by Julia Kent
“It’s fine,” Madge said. “In the morning, we’ll know so much more.”
“I wouldn’t feel right having a big party in the middle of all this,” Alex said softly.
“And Mike would be horrified to think that his injury ruined the most important day of your life!” Lydia shouted, her volume making nurses shush her. “You can’t do that to him!”
Alex reached for her shoulders and gently turned her away from the ICU door, Jeremy on her other side, the two of them ushering her away. The hysteria that tinged everything was at full throttle now, and Lydia didn’t recognize herself. Where was her cool, rational mind?
It was injured, just like Mike’s, except she didn’t have a brain bleed.
It was her heart that bled.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, as Jeremy pulled her to his chest, the fleece’s zipper scraping against her cheek. He made her walk, slowly, away from ICU, down a small hall and into a room with a few chairs and an ancient coffee pot.
“No need. You love him. I love him. We’re all freaked out.”
A warmth infused her. Jeremy had never said those words about Mike before. She knew he loved him, but this was different.
“Do you want to go back and talk to him?” she asked, the thought striking her suddenly.
Jeremy just blinked rapidly, with no expression.
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “I do.”
“I’ll stay with her,” Alex said, looking at the coffee pot with a miserable expression. It looked like molasses at the bottom. “I’ll make a fresh pot.”
Jeremy gave Lydia an extra squeeze and left. Madge took his spot against Lydia, holding her.
“He can’t die,” Lydia whispered into Madge’s shoulder, finally able to say the words to someone with Jeremy out of the room. “I love him too much. We love him too much.”
“Oh, honey. He knows. He knows.” Madge’s dry, wrinkled palms smoothed Lydia’s hair, caressing her cheek. “And he’ll be fine,” she declared.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t.”
“Then how can you say that?”
“Because it’s what you say when you don’t know.”
“Grandma,” Lydia groaned. “I don’t want to be shined on.”
“Yes, you do.”
Lydia startled. Grandma was right.
“And Alex,” Madge added. “That is one shitass coffee machine. We need to run to WalMart and get a new one as a donation. You drive here?”
“No. Rode in the ambulance.”
Madge reached inside her pocket and tossed him a set of keys. “Go to the store.” She barked out the address while reaching into her purse to take cash. “Buy a new coffee maker. Get some decent coffee and snacks. It’s going to be a long night.”
Alex gave Madge a perplexed look, but obeyed her orders. A corner of Lydia’s mouth turned up. She knew exactly what Alex felt like. Grandma had that effect on people. You just did what you were told, even if you weren’t sure why you were doing it.
And Grandma’s orders always made any situation better.
“Will do,” he said, giving Lydia a sympathetic smile as he left, leaving her in Grandma’s arms, Jeremy with Mike.
She wondered what he was saying right now.
Chapter Twenty-three
Jeremy
“You can’t fucking die, okay? That’s off the table, you asshole.”
Jeremy was glad he was alone with Mike, because he knew anyone who overheard him would think he was a sick, twisted, soulless person.
And they’d only be half wrong.
“You hear me, Mike? I know you do. You’re just playing possum. You’re doing this to get Lydia’s attention. You were complaining the other day that she spent more time with me last week. This is one hell of a way to get her to focus on you.”
Nothing. Mike’s steady breath was reassuring, but Jeremy didn’t see eye movement under the closed eyelids. Wake up, damn it.
Wake up and be Mike.
He hadn’t said a word to Lydia about his biggest fear, aside from death: brain damage. What if Mike woke up and wasn’t Mike? What if he came through all of this significantly altered? Their threesome relationship was a steady balance of personalities. The years together had forged an alliance between the three of them, checks and balances, strengths and weaknesses all carefully calibrated.
Change one person and...what? What would the future look like?
He reached for Mike’s hand, splaying his other palm against Mike’s chest, feeling a wire under the sheets and blanket. When Madge had her heart attack a few years ago, he’d been loath to come to the hospital, the reminder of his own mother’s death too much.
Now he was sitting with his best friend, his intimate partner of so many years, and it wasn’t fair.
It wasn’t fucking fair.
Jeremy had taken more than his share of risks in all his years of traveling around the world. He’d been in a bus that slid off a treacherous maintain road in Guatemala. Been jailed a few too many times in Thailand for sexual...indiscretions. He’d been mugged too many times to count in Southeast Asia and Central America, and had even been in a taxi crash that ended with chickens shitting all over his back in Peru.
He’d take every one of those moments in triplicate if he could save Mike.
“We’re reducing the sedative,” a nurse said quietly from behind him, the sound making him jump. Deep in his own thoughts—which involved curious mental images of people he’d slept with on his travels—he didn’t hear her approach.
She fiddled with some machines, a process Jeremy couldn’t even begin to understand. He’d never been good with things. He was great with code, though, and that’s how he’d made his first millions, happily stuck behind a computer screen for eighteen-hour days, writing feverishly to produce the next great tech invention.
And he’d cashed out from the dot-com boom for a life of cheap luxury.
The nurse finished up and he flashed her a grateful, tired smile, his stomach growling ferociously.
