Page 103 of Together We Burn
I pressed my temple against him. “You don’t get to make me fall for you and not even let me say the words. You’re not allowed to leave me, okay? This is not how this ends. So don’t you dare die. Because I never got to say it back. I never got to say it.” A tear splashed down onto his ear, following the curve of his lobe before dropping onto the stretcher.
“I love you too, Jake. I love you.”
Surgeons were ready at the door as soon as the ambulance arrived outside the emergency room. The same EMT who had tried to move me from Jake attempted again, having grown some balls when he was surrounded by more medical staff.
“You touch me, and I swear to God, it will be you in that surgery suite for the severed finger they will be reattaching. I’m not moving.”
“That’s probably for the best, Chad,” a young female doctor in teal colour scrubs said as she approached, her voice calm and soothing like she was talking to a scared cat. “Her fingers are stopping the bleeding right now, so we will wheel them both straight into OR three, please.”
Two nurses nodded and quickly wheeled us down a long corridor and into the operating room. In a rush of movements, I was suddenly lifted off Jake, my fingers removed as commands and shouts were fired around the small suite filled with far too many people.
My pulse was erratic as I watched someone cut up the middle of his shirt, and another removed the oxygen mask covered in blood and replaced it with another. Two more medical staff were connecting wires and tubes to his body, and I stood frozen as they whirled around me like I wasn’t there.
Whooshing filled my ears. Mouths moved with no sound. Equipment was wheeled to his bed with no noise as I watched helplessly from the sidelines.
A hand on my forearm dragged my attention away from Jake’s still body, beeping, shouting, clattering filling my senses, and I winced.
“Sorry, ma’am, but you can’t be here,” she said, a sympathetic look on her face, matching the softness of her tone. “Let’s get you to our break room. You can shower and get changed into fresh clothes. I’m afraid we only have spare scrubs, so they will have to do.”
She wrapped an arm gently around my waist and guided me out of the room. My legs carried me in the direction she was taking me, too weak to fight her to be by his side the whole time. I knew I couldn’t, but leaving him felt wrong.
The shower in the staff room wasn’t great. I watched the scalding hot water, no more than a trickle, turn from red to pink to clear as it rinsed Jake’s blood from my body. A different kind of nausea swelled in my gut compared to when it was Ronan’s blood swirling down the plug and out of sight.
Turning off the water, I stepped onto the bamboo shower mat and dried myself with the rough towel the nurse had kindly left on a bench, along with a clean pair of scrubs. Quickly tugging on the clothes, I tied my hair on the top of my head and collected my soiled clothes I’d chucked in a corner, shoving them into a bin.
I glanced at the clock on the wall, the incessanttick-tick-tickinggrating on my nerves as only twenty minutes had passed since Jake had been admitted. I eyed my combat boots, dirty and scuffed, and pulled them out from under the bench where they’d been neatly stored away. Next to them were a pair of light blue Crocs.
“I’ll give these back,” I told the empty room as I swapped my boots for whosever shoes I was stealing, slipping my feet inside and heading for the door.
The corridor was busy with nurses and doctors hurrying around the ward. In the middle was a reception desk with three women busily working behind it.
I wrapped my knuckles on the desk to get their attention. One nurse with large square glasses glanced up from behind a computer and smiled.
“Can you tell me the status of Jake Weston, please?”
She hummed, clicking quickly on her keyboard, then frowned. “Who?”
Fuck. I distantly remembered the nurse who took me from his room asking me for his details, but in my stupor, I’d never given it to her.
“The man brought in with a bullet wound to the stomach.”
Her eyes widened. “Are you the one who threatened Chad with chopping his finger off?”
I grimaced, smoothing a hand on the top of my head.
“You might have just saved that man’s life by refusing to move off him,” she said, placing her hand on mine and tapping it lovingly. I flinched and pulled it out. Her shoulders slumped with pity. “I’m afraid right now there’s no news. He could be in surgery for a couple of hours. But the third door on your left is the waiting room.”
Four hours, twenty-two minutes, and fourteen seconds, and he was still in surgery.
Mac stood with his arms folded over his chest, leaning against a wall with his eyes closed. Alex, Chris, and Nate sat on plastic seats in the middle of the room, Nate watching something on his iPad while Chris snuggled him to her, her cheek resting on the top of his head. I sat on the floor, with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, staring at the speckled floor as I had done since the nurse told me where I could wait.
“Uncle Alex?” Nate’s voice broke through the voices of Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth playing from his tablet.
“Hmm?”
“Did I show you what Trigger found lodged in his bike?”
Alex shook his head, and Nate dug around in his jacket pocket, pulling something out in his clasped hands. Pressing his lips together in a tight line, he unfurled his hand. I lifted my head and watched Alex pick up a small piece of metal and hold it to the light.
