“Forever,” I say quickly. “Until he gets better.”
“I don’t think you can.”
“I don’t care.”
If I can’t, then I will deal with this later. But for now, I’m here. And I’m staying here for good.
Minutes turn into hours and I’m still here. I sit next to his bed staring at his face and wondering how it all went so wrong. Brie stays with me even though I ask her not to. There’s no need for both of us to lose sleep. Besides, she hardly knows him. But Brie stays anyway. She buries her head in her phone and pretends to work. Apparently, she’s working on some article. I can’t remember about what.
After a while I can’t stand the wait any longer. I need a distraction. I take out my laptop, which Brie was kind enough to bring over along with some clothes and other sundries, and I check my emails. I have a number from my readers and they put a smile on my face. They’re asking when the next book in the series is coming out and tell me that they can’t wait to read it. In all the badness that surrounds me, these emails give me a glint of hope.
As the hospital quiets down for the night, I prop up my feet on the chair next to me and open the latest Auction book. I have it all outlined, but have a few chapters written. But I couldn’t work on it when I was throwing up all the time. I flip to the thriller which I started, but that doesn’t seem right now either. I’m no longer in the mood to murder any characters to make myself feel better. No, I miss thinking about love and beauty and all the things that inspired the first book. I miss hope.
I read over the outline of the next chapter and start typing. My head hurts and my eyes are barely staying open and yet I continue to type. The characters get into a big fight and take some time apart. During that time, she reminisces about the all the good times that they’ve had. Her good times are my good times. A few times, my throat closes up remembering all the laughs that Aiden and I had.
It’s going to happen again, I say to myself glancing over at him.
“Just wake up, honey, and I will be here for you. No matter what.”
Wow.
Now, there’s a statement. I mean, I’ve said that to him before, I'm sure. We all do in relationships. But do we really mean it? Do we really think that sometime in the future we might be faced with the prospect of really being there for this person? What if he’s totally helpless and dysfunctional? What if he can’t remember anything? What if he’s lost? What if he can’t take care of himself physically at all?
Would I be here for him? Can I be here for him?
I don’t really know what this means, but I know I want to. I just need him back. No matter what the condition. Back to normal would be best, of course. But I’ll take him in any way.
But is that me just being naive? I mean, I have no idea what it’s like to have a sick boyfriend to take care of. And I know that I am not the most giving person in the world. I’m quite selfish and self-centered and I don’t really know if I can or will change that. Frankly, I don’t even know if I’m capable of changing this.
For instance, I like my alone time. A lot. I like to have time to read and think. I like to have time to write and just be by myself. Not many people understand that. My mom never did. But Aiden did. And now what? What’s going to happen now? If he’s seriously injured? If he has crippling back pain? If he is in a wheelchair? What then? How will I be able to take care of him? I don’t really know. But I will try. There’s one thing I know for sure, I will do my best. I just hope that will be enough.
Chapter 13 - Ellie
When I go to the doctor…
By the following morning, Aiden’s shooting is all over the news. Reporters are waiting outside the hospital and some are even crawling around the waiting rooms, pretending to be regular visitors. I don’t really have the energy to deal with them. Nor do I really know how to deal with them. Should I tell them to leave? Will that just make it worse? Maybe I should just ignore them. They won’t go away, but they won’t have much of a story to publish.
I chose the latter. The decision isn’t exactly incorrect, but it doesn’t really solve my problem. They take pictures of me, unflattering at that, and within the hour I see myself on the cover of three online gossip magazines. Perfect. Perhaps, next time I should grant an interview and pose for the photo so I don’t look so pathetic and the headline doesn’t read ‘Aiden Black’s Girlfriend Waits for Him to Come Out of the Coma.’
In the morning, Brie comes back with some coffee and pastries from Starbucks. I ask if she’s heard anything about Blake and she says that they’re still looking for him. She talked to Officer Paulson on the phone before she came over and he didn’t really have any news for her.
“So much for that All Points Bulletin, right?” I say.
“They’re doing their best,” Brie says.
“Yes, I know they are,” I say. “I don’t know why I said that.”
“Because you’re tired and pissed off that your fiancé and the father of your unborn child is lying here in a coma while the guy who did this to him is out there running around free.”
I stare at her. “Yes, thank you very much, Brie Willoughby, for that detailed explanation and examination of my feelings.”
She flashes me a sarcastic smile. I’m about to respond with something witty when a wave of nausea comes over me. I run to the toilet, which is luckily inside the room, and throw up. After I vomit my guts out for a few minutes, my body gets the chills. More like the chills followed by intense heat. I lie down on my side on the cool floor not caring how gross it is to put my face down on the hospital floor and wrap my hands around my knees. A few minutes later, Brie comes in and helps me into the ensuite shower. I let the warm water run down my body and I feel a little bit better. But the sensation doesn’t last. I get too hot and throw up again, this time in the shower.
“Fuck,” I moan when I get out of the shower, wrapping my towel around me. Brie hands me the bottle of Diclegis pills, which seem to be doing fuck all right now.