As he turned to look back at Mike, his swore he saw movement under the eyelids.
And then...nothing.
The machines whirred and hummed with precision. Mike was resting and stable. Jeremy looked at him. In repose, Mike looked so grave. So serious. Without those bright blue eyes boring into him, Jeremy couldn’t get a read on Mike. Was he in pain? Was he inside this prone body, stuck between life and death?
Or was there enough brain activity for Mike to even be able to deliberate?
Taking Alex at his word was hard. Time really was their friend now, but time had a funny way of being a little bit of a bastard.
Especially in emergencies like this.
“Wake up, damn it. I mean it. You did a good thing out there tonight. A great thing. Mike Pine is fine, thanks to you. People keep calling me a hero. I hate it. You’re the hero, Mike. You. You found him, you got him most the way up the mountain, you sacrificed yourself for him. I just bumbled along and did what you said. That’s who we are, right? You lead. I follow.”
Jeremy’s throat tightened. Fuck. He couldn’t cry. Crying was not an option.
Did Mike’s eyes flutter? He couldn’t tell as his vision blurred.
Someone behind him cleared her throat. He turned to find Lydia there, her eyes bouncing between Mike and Jeremy.
“Need company?”
“I have company,” Jeremy said pointedly, looking at Mike.
“I didn’t mean...”
“I know.” He sighed and realized his eyes were perilously close to spilling over.
Lydia’s brow lowered, then her eyes widened with surprise. “Jeremy, are you...”
“Crying?” Might as well admit to it. “Yeah.”
“Wow.”
“Just a little.”
“You don’t have to defend it.”
“If I were defending it, I wouldn’t have owned up to it.”
She peered at him. “Good point.”
�
��Mike is an ass,” he blurted out.
“Is that what you said to him?”
God, she knew him so well. Too well.
Creepily well.
“Something like that.”
“Bet it was worse than that.”
Shit. Caught.
“He needs to be told what an idiot he was, going all hero on everyone.”
“If you’re yelling at him, shouldn’t you yell at yourself?”
“What? Why?”
“Because you’re a hero, too.”
“QUIT SAYING THAT!” he rasped, sounding like a demon answering. “I can’t stand it. Why does everyone keep saying that?”
She recoiled with shock. “Why?”
“Because it’s not true! If I were a hero, none of this would have happened! He’s here with his fucking head bandaged and his brain swollen from bashing against more than one rock and he’s having seizures! Jesus, Lydia, how can people run around calling me a hero when this is the result?” He pointed at Mike, his arm outstretched, the ache in his heart bubbling up through his throat to become an angry lashing out. “What the hell?”
“Mike’s condition doesn’t make you less of a hero for acting the way you did.”
Mike’s condition makes me less of a human being, Lydia!” he groaned, letting his emotions overflow. “He’s in that bed and I couldn’t stop him from slipping and now I’m fine—fine!—and he’s a prisoner in his swollen brain and I’m here on the outside, looking at him and wondering if he’s going to leave me, too.”
“Leave you?” Her words rang in the air like a gong.
He closed his eyes, the fight in him gone, the words like a blade to the soul.
So that’s what this was about.
He was terrified of being left behind.
Again.
“Oh!” Her little exclamation made it clear she got it. “This is about your parents, isn’t it?”
She really did get him.
“I guess so,” he muttered. “I don’t really understand it.”
“Mike’s your best friend. You don’t want him to leave.”
“I don’t want him to die, Lydia. When people die, they just go. They’re gone. And you’re left alone. Completely alone. All that work—poof! Gone.”
“Work?”
“The relationship. The back-and-forth. The finding of people who are worth your time, and who think you’re worth their time, too. The tiny little disclosures that become a dance of trust. is this person worth showing the real me to? Are they going to hurt me if I reveal myself? And then the pain of rejection or the relief of understanding.”
“What does that have to do with—”
“People don’t get to that inner circle with me, Lydia. My parents were the first, but that’s because they were my parents. They loved me. Mike was the second. You’re the third. That’s it. That’s my core identity. And my parents are gone, so it’s just you and Mike.” He turned and looked at Mike. “And if you fucking die, I’ll hate you forever.”
“He can’t hear you.”
And just then, because Michael Bournham was exactly the type to prove someone wrong out of sheer determination, his eyes opened.
Alex
He had his marching orders, and as Alex walked outside to discover the rain had stopped, he took a cleansing breath. The antibacterial cream and bandages on his arm prickled with pain, but it was nothing compared to what the two Mikes were going through.
Luck had a whole new meaning to Alex tonight.
The past few hours ticked through his mind like those old flipbooks from his childhood. Josie walking in on Dylan, Mike and Laura having sex. Dragging Josie away. Calming her down. Talking to his mom about some minor wedding detail. Chatting with his aunts and grandpa. Greeting Trevor and Joe. Urging Darla to go find Josie and talk to her on the shore. Being approached by Laura and Dylan with their worry for Mike.
The search party. The cliff. Hand-pulling the rope up to get Mike Pine out of danger at the very end. The sickening feeling of watching Mike Bournham slide, foot by foot, rock by rock, down that damn cliff.
