Page 97 of Riot Reunion
“Good to see you again, Wren,” Dr. Crawley says. She was here when Wren carried me into the hospital six hours ago. “Glad to see you were able to shower up and find a change of clothes. You looked…” She trails off, struggling to find the right words. He’d looked like something out of a horror movie—as if he’d just crawled up out of a gateway from hell. His skin, his hair, his clothes: there wasn’t a single inch of him that wasn’t covered in blood.
“They let me use a shower in the nurse’s lounge,” Wren says. “They loaned me these.” He gestures to the scrubs, pulling a face. “Not really my color, but…”
“I think the blue suits you. But then I’m just used to everyone wearing scrubs, so…” She laughs. “I was just telling Elodie that her shoulder should be fine. If she does the exercises we give her, she shouldn’t lose any mobility. I’ll be back later on tonight to go over your pain meds, but I’ll leave you guys to it for now.”
She leaves, and Wren paces slowly into the room, eyes fixed and locked on mine as he approaches. He looks strange. Haunted. Angry. Taking his right hand out of his pocket, he carefully reaches out and runs his index finger over my neck, barely making contact with my skin. “I was nearly too late,” he says. The timber of his tone carries a metric ton of remorse. “I’d never have forgiven myself—”
“Stop. No.” Fuck, it really hurts to speak. Each word feels like a jagged rock dragging up the back of my throat. “We’re notdoingthat. We’re both alive. Everyone else is alive.”
Wren nods, looking down at the floor. “I’m glad Presley’s going to be okay.”
“Me, too.”
“How was the police station?” I ask gingerly.
Wren scowls. “They had video footage of Fitz knocking out Alessia at a gas station in town. Hit her over the head with a tire iron, for fuck’s sake. That was enough to exonerate us from any involvement in her murder. They had no reason to keep us there as long as they did. At least it’s all done with now. I thought Pax was gonna lose his shit.”
“Where is he now?” I ask.
“About to go in and see Presley. Dash and Carrie are waiting for us in the cafeteria. We can go in to see her once Pax is done. You feel up to it?”
“Try and stop me.” The truth is that, no, I don’t feel up to it. I feel like curling into a ball and sleeping for a week, but the last time I saw Pres, she was hemorrhaging all over the place, bleeding to death. I really did think she was going to die. If I have to overcome a little exhaustion to go and see her alive and well, then that’s a price I will gladly pay.
39
PRESLEY
“It’s your choice.Your father’s very eager to get some time with you before everyone else piles in here. Your boyfriend’s been pacing the halls, though. He’s desperate to lay eyes on you. Would you like them to come in together, or have your boyfriend wait until after you’ve seen your dad?” The nurse smiles brightly, unaware that the information she’s imparting to me has hidden context. Dad pulled the nurse aside and said he wanted to come in here before Pax, because he wanted to prove that he’s more important to me than Pax. If Pax is pacing the halls, desperate to get in here, then that means he’s also biting people’s heads off and threatening violence if anybody gets too close to him. He’s probably a train wreck right now. It isn’t fair that I have to choose who I let in here first. My brain is still addled from the anesthesia, and the enormity of everything the doctor explained to me when I woke up still has me reeling. Everything just feels like too much.
“If you could send Pax in by himself first, that would be great,” I tell the nurse.
Dad’s going to be all wounded and hurt when he comes in here after Pax, but he’s just going to have to deal with it, isn’t he?
The nurse goes out into the hall, and a moment later, Pax returns alone. His tall frame seems to take up all of the space in the room. His eyes, stormy as ever, seem distant as he rubs his hand over his shaved head as he crosses the room and sits down heavily in the chair next to my bed. His‘Alice In Chains’t-shirt is rumpled, but it looks clean, at least. I know he carried me from the gazebo back to the car, even if I don’t remember him doing it. He carried me inside the hospital, too. He must have been covered in my blood at some point.
“I’m glad they let you get changed,” I say quietly. Seems like a stupid thing to say after everything that’s happened, but I have to break the silence somehow.
He snorts. “They didn’t. The house is a crime scene. We won’t be able to go back in for a while yet. This was in the gym bag I keep in the car.”
“I’m sorry,” I blurt out. “I’msosorry, Pax.”
He looks at me so intensely, a deep sorrow pooling in the silver-grey of his eyes. I expect him to say something, anything, but he just watches me, resignation pouring off him.
“For all of it,” I continue. “For not talking to you. For not trusting you to stick around through the messy stuff. For running away.Twice. For not giving you a chance to—”
“It’s fine, Chase. It’s okay.” So quiet. So pained. Ihatehearing this kind of hurt in his voice. Worse, I hate knowing that I am the cause of that hurt. Pax takes my hand in his. He leans forward, resting his forehead against the back of my hand for a second, before taking a deep breath and placing a kiss against the inside of my wrist. “It’s all in the rearview now, right? We can’t change it, so we move forward.”
“I can’t just move forward and act like I didn’t behave really terribly, Pax. I wasn’t fair to you. There’s so much to talk about.”
He chews on his bottom lip, nodding slowly, seeming to slip further and further away. “The doctor explained everything to you. About the surgery?”
“Yes,” I whisper. “I haven’t really wrapped my head around it yet. It’s a lot.” The doctor went over the details of the emergency surgery they performed on me twice, answering my questions and giving me a run-down of what they did to save me. I’ve taken it all in, but I haven’t processed it yet. Not properly. It’s going to take me a long time to fully comprehend what it might mean for me moving forward. All I know is that Pax was there for me when I needed him. He physically carried me. Emotionally carried me. And I treated him so badly. I allowed my own fears to color my judgment, and I let my father cast doubt in my mind. I know this man. I should have been honest with him from the beginning, for God’s sake. I look back on the way I handled the whole pregnancy situation, from the moment I peed on the test to waking up here in the hospital this morning, and I don’t even recognize myself in my own actions.
“I’ll never be able to get pregnant again.” I say it out loud for the first time, waiting to see how the truth of it feels, letting it sink in. I’m surprised by how badly it hurts. I was terrified when I saw that second pink line form on the test. Mindlessly so. But only because of the timing. Pax convinced me the other day in his bedroom. I hadn’t even had the chance to tell him that. He made me feel safe. Protected.Hopeful. I began to reframe it all in my mind. I’d started to look forward to a world where me and this man shared a child. And then it was all snatched away.
“I want a baby with you,” I say. “I want the life together that you could see so easily when I couldn’t. I’m never going to doubt us again, I promise.” I wish I’d seen this clearly before. There was no avoiding the suffering we’d have endured, losing this baby. It would have happened. The pregnancy was never going to be viable, no matter what. But we could have faced it earlier, head-on, together. We could have supported each other from the beginning, and I went and fucked it up.
“Chase—”