“This really sucks,” Brie says. “I’m so, so sorry.”
I shrug and start to put my clothes back on. Just then there’s a knock at the door. The doctor I met last night, and whose name I cannot remember, comes in with a few other people. Dr. Reycook introduces herself again and introduces the residents who are there to learn from Aiden’s case. I shake their hands with my hair dripping water on the floor.
She reads over his chart and confers with the others in their white lab coats. Then she turns to me and says, “Everything seems to be okay.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“Well, we will continue monitoring him, but if he continues to improve, we will take him out of the coma in a few days.”
“He’s improving?” I ask, looking over at Aiden’s almost lifeless body.
“I know that it’s difficult to tell, but he is. His heartbeat is stronger and other vital signs are looking good, too.”
I ask her more questions, but her answers are not much clearer than that. What is a relief is that he’s apparently getting better. When they leave, I walk over to Aiden and take his hand.
“You’re going to be fine, honey,” I say through the tears. Happy tears. “You see. You’re going to be all fine.”
Brie stays with me for a while and we spend an hour watching Judge Judy without saying a word. Then, suddenly, something occurs to me.
“Oh, crap, I just remembered. I have my ultrasound appointment today. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“When?” Brie asks.
“This afternoon. But I guess I can cancel it.”
“No, don’t. It will take you away from here for a bit. Might be nice. Plus, you need to get the ultrasound sometime anyway, right?”
I shrug. I guess.
“Well, perhaps today is as good a time as any.”
Dr. Emily Bodon’s office is mysteriously located in a suite with three proctologists. I write my name on the clipboard by the nurses’ station and they hand me another clipboard with thre
e pages of questions to answer. Perfect, I think to myself. But I guess it’s something to do while I wait. I fill out the info on the clipboard. It doesn’t take long. I don’t have any diseases and am not taking any medication. I just mark NO all the way down on one long box of questions. When I turn it in, the man at the front desk points out how quickly I managed to fill out the page.
Then I sit and wait. And wait some more. A couple of women come in and are quickly taken back. I ask why they went ahead of me in the nicest way possible. I don’t want to be rude since I’m a firm believer that you get more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.
“They are here to see someone else,” the front desk guy says. I nod as if I understand, but I suspect that that’s a lie. Still, there isn’t much I can do about any of it.
A few minutes later, a nurse with a friendly look on her face and a clipboard in one hand calls my name. First, we stop by the scale. Shit. I can barely look. I’ve gotten so fat. It has only been a few weeks, but I’ve already gained so much weight. At this rate, I’m going to weigh close to two hundred pounds by the time I give birth.
“I’m getting big?” I say. It’s partly a question and partly a statement. I feel bad because she is actually considerably bigger than I am but I can’t help how crappy I feel about how I look.
“No, not at all.” She smiles. “I’ve had three kids.”
I guess her statement is supposed to make me feel better, but it doesn’t. I just feel worse. And more unattractive. I follow her to the room and she tells me to sit down and that the doctor will be with me soon. I expect to be asked to change into one of those paper gowns, but not this time. Well, that’s good I guess. I hate those things.
When she leaves, I look around. There’s a big poster of a woman’s reproductive organs on the far end next to the magazine rack. I guess it’s good that they provide magazines here in addition to the waiting room, but I hate what their presence indicates - that more waiting is involved.
Eventually, Dr. Bodon comes in. She’s a small, happy-go-lucky woman in her mid-forties. She asks me how I’m feeling and we talk a little about my vomiting. Now, there’s a topic of conversation! She doesn’t ask me about the father of the baby and I don’t volunteer any information. She wasn’t the one who prescribed me the Diclegis; that was a doctor from a different office.
“So, why did you decide to change doctors?” she asks. “Just out of curiosity.”
I shrug. I guess I could lie and tell her it was because of all those wonderful reviews I read. That’s one of the reasons I had switched, but not the main one. Her office is further away from my house and sort of inconvenient. Plus, the wait here is much longer than it was at the other place.
“Well, I was going to the Advanced Women’s Healthcare place before and they have a number of OBGYNs on rotation there. I didn’t really like the idea of not knowing who was going to deliver my baby. Plus, they have this policy there of charging you upfront when in reality my insurance is supposed to cover all pre-natal care without any copays.”
“And they were trying to charge you for that?” she asks.
I nod. “They were trying to get me to pay for everything upfront and then ask my insurance for a reimbursement. When I called the billing department at my insurance company, they said that they would cover everything and that I couldn’t prepay. So, it was getting quite complicated.”
She nods.
“So, I knew I needed a new doctor. And you had all these great reviews online,” I add. This part is true. I did like all the raving reviews, but this was not the main reason I switched. How perfect is that? Expecting mothers should always select their physicians based on their office’s insurance billing practices, right? I mean, it’s bad enough that there are some doctors that women just can’t go to because they don’t accept their insurance, but this? Man, fuck this system.
“Well, I’m glad,” Dr. Bodon says. “It took my mom a long time to write them all.”
