by C. Morgan
“You’re going to be okay, Brysen,” she said soothingly, reassuring me as the distant drone of sirens became audible. “They’re almost here. You’re going to be okay.”
My entire body ached, but I managed to turn my head against the backrest of the seat to look at her. “You really think so? Because I feel like shit.”
“I really think so.” At least she sounded confident, even if I couldn’t be sure if she was lying. “The paramedics will check you out and take you to the hospital. I’m not just saying that you’re going to be okay. I believe it. You’re going to be fine. I’ve got you, Brysen. I’m right here. I’ve got you.”
Her words washed over me like a balm. It was the kind of thing I’d usually laugh at or run from, but I didn’t want to do either of those things right now. Even if I could’ve, I wasn’t sure I would’ve.
“They’ll be here soon,” she murmured again, then kept talking as if she was determined to do it until the ambulance arrived. “I don’t know if you know this, but paramedics are actually really cool. They get to be out on the front lines and in the field. They’re the emergency responders who have to think on their feet to save patients and they have to do it without all the fancy tools we have at our disposal in a hospital.”
“That is cool,” I whispered, but my head was spinning faster now and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t blink her into focus anymore. “Hey, Ruby?”
“Yeah?”
“I think I’m going to pass out again,” I said. “Stay with me until they get here, will you?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she promised.
For some reason, I trusted her to keep that promise even though I didn’t know her very well. She struck me as the kind of person who kept her word, which was very fucking comforting right now.
The last thing I felt before the darkness I’d been fighting to keep at bay closed in was her fingers brushing over my knuckles. “I’m right here, Brysen. I’ll stay with you, but you’re going to be fine. Don’t worry about a thing. I’ve got you. I’ve got this. Relax now, okay? I’m right here.”
I breathed out slowly and let the heavy weight of the darkness crush me. Ruby’s here. She’ll tell them what happened. I’m going to be fine.
Chapter 11
RUBY
Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Please don’t let him die. I promised he’d be okay. Please let him be okay.
Freaking out, I paced the length of the hospital waiting room over and over again. Being on the scene of an accident and everything that had followed had been the first of so many things for me and with the patient being Brysen Burke to boot, it’d really thrown me for a loop. My heart had nearly jumped out of my chest when I’d realized I recognized the bloodied driver. I knew there were potential conflicts about treating someone you knew, but I didn’t think they quite applied in this case.
For starters, I hadn’t actually treated him. I’d just taken stock of his injuries and then I’d tried to keep him calm until the professionals arrived.
When they’d finally gotten there, which had felt like hours later, I’d told them what I’d observed about his condition and that was it. I wasn’t sure exactly how it’d happened, but I’d ended up in the ambulance with them after they’d loaded him up.
And so here I was. In the waiting room, covered in Brysen’s blood, and worried sick about a boy I hardly knew or liked.
While the covered in his blood thing was more than a little gross, I wasn’t as freaked out about that as I was about the situation we were in. Well, the situation he was in.
As soon as we’d arrived at the hospital, he’d been rushed in for surgery. I didn’t know what kind of surgery or what the extent of his injuries were, but I knew enough to know it was bad.
Everything had happened so quickly and it’d been messier than I ever could’ve imagined, but I hadn’t let it deter me. Which I was proud of myself for.
At first, I’d thought it was only his head bleeding but it hadn’t been. Not by a long shot. It turned out that in this round of machine vs. tree, the tree had been the last one standing. The car had looked wrecked to me but it, in turn, had wrecked Brysen.
Shattered glass had covered him from head to toe, and a lot of the blood had come from little cuts all over his face and arms. But that wasn’t what worried me the most, nor had it been the cause of most of the blood.
Bone had been sticking out of his leg. I knew for sure he needed pins in his femur and possibly even in his hip to put everything back in place. It’d looked like a part of his left leg might’ve been crushed under the dash and if there had been internal bleeding as well, that could cause some serious problems.
It was surreal to think that my first experience with anything like this had happened in the middle of the night in front of the library of all places—which I thought of as my safe space. Or used to think of as that, anyway.
But the worst part of it had definitely been knowing the victim.
God, what a shock. It’d been awful then and it was awful now. Especially since all I could do was wait around to find out if he really would be okay.
I didn’t like the guy, but I didn’t want him to die. I also didn’t want him to lose a leg or any of the other horrifying scenarios that’d been running through my brain since they’d rushed him past me on that gurney.
A surgery like that could take hours, though. It’d already been a couple, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave. Not before I knew what was going on. Besides, the nurses had told me to stay put in the waiting room.
I was pretty sure it was only because they assumed I was his girlfriend, but I hadn’t argued. It felt wrong to leave him alone while he was being operated on anyway. I’d promised him I’d stay with him, and I felt obligated to keep that promise. I sure as heck would’ve liked knowing that there was someone in the building who actually knew my name and not just my condition if I’d been the one in surgery.
