Falling Into You: The Complete Naughty Tales Series

by Nicole Elliot

  I indulged Dean because I wanted to, and the end result was the uncontrollable passion I felt whenever I was in his presence.

  That’s an interesting interpretation, and it makes sense. So if passion is the byproduct of something, then what made you want to choreograph fashion shows in the first place?

  It’s beauty and organization.

  That would make sense, especially after what you did to my apartment.

  Do you like it? I thought our weekend together went well.

  Oh, it went very well, Ivy.

  My cheeks flushed at his comment as my thumb flew across my phone screen.

  I’m glad you got a sturdier couch. You’re a big boy. You need furniture made from real wood. Not that plywood shit they sell in places nowadays.

  Maybe we could test it out this weekend. See how it holds up.

  Oh, a challenge. I like those. Do I get dinner beforehand?

  Anything you want, Ivy.

  I finished off my second bowl of cereal before I put it in the sink. If Grace was still living with me, she would’ve gotten on me about putting it straight into the dishwasher. She was nothing, if not a clean freak. Something I knew jived well with Hayden and his meticulous ways. I could still remember their wedding. Simple and elegant, and every bit as much her as it was him. The same was true for Emilia and Tristan. I’d looked out for those two while they were swept up in their own romances. I didn’t want them being blinded by the money their now-husbands touted around. They were strong women that deserved the best, and I made it my personal mission to make sure they had the best.

  I opened my eyes and sighed as I was met with my empty apartment.

  I wanted that for myself. My own happy ending. I wanted a man to wake up to. A man who took care of me, even when I asked him not to. Suddenly, my heart was filled with an emptiness I couldn’t control. A loneliness that clenched my heart and made it hard to breathe. I thought about the happiness my friends had found and I thought about how I struggled so much in my love life. Zander and Grant. The two exes that had reeled me in before spitting me out.

  What if Dean did the same thing?

  It brought tears to my eyes to think about. I tried to catch my breath as my hands began to shake. I closed my eyes and tried to center my mind. Tried to reel myself back in from the cliff I was nose-diving from. It was a secret I kept to myself. How badly my anxiety could balloon. I’d always been the strong one. The wise one. The friend everyone went to when they needed help or advice or guidance. And I loved it. I loved being the person everyone could trust and lean on.

  But it came at an exorbitant cost.

  I heard my phone vibrating, but it sounded far away. I clenched my chest, trying to straighten out my torso. Panic attack. I was having a panic attack. I’d only had a handful in my life, but I knew they were caused by my trains of thought. When my mind took a road my body wasn’t willing to entertain. Or cope with.

  The idea of Dean being like them.

  The idea of Dean not being there.

  I laid down onto the cool linoleum tiles of my kitchen floor. I needed to calm down. I struggled through my breathing. Through my shaking. Through the ache rising up in my bones. Images of Dean yelling at me. Cursing at me. Drifting away from me. It all filled my mind. Things I’d never experienced with him pummeled my vision, casting shocks of anxiousness throughout my system. My rational mind knew better. My soul knew better.

  But I couldn’t get my heart under control.

  It had been broken so many times with death and destruction and heartache. It had learned to withstand the colossal storms I’d weathered throughout my life. It had lived through unspeakable losses and dragged me through black storms I couldn’t see through.

  It couldn’t comprehend the idea of a happy ending.

  It was convinced this would all blow up in my face.

  I pressed my palms into the floor and arched my back. Opening up my diaphragm so it could get as much air as possible. The shaking was subsiding and my tears were finally drying up. My heart rate was settling back down and my breaths were no longer jumping. Were no longer broken. I drew in air through my nose and released it through my mouth. I thought about my next runway show in London. The choreography I’d created for the last fashion show I had done. I thought about possibly having another bowl of cereal or making myself a sandwich or going out for a drive.

  Dean.

  I thought about Dean.

  And his text message came alive in my mind.

  I rose my weakened body from the floor and reached for my coat. I tossed it over my shoulders and grabbed my keys, fumbling with them as I slipped my flip flops on. I could visit Dean at work. Maybe bring him another cup of grossly-black coffee. I could see him with my own two eyes and prove to my scarred heart that he was still there. Still willing to smile at me and take me in his arms.

  I reached for my phone and sent a text message to Dean before I stuffed it into my pocket. I left my apartment, locking it behind me as I stepped out. Relief cascaded through my veins. The fresh air filled my nostrils and exposed me to a renewed sense of vigor. I felt strong. Rooted again after such a blatant attack. And I smiled at the idea of seeing Dean soon.

  For so long, I’d been alone.

  And I didn’t want to be alone anymore.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Dean

  “Code blue, incoming!”

  “I need two pints of O-positive blood and another I.V. in her left hand.”

  “Prep the O.R.!”

  “Doctor Anderson!?”

  I rushed down the hallway towards the gurney rolling as lightning speed. There was a hand hanging off the side of the bed and a team of nurses jogging alongside it. There was a substantial amount of blood on the sheets the patient was lying on, so I placed my stethoscope in my ears and readied myself for the torrid of information about to head my way.