It takes me a moment to realize that she’s joking, but when I do, I laugh. A deep loud laugh that comes from somewhere in the pit of my stomach and feels so good that, for a second, I forget about everything else in the world.
“Okay, so do you want to see your baby?” she asks. I nod yes. She turns down the lights and asks me to lie down. I pull up my shirt and she squirts something sticky onto my stomach. She presses the ultrasound wand onto my stomach and looks at the screen. Suddenly, I hear it. The heartbeat.
“Oh, wow. That sounds so fast,” I say.
“Yep, babies have a very fast heartbeat,” she says and looks back at the screen.
I glance over and see the baby’s little head and even smaller body.
“It sounds like it’s under water or something,” I say.
“Well, it pretty much is,” she says.
After moving the wand around my stomach a bit, she looks over at me. “Everything looks good. Judging from the date of your last period, you are seven weeks along.”
I nod. Wow. My baby is almost two months in utero. That’s hard to believe.
“When will I be able to know the gender?”
“If you want to find out the sex, we can probably tell you around fifteen weeks, but it’s not super accurate. Closer to twenty weeks.”
“Okay, well, that will give me some time to decide if we even want to know.”
Dr. Bodon gives me a smile and then prints out a couple of pictures from the ultrasound. These are mine to keep. I stare at them as I wait to checkout. This is my baby. My baby. Our baby. Mine and Aiden’s. That’s still so hard to believe. My heart skips a beat. You have to get better, Aiden. You just have to. You have to see your baby.
Chapter 14 - Ellie
When I stop by my apartment…
Instead of going straight back to the hospital, I decide to stop by my apartment and get a few things. A notebook to write in, a copy of The Outlander, a book I’ve been reading on and off for some time now and my iPad. I need the iPad in case I want to watch some Netflix on something other than my phone or my laptop - the phone is too small and the laptop is too unwieldy.
When I get into the lobby, I get an uneasy feeling down in the pit of my stomach. Agh, I have to take another Diclegis pill. It’s wearing off. I fish around for my keys and walk inside. I head straight to the kitchen to wash down the pill with a glass of water.
“Hello, Ellie.” A cold, familiar voice sends shivers down my spine. I know who it is without even turning around.
“Are you surprised to see me?” he asks. My shoulders scrunch up all on their own and a thick mass of tension settles just below my neck.
“What are you doing here, Blake?”
“I just wanted to come see you. You know, for old times sake,” he says. When I turn around, I come face-to-face with a disheveled man on the brink of collapse. His hair is out of control and so are his clothes. His eyes look frantic and terrified, yet mean all at the same time. He is pointing a gun at me.
“We don’t have any old times sake to share, Blake,” I say. I stand back, leaning against the kitchen counter. I don’t know what to do, but I need to come up with a plan. Fast.
“Aren’t you curious how I got here?” he asks, waving the gun around in his hand.
I shrug. I don’t know whether it’s best to agree with him or to argue.
“What are you doing here, Blake?” I repeat my original question.
“I heard that the cops are looking for me. You know, for shooting Aiden. How is he again?”
His question pierces me through my heart. How dare he ask me about Aiden? How dare he say his name at all?
And then, all out of the blue, I have an idea. My purse is the crossover kind and it’s draped behind me. I turn away from him slightly so that he can’t see what I’m doing from behind the kitchen island. When I’m certain that he can’t see me, I reach in and bury my hand inside. I search for my phone.
“He’s fine,” I say. “No thanks to you.” I say these words, but my thoughts
go back to my phone and the task at hand. All I need to do is remember how to turn the recorder on. I just looked it up a few days ago. I thought it might be a good idea to record my outline for my writing rather than typing it out. Okay, now, try to remember, Ellie. You did it before. What buttons did you press?
“Oh, c’mon,” Blake says, taking a few steps toward me. “You’re not really mad about that.”
To record, I have to open the Voice Memos app. I try to remember where it was visually on the screen because I can’t exactly look down and find it without him noticing.
“You don’t think I should be?” I ask.
Blake turns away from me. Quickly, I look down at my phone and press on the App Store button. Then I search for Voice Memo and press open.
“How did you get in here?” I ask, pressing on the big red button to record. Just as I drop the phone back into my purse and press my hands on the island for him to see them, Blake says, “Oh, you know, it’s amazing what you can find on YouTube these days.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugs. “One of your nice neighbors let me in when I told them that I forgot my key and then I picked your lock.”
“You picked my lock? How?”
“I watched a few YouTube videos. Not all of them are useful, you know. Some are total crap.”
I take a deep breath. I have no idea what’s going to happen, but at least I’m recording it. Now, I need to think of a way out of this.
“You shot Aiden,” I say. “Didn’t you?”
“Of course, I did,” Blake says nonchalantly. “I mean, who the hell do you think shot him?”
My heart sinks to the bottom of my stomach. The way he just admitted that. There’s a desperation in his voice. And that’s never a good thing to hear.
“I can’t believe you just said that,” I say before I get a chance to catch myself.
“It’s the end, Ellie. There’s no reason to lie at the end.”
Auctioned to Him Book 8 Page 17