His arms throbbed with the raw memory of it all.
And then his Doctor Brain had kicked into high gear.
Alex entered a kind of magical flow when a medical emergency unfolded before him. He had no words to describe it. It just was. The concept of a being called Alex dissolved, turning him into atoms and cells that moved in concert with whatever the world demanded in order to return a situation to normal, to get an injured person back to homeostasis.
Births were different. Softer. Sweeter and more about giving nature the time it needed to unfold and let the baby come when the baby was ready. Emergencies in births made him shift instantly into medical combat mode, though, a pairing of states of self that Alex found jarring, but that got easier as time passed.
Right now, he was trying to go back to being Alex.
Whatever that meant.
“Hey. You didn’t answer my texts.” Josie appeared behind him, her voice warm on the cold wind. He turned to find her rumpled and wet, looking up at him with puppy-dog eyes that said everything he was feeling.
All he could do was reach for her. She let him, her tight hug giving him strength.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured into her hair, which tasted like the ocean. “I had to help Lydia and Jeremy with ICU, and then Madge asked me to go to the store.”
“I know. Madge found me and told me to come with you. She got Laura to go and sit with Lydia for a while, until they called Lydia in to see Mike with Jeremy. They’re all together now. And I needed to be with you.” Her voice thickened with emotion, which made his throat tighten.
“I need you, too,” he said, the words so true.
“God, Alex, what if that had been you? You pulled on the rope. One misstep and you could have gone down the hill with Mike Bournham.”
The thought never occurred to him. He let out a small sound of acknowledgment.
“And your hands.”
“Fuck my hands. I needed to help Jeremy.”
“I know.”
The “but” she didn’t say hung in the air between them, suspended by exhaustion of fears of a scenario that never happened.
To them.
But was happening to Jeremy and Lydia and Mike Bournham right this very moment.
“Is Bournham going to be okay?” He knew what she was really asking, and it just added to his sense of fatigue. People did this. They weren’t actually asking whether the patient would recover.
They were asking him to predict the future.
“I don’t know.” He answered with the truth.
She nodded. Unlike most people, Josie knew to stop there.
Over her shoulder, Alex spotted Madge’s car. “Let’s talk on the drive.” By the time they were settled in the front seat, heat blasting, Alex’s phone turned into a GPS that said the drive would be eleven minutes long, he felt more himself.
“We can’t have the wedding tomorrow,” Josie declared. “We just can’t. Not like this.”
“Mike’s determined to see it through.”
“Which Mike? Oh, wait,” Josie backpedaled. “Duh. Mike Pine. Will he be released soon?”
“Probably in the morning. He has some broken bones and scrapes, but nothing that stops him from going home after a night of observation.”
“And he still wants to have the ceremony tomorrow. Laura said he’s adamant, unless the rest of us think it would be in poor taste,” Josie whispered.
Poor taste. The image of Michael Bournham seizing in the back of the ambulance overlaid against the words as Alex drove. And yet Lydia’s anger at the suggestion that they postpone echoed what Josie was saying about Mike Pine’s wishes.
“I think we’ll have to wait for morning to know what to do.”
Josie looked at the dashboard clock. 12:49 a.m. “Morning’s coming sooner than we think.”
Alex did Time Math, a kind of calculation that anyone who works long shifts use
s constantly. “The ceremony’s supposed to be at four p.m. tomorrow. We have plenty of time.”
“We’ll be zombies at our own wedding.”
“That might not be so bad,” he joked.
“Do you care whether we have the ceremony or not?” she asked.
Alex froze. Was this one of those loaded questions where Josie had a “right” answer in mind, and he was supposed to guess? Or was this a question where his actual opinion counted?
He took a giant chance and guessed the latter. Over time, their relationship had led to more and more of his opinion counting.
“I genuinely don’t care. The wedding isn’t about the ceremony for me. It’s about being married to you for the rest of my life. We could accomplish that with a quickie courthouse ceremony. I’m fine with all the craziness of this double wedding here at this campground, but given the circumstances...” He didn’t finish the thought, the GPS interrupting him to insist he turn right.
A big WalMart sign greeted them.
“We should have just eloped,” Josie said with a sigh, reaching across the car to rest her hand on his knee. “Would have been so much easier.”
“We can’t turn back time.”
“Who are you? Cher?”
His laughter felt good as he pulled into the nearly-empty parking lot, the dull glow of store lights shining on the freshly-wet asphalt.
“What the hell does Madge have you buying, anyway?”
“Condoms. For our wedding night.”
That stopped Josie in her tracks. “WHAT?”
He smirked.
She punched his shoulder.
Maybe homeostasis could be achieved after all.
One coffee machine, two cans of ground coffee, one quart of Josie’s favorite creamer, and a variety of snack foods chosen for maximum protein and minimal sugar and they were at the checkout line, stuck behind a woman who was slow as molasses.
Josie nudged him. “Check out what she’s buying.”
A box of condoms. A jar of coconut oil. Two My Little Pony plush toys. A bag of rubber bands. A jar of Nutella the size of his head. A shrink-wrapped European cucumber.
And a giant tube of Preparation H.
