my heart melted.

I could only imagine. If someone had called me and told me thatshehad been in an accident… I don’t know what I would’ve done.

“It was a semi-truck that didn’t stop at a red light,” I said after a moment, not knowing if understanding what had happened would make her feel better or worse.

“I know. I talked to the nurses, the doctors, and everyone in between,” she replied, and eventually, she laid a hand very carefully on my arm.

Even if I had just been in an accident, I felt like I was on cloud nine. Just being touched by her was enough to make me feel on top of the world.

“Sounds like you were really worried about me then,” I said, with a bit of a joking tone to my voice. She shook her head with a bit of a choked laugh and met my eyes, and I felt a world of worry in her own.

I knew, then, that I needed to tell her everything.

Maybe it was some notion that if I didn’t, something else would happen, or perhaps it was because my mind had been cleared by what had happened that it made me realize that I was stupid for not telling her the truth in the first place.

I just knew I had to tell her.

“Amy,” I said gently, looking over at her and meeting her eyes. The beauty and innocence in hers were nearly enough to stop me in my tracks, to stop me from telling her about the terrible stuff that had happened.

“I… I haven’t told you everything. I told you that I didn’t know why I decided to change myself, but… That isn’t necessarily true. The truth is that about four months ago, my father died.”

Her eyes widened slightly, just for a moment, and her lips parted. “Oh, Jared… I’m so sorry, I…”

I stopped her with a slight shake of my head.

“It’s alright. I’ve already had my time to grieve, and I was with him when he passed. He knew that I loved him, and I know that he’s now in a more peaceful place. But after he died, I realized that I wanted to be somebody that he was proud of. And the only way I could think to do that was to follow your advice.”

I couldn’t read her expression; it was some mixture of sadness and sympathy that I’d never seen before.

“But I took what you’d said to heart, and I began to fall in love with you more and more every day. I tried to lessen our conversations not because I wanted us to grow apart but because I wanted to see if there was some way that I could stop it. I didn’t think you’d ever want me.”

She was about to protest, but I shook my head again.

“No. Before this, I knew you would never have considered a relationship with me. I was rude and arrogant, and I did my best to change that because I wanted you to see that I could be different. I wanted you to feel safe around me because you being worried about being around me is one of the worst things I could imagine.”

I paused for a moment, catching my breath. Speaking for so long was beginning to hurt my ribs.

“I just want you to know, now, that I’ve changed. I want to try things with you just once, and if you hate me, then we don’t have to be anything more than the friends we’ve always been. But I’ve loved you for as long as I can remember, and I just-”

She stopped me by doing something that I never expected.

She leaned forward and pressed an incredibly soft, quick, and slight kiss to my lips.

“You talk too much,” she said quietly, laughing softly at my stunned silence. “You’re right. Before this, I wouldn’t have considered dating you. I’ve had so many crushes on you over the years, but the thought of dating you always worried me because I’ve seen how you are in relationships. I’ve seen how you treat people, and I know that you probably aren’t that way anymore. But I still worry.”

I nodded sadly. She was right; I hadn’t always been the best in my relationships, and it largely came from the fact that not many of them had the spark that I was looking for.

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