  “Victim is a blonde female. Approximately twenty-seven years old. Car crash downtown coming out of a coffee joint. Had to be revived in the ambulance, has sustained head trauma and massive blood loss. Possible fractured ribs, a broken nose-”

  The second my eyes fell onto her, everything faded into the background. The green ends of her hair. That distinct pout to her lips. Even though her face was covered in blood and bruises from what I assumed was the airbags of her car, her identity was unmistakable.

  “Ivy,” I said with a whisper.

  “Doctor Anderson?”

  “Yes, what?” I asked.

  “We have to get this woman into surgery. Now.”

  I ran in front of the head of her gurney as we slammed through doors. We wheeled her into a room where we quickly prepared her for surgery. I wiped the blood off her face. Set her nose and braced it. Checked her ribs to make sure they hadn’t punctured through the skin or fractured back and punctured her lung. I opened her eyes and flashed a light into them, watching her pupils dilate.

  Watching them move crashed relief through my veins.

  “Blood pressure’s 132 over 80. We have to get her in now and relieve the fluid on her brain. It’s going to throw her into shock.”

  “Set a tube at the base of her skull,” I said. “Her ribs don’t seem to have punctured anything, but she’s got blood pooling in her stomach.”

  I kept my hands steady and as reset her I.V.’s. Blood was being rushed into the operating room and a surgeon was scrubbing in. A small trickle of red slid from her lips and I blinked back tears. My Ivy.

  What in the world had she done?

  I passed her off to the nurses and they rolled her into the room. I stood there, watching the door slam shut, leaving me in the dark. I felt my world tilting. I felt my legs growing numb. I walked in a haze back to the emergency room and clocked out for my lunch break before I went to go sit in the waiting room. I knew the surgery would take more than one hour. Especially if they had to chase a bleed around. But I wasn’t hungry and I wasn’t tired and I couldn't think of anything else to do.

  A
ll I could do was recount my conversation with Ivy in my head.

  Such a shame. Someone should come in with something bloody and interesting. You know, to keep your spirits up.

  Or you could come visit me. I’ve got a ten-minute break coming up.

  Are you asking me to come to work to give you a quickie?

  Not what came to mind, but now that you mention it…

  My jaw trembled as I put my face in my hands. Holy shit, had Ivy been coming to see me? A coffee joint. Why the fuck would she need a coffee joint so close to midnight? I felt my world caving around me. I felt sick to my stomach with guilt. Those four text messages kept rolling around in my mind, taunting me with a sorrow that took hold of my throat. I raked my hands down my face and sighed, relinquishing myself to the anger I felt bubbling in my chest.

  This was my fault.

  Ivy had been in an accident, and it had been all my fault.

  “Doctor Anderson?” Mary asked.

  “Yes?” I asked as I looked up.

  “There’s a child in the E.R. with a broken leg. We could use your help. You know, since you’re so good with kids.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I’ll be there in a second.”

  “Do you know her?” she asked as she nodded down the hallway.

  She was talking about Ivy.

  “We’re familiar,” I said.

  “She’s in the hands of the best surgeon we have.”

  “And you know as well as I do that good hands only get a surgeon so far.”

  I gritted my teeth and grimaced at how sharp my tone was.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sounds like you two are a little more than familiar,” Mary said.

  “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  “Then come get your mind off it,” she said. “Come help this little kid. You can’t do anything until she’s out of surgery anyway.”

  So I gave into Mary’s words and headed back to the E.R.

  I set the boy’s leg and got him into a cast. The mother was completely distraught. The young boy got up because he wanted a glass of water and tripped going down the steps. Just something that happens with kids sometimes. I released them with instructions on how to deal with the cast and how to wash him down at night, then I scheduled them for a check-up within the walls of the hospital. Patient after patient filed through. Raging fevers. Allergies. Unexplainable pains with no diagnosis other than ‘you just wanted drugs’. Routine things I dealt with on a daily basis at Bellevue.

  Four hours ticked by before Mary came and found me.

  “She’s out of surgery.”

  And those four words sent me running through the halls of the hospital.

  I ran to the operating room and saw the surgeon scrubbing out. And the sheer amount of blood on his scrubs worried me. He wiped his hands off and turned around, looking at me before a set of doors opened behind me. I whipped around and saw Ivy being rolled down the hallway. I went to go follow her and felt a hand come down onto my wrist, so I turned around.

  And came face-to-face with her surgeon.

  “Doctor Anderson.”

  “Doctor Lively. Is she all right?” I asked.

  “I can’t technically talk about that unless it’s with family,” he said. “You know that.”

  “She doesn’t have any family,” I said. “She’s… she’s like me.”

  He sighed and shook his head before he cleared his throat.

  “I can’t tell you,” he said. “You’re not family. But you are a doctor in this hospital.”

  He raised his eyebrows before he walked past me and I knew what he was referring to. I raced over to the nurse’s station and requested a tablet to look up her chart, then held my hand out to signal that I needed it quickly. The nurse quirked an eyebrow at me before she set the tablet into my hand and I immediately opened her file. I scanned her vitals. The notes the doctor took during surgery. My eyes walked me through everything they did, and with each word my stomach sank.