For a brief minute just after they’d wheeled him away, I’d considered calling Hadley. At the very least, she could’ve brought me a change of clothes that wasn’t soaked in blood, but then I’d decided against it.
She was probably still with Daxton and given his recent altercation with Brysen, I doubted either one of the boys would’ve liked being near the other. In the end, though, that wasn’t what had tipped the scales for me.
The truth was that I just didn’t feel like talking to anyone right now. Not even to my best friend. I didn’t want to have to explain what’d happened or to relive what I’d seen by describing his injuries again. Once had been enough and besides, it’d been necessary that time considering I’d had to tell the paramedics what’d happened.
So no. I’d fill Haddie in later.
Those clothes she could have brought would have been nice, but I’d made do as best I could with what I’d found in the ladies room. I’d scrubbed the blood off my skin and out from underneath my fingernails. I’d even managed to get it off my shoes. It’d dried on my clothes by now, but I had plenty more scrubs where these had come from.
The hours blurred into one another while I waited for news. Too many cups of terrible coffee from the pot in the corner of the room later, a doctor finally came in.
“Are you...” he trailed off as his eyes dropped down to the chart he was carrying. “Ms. Sprite? I’ve got an update on your boyfriend, a Mr. Brysen Burke?”
“Yeah.” I cleared my throat as I dropped the empty Styrofoam cup I’d been holding into the trash and hurried over to him. “Yes. That’s me. Ruby Sprite. How is he? Is he out of surgery yet?”
Just as I’d done with the nurses earlier, I let him assume that I was the girlfriend. It was the only way I’d get any information, and I definitely hadn’t just spent all that time waiting only not to be told anything.
The doctor was an elderly man I recognized as a surgeon by his scrubs and apparel. He smiled kindly at me, but it was a thin, apologetic smile too.
“Since you’re not next of kin, I can�
��t tell you too much,” he said. “What I can tell you is that he’s out of the woods.”
“Oh, thank God.” The words whooshed out of me, but I was so relieved that I didn’t even care that I’d even sounded like his girlfriend for a second there. “Thank you, Doctor. I know you can’t tell me everything, but his recovery? Will he be okay, or...”
When I let the sentence hang without finishing it, he nodded. “Eventually, he will be okay but it won’t be for a long time.”
Sympathy darkened his eyes when he reached out to give my forearm a reassuring squeeze. “It’s going to be a long road to recovery, I’m afraid. He’s going to need physiotherapy and a lot of determination and patience, but he’ll survive.”
I sighed, but nodded. Even with my relatively limited knowledge of the way these things usually went in real life and outside of textbooks, I’d expected that even if he got through surgery really well, he’d be facing an uphill battle to get back to the shape he’d been in before.
“Thank you,” I said again before continuing cautiously. “Do you know what caused the crash?”
There was a reason I was asking this a little more hesitantly than I had my previous questions. While I’d been out here stewing over what’d happened and whether he’d be okay, I’d replayed every minute of it in my head. I’d thought about hearing those tires screeching before he’d slammed into the tree.
There hadn’t been another car anywhere near him. No car, no movement, and nothing that could’ve caused him to swerve or spin out. The road was straight leading up to where the crash had happened and, except for the snow, there was nothing hazardous about that stretch at all.
While I’d considered the snow, it seemed unlikely that it by itself could have caused the accident. As far as I knew, Brysen had been born and bred around here just like me. It stood to reason that he’d be as familiar with the white stuff as I was. Which also meant that I knew how perilous driving on it could be, but it just didn’t quite add up to me under the circumstances.
Unless he’d been drinking or something. And that was what I was afraid of. I hadn’t smelled any alcohol on him, but that didn’t make me much less worried about it.
The doctor shrugged. “We found a brain bleed that we suspect might have happened before the accident. It just doesn’t seem to correspond to any of the other, more obvious injuries that occurred this evening. It’s difficult to be sure, though. He would’ve had to have hit his head pretty hard to have caused something like that.”
My stomach dropped my shoes. I didn’t know how much to tell him, but also knew he needed to know. “Brysen was in a bar fight last night. He might’ve hit his head hard enough to have caused it. It got pretty out of control.”
The older man nodded knowingly. “That could very well have been it. We suspect he lost consciousness behind the wheel. It was an innocent mistake considering there was no way he could have known about the bleed or what could happen, but the kid is lucky he didn’t kill himself or hurt anyone else.”
“Very lucky,” I just about breathed. Stupid boys and their stupid fighting.
“Now,” the doctor said, shaking off the revelation about the possible cause of the crash, “Mr. Burke will be waking up soon. It’s good for patients to see a familiar face when they wake. It helps them come to and to understand what’s happened. Can I show you to his room?”
Taken aback by the unexpected offer, I nodded. It would look way too suspicious if the dutiful girlfriend who’d hung around all night suddenly fled when her supposed boyfriend was going to be waking up.
One day, I might end up working in this hospital. I knew it was unlikely they’d remember me when the time came, but I didn’t want to give anyone any reason to look at me twice. It was a learned behavior, given how good I’d gotten at keeping my head down.