  Severe concussion.

  A tubal at the base of her skull to drain fluid.

  Four fractured ribs that needed pins.

  Three pints of blood.

  Three cauterized major arteries severed because of the fractured ribs.

  But there was one small sentence that caught my eye and made me hold my breath. One sentence that forced me to understand the sheer emergency I was facing with Ivy.

  ‘Patient is unresponsive to outward stimuli.’

  Holy shit.

  Doctor Lively thought she was in a coma.

  I scanned her brainwave analysis before I handed the tablet back to the nurse. Then I rushed down the hallway and stuck my head in every single recovery room until I found her. There she was, with a swollen face, bruised skin, and a pale facade. She had tubes running in and out of every orifice she donned, and the sight was sickening. I walked into the room and sat in a chair next to her, frightened by the action I wanted to take. The action I needed to take. I knew what I had seen when she came in. Her pupils had been responsive to the light I shined in her eyes.

  My hands shook as I removed the light from my pocket and stood to my feet.

  Gently, I pried her bruised eye open. Her silent stare gazed back at me and I had to choke back tears. I clicked the light on and whipped it by her gaze, but nothing happened. She didn’t blink. Didn’t move.

  And her pupil didn’t dilate.

  I quickly opened the other eye and did the same test. Over and over again, hoping I would see her respond in some way. This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. It wasn’t possible for this to be happening. Time after time, I flashed her eyes with my light. Time after time, I begged her to respond. Tears welled in my eyes as my forehead fell to hers, and the light I was holding between my fingers fell to her bed.

  “Ivy,” I said breathlessly. “Please wake up.”

  I dropped back down into my seat and put my head in my hands. I had no idea what I was going to do. I had a shift to work and Ivy was up here alone. Battling this all by herself. My beautiful, precious angel. With a selfless heart and a soul as strong as granite. I planted my elbows onto my thighs and sighed into my skin. It was still hard to wrap my head around. I was just talking with her. Just joking with her about quickies and talking about passion and what that all meant to her.

  Such benign topics.

  I fell back into my seat.

  I slipped my hand into my pocket and pulled out my phone. I was about to call down to the emergency room and tell them to initiate on-call procedure. I couldn’t leave Ivy like this. I couldn't let her ride this out alone. She had no one else. I had no one else. I cared for her. Longed for her. Thought about her during all of the free seconds of my day. I couldn't leave her side. Not for my job. Not for my stomach. Not for anything.

  But a missed text message caught my eye and I held my breath.

  ‘Text message from Ivy’

  Ivy with the little rose beside her name.

  Did I dare open it? Could I handle what was in there? My eyes panned back up to her face and I felt guilty. There she was, battling for her life. Battling to open her eyes. Battling to come back to the world. And I couldn't open a fucking text message and read her words to me.

  I unlocked my phone and pulled up the text message before tears fell down my cheeks.

  Hope you’re ready for that quickie. I’ll get us some coffee, too.

  My phone slipped from between my fingers and the entire world fell silent. I tilted. Everything tilted. Everything was shoved off its axis. My stomach rolled with nausea and my eyes filled with tears. She had been coming to see me. She had been picking that coffee up for me. For us. My body wavered in my seat. It became hard to breathe. My ears stopped working and my body went numb and soon, someone was flashing a light in my own eyes. Dilating my own pupils. Setting an I.V. in my own hand before I finally came back to reality.

  The patient is unresponsive to outward stimuli.

  That was the kind of com
a doctors feared.

  That was the kind of coma doctors hated. Because out of all of the comas on the Glasgow and Rancho Los Amigos scales, that was the coma that was the hardest to come back from.

  “Doctor Anderson, can you hear me?”

  I looked into the eyes of Mary before another tear rushed down my cheek.

  “Dean,” she said. “Can you hear me?”

  There was a chance my Ivy wouldn’t wake up.

  “Does anyone know how they know one another?” she asked.

  There was a chance Ivy would never come back from this.

  And all because I asked her to come visit.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Ivy

  “No, she has no family to alert. It’s just her,” Dean said. “Which is why you need to talk to me. I’m all she’s got.”

  “How do you know her?”

  “We’ve been seeing one another for about three weeks now.”

  “Doctor Anderson, you know how this looks to me.”

  “I know how it looks, but there is no other person,” he said. “She’s got friends I can try to get in touch with, but no family. Talk to me, damn it. What’s going on with her?”

  “Dean-”

  “Please.”

  Talk to him, doctor. It’s okay. He takes good care of me. You have my permission.

  “She sustained serious trauma to her head, Dean. She was barely responsive in the ambulance. The dilation of her pupils you witnessed was probably a simple medical phenomena. And even then, none of the paramedics wrote down in their notes that she was responsive to outside stimuli. And she wasn’t in the O.R. either.”

  “I know what I saw, Doctor.”

  “And I trust you. You’re one of the best doctors we have at this hospital. But now that I know about your emotional attachment to her, you can see why I’m wary of taking it into consideration. She’s been out for four days, Dean. The anesthesia has beyond worn off.”