“Sure,” I said, nervous and knowing that this really wasn’t my place. “I’m right behind you.”
As I followed the doctor down the clinically white corridors and past a nurse’s station, I chewed on the inside of my cheek, wondering if this was a mistake. Maybe I can just take off once he leaves me in the room.
Even as I thought it though, I knew I wouldn’t go through with it. That promise was really coming back to haunt me now. I couldn’t leave him to wake up alone regardless of the fact that he was an asshole.
The doctor showed me to a small, private room at the end of a hallway. He told me he’d be back to check on my boyfriend again later, and then pushed the door open for me to enter the dimly lit space beyond.
Nerves skittered across my skin as I walked in. Alone and definitely out of place.
Brysen was lying on a hospital bed with the headboard pushed up against one of the walls. There were monitors quietly beeping around him and a long light in the panel that all the medical equipment and monitors were plugged into.
With the main lights in the room off and the curtains in front of the outer windows and into the corridor on the other side drawn, that and the screens of the monitors were the only light in the room. It illuminated him in a ghostly kind of hue.
My heart constricted when I saw how pale he was. His black hair was matted and mostly stuck to his head, except for a few places where it stood up in all directions. There were bandages around his forehead and in places around his arms, and his cheeks seemed sunken in this light. Since the covers were pulled up to his chest, I couldn’t see much more than that but I suspected his lower body would make for even more of a sight right now.
Dear heavens, he really doesn’t look good.
All my misgivings about staying fled when I saw him lying there like that, alone and unconscious in a hospital bed after a major surgery. Sighing softly, I resigned myself to staying despite the nerves and settled in the chair by his side.
As the doctor had predicted, it wasn’t long before he started regaining consciousness. When he did, I leaned forward and swiped my tongue across my lips. “Brysen? Can you hear me?”
“Of course I can fucking hear you,” he grunted, his voice even raspier than it’d been before. “Water. Get me some water.”
Well, he’s still an asshole. So there’s that.
Getting up, I poured him a small cup of water from the jug on his nightstand, then tried to bring it to his lips. One of his big hands came up—albeit slowly—to take it from me. “I’m not a child. I can drink it by myself. What happened? Why am I in the hospital?”
I answered all his questions, telling him everything that’d happened earlier as well as everything the doctor had told me. It didn’t take a genius to see he was pissed by the time I was done and, not surprisingly, he took that anger out on me.
“What the fuck are you still doing here?” he asked. “Just had to stay to see me finally get what’s been coming to me?”
I rolled my eyes at him, not about to cut him any slack just because he was grumpy coming out of anesthesia. “Yeah. That’s got to be it. I stayed in the hospital all night just so I could see karma come back to bite you.”
Before he could reply, I stood up and looked directly into his blackened eyes as I leaned over him. “Get better, Brysen. I’m sure you’ll be back to terrorizing the rest of us in no time. You’re right. I don’t actually know what the fuck I’m still doing here.”
As I turned to leave, three people filled the doorway. One man, a woman, and a teenage girl. Since the man and woman were around my parents’ age, I assumed they were his parents. Judging by the way the girl rushed past me to his side, I was guessing she was his little sister.
“Brysen,” the man growled his name from the doorway before he stalked into the room, completely ignoring me. “What the fuck have you done now?”
Okay, that’s definitely my cue to leave. I hadn’t been sure if his family would want to talk to me before I did, but I wasn’t about to stick around to find out.
“Excuse me,” I muttered, skirting my way around them as I darted out of the room.
Once I hit the hallway, I was relieved to
finally be able to get back to my room until I heard his father laying into him. What the heck?
The man’s raised voice carried, and I saw several of the nurses exchanging glances, looking as confused as I was that anyone would climb into their injured son the way he was. Since it didn’t concern me, I kept right on walking and even upped my pace a little.
As I walked out onto the sidewalk into the chilly, predawn air, I felt the last thing I ever expected to feel for Brysen Burke. Pity. Pity, and maybe even just a little bit of understanding about why he was as troubled as he was.
Chapter 12
BRYSEN
Lying there, helpless and in this dull kind of pain that no medication could take away, I took my father’s rage. I’d known it was coming and I knew that the best thing to do was to shut up and let him get it all out.
Nothing he said was unexpected, but it was surprising even to me that he was letting me have it when they didn’t even know how I was doing. Or maybe they did know. Maybe they’d spoken to my doctor on their way over here.
Either way, I wasn’t about to interrupt him to ask when he was so clearly on a roll. Emily was in tears next to my bed, but she kept her sobs quiet. She knew better than to do anything to grab his attention right now.
While she was his golden girl, there were times when even she wouldn’t be safe from his rage. And this was one of those times.
My mother didn’t even seem to be listening. She stood stiffly in front of the window, her one hand resting on the curtains and keeping them open just far enough that she was able to see out. I wasn’t sure she’d even glanced at me directly since she’d come into the room.
