Ezra sniffed wetly. The nurse approaching with a tray gave Jesse a look, and he shook his head.
“We’re fine,” he mouthed.
She gave him a sympathetic nod, set the tray on the side table and snuck away again.
“Come on, sweetheart,” Jesse murmured into that fine fair hair. “Even if you do lose it, you’re alive. And I’m here, aren’t I? No matter what, I’m here.”
Ezra heaved a deep, shaking breath and whispered, “Couldn’t do this without you, Jess.”
Jesse swallowed against the lump in his throat and breathed out through his nose.
“S’why I’m here,” he managed, and untangled them. “Come on. Lunch. The cup of tea lady said if you manage all three meals today you can come off the drip, and I’m sick of trying to hug you around that line.”
Ezra offered a wet smile, eyes still shimmering like liquid, but settled awkwardly back and let Jesse set the tray across his lap. He picked at the food rather than really stuck in, but it slowly disappeared, and when the same nurse passed on another round, she gave Jesse an approving look.
“The doctor will be up in half an hour or so,” she said when she came to remove the empty tray, and Ezra grimaced.
“It’ll be fine,” Jesse said. “You know what I thought when I first saw you in the car?”
“What?”
“I thought you’d broken your back,” Jesse said. “I was imagining, you know, wheelchairs and a new house and all sorts. So, from my point of view—”
“I get it,” Ezra mumbled, squeezing Jesse’s hand. “Thanks,” he added after a moment, and sighed. “Just—for being here.”
“Always,” Jesse promised.
Twenty minutes later, a doctor appeared, one Jesse hadn’t yet seen—tall, red-haired, and, although he must have been forty-five if he was a day, very good-looking in a confident, refined sort of way.
“Mr Pryce,” he greeted brightly. “And, ah—” He checked his notes. “Can I assume you’re Mr Dawkins?”
“Jesse.”
“Your mother a wild west fan, then?”
Jesse snorted. “They told her I was going to be a girl.”
“Oh dear.” The doctor smiled. “Well…” He flipped over a couple of sheets of paper. “I’m Dr Yates. I’ll be handling your treatment from now on, Mr Pryce, and arranging things with other departments. What news would you like first? The excellent, the good, or the bad?”
Ezra’s grip tightened alarmingly on Jesse’s hand and the colour drained out of his face. Jesse wrapped both hands around Ezra’s fingers and squeezed them back as much as he could before saying, “Start with the best and work our way down, maybe?”
Ezra simply nodded.
“Well,” Dr Yates said cheerfully, “your liver function is back up to normal, looks like you’ve got no permanent damage there, and Dr Anwar and I are both of the firm opinion that you’re not in line for any more surgery for the moment.”
“So—”
“You’re not going to lose your leg,” he clarified kindly.
Ezra sagged back against the pillows bonelessly. Jesse lost control of his smile and leaned over to hug him and hide it in his shoulder. Ezra was trembling faintly, but for once, neither of them cared.
“Oh, thank God,” Ezra breathed suddenly, and sniffled. A tear escaped. Jesse brushed it away and kissed his cheek. “Jesus, thank you.”
“Thank the surgical team,” the doctor said. “If not for Dr Anwar, I have no doubt you would have lost it, and on the table, too. But she’s an excellent surgeon. She’s written in her report a recommendation that you don’t have the metal rods taken out, however, and she can’t vouch for the functionality of your knee. The ligament damage was somewhat extreme.”
“I’ll take what I can get,” Ezra croaked, and wrapped both arms around Jesse’s shoulders, hiding his face. Jesse had the distinct idea that the tears had won.
“What’s the rest of it?” Jesse asked.
“That’s the good news,” Dr Yates said. “The infection window has passed with no sign of it. The physiotherapy team sat down with myself and the surgical team yesterday afternoon and discussed the scans and the surgical images. Now they are convinced you should regain full use of your hip, with time, and you will be able to walk again, after a fashion.”
Ezra twisted his face out of Jesse’s shoulder, but didn’t disentangle himself. “After a fashion?” he managed wetly.
The doctor shrugged. “That’s the bad news, I’m afraid. Two hours of your surgery were spent attempting to repair the damage to your knee, and neither team can say for certain that they succeeded in giving you that functionality. The bones will heal, as should the muscular tears, but there is severe ligament and tendon damage, and if those cannot be repaired or strengthened with the physiotherapy, then your knee won’t function properly.”
“By not function—”
“You won’t be able to control it,” he translated. “It won’t stop or start when you want it to. You would have to walk with a crutch, but you would be capable of movement. You aren’t going to be confined to a wheelchair forever.”
Ezra took a shaky breath, shook his head and buried his face back in Jesse’s shoulder. “That’s hardly bad news,” he mumbled.
“You’ve obviously never had physiotherapy,” the doctor said dryly, and smiled again. “The head of the physiotherapy team and I will drop by tomorrow afternoon to discuss your treatment and long-term care. You will be confined to a wheelchair until your legs heal, I believe that goes without saying, and it’s unlikely you will be released until one of them—the left—is out of plaster and you can get yourself about on crutches. But we can’t make any promises about how well your right leg will work after all of this.”
“It’s better than cut off,” Ezra whispered, so low that Jesse had to repeat it for the doctor—and agreed with it. Crippled was better than gone. A dodgy knee was better than a missing leg.
“It is indeed,” Dr Yates said, flicking through his notes. “The bones in both legs are healing nicely so far. The break in your right ankle is rather worse than originally thought, but that should still heal perfectly well. You’re a lucky man. A less fit patient would almost certainly have lost functionality of the right leg by now.”
Ezra coughed out a laugh. “Knew the yoga was good for something,” he mumbled, and Jesse combed his fingers through his hair. “Can you—when can I start using the wheelchair?”
“We’ll get the plaster put on your right leg in a couple of days,” Dr Yates said, “and we’ll try transferring you into the chair for a few hours each day and letting you get about the hospital a bit. If you cope very well, we might let you out for a couple of hours to go to lunch somewhere with your partner, let you have a change of scenery. But you do not move yourself in and out of the chair. Your right leg is still very delicate and jarring it even slightly could undo all the work Dr Anwar put into saving it.”
Ezra nodded. Jesse stroked a hand down his arm and ignored the doctor in favour of the light coming back on in Ezra’s eyes. He was going to recover, and he knew it. That steely determination was beginning to stir up again.
When the doctor disappeared again to find another patient on his list, Jesse leaned across the bed to kiss Ezra’s cheek.
“I love you,” he said, and it felt, for the first time, completely natural to say.
Chapter Thirteen
Ezra came home in late July.
The lads at the station had wanted to throw a party. The summer term had just ended, and Jesse heard rumours of the teachers wanting to do something similar, but he managed to waylay both attempts until the weekend, guessing that going home would be painful, exhausting and embarrassing.
And he was right.
Ezra was released on the last Monday in July, a simmering hot day that made the roads sticky and the air stickier. Jesse had taken two days off work to help him get home and get settled and had roped Pete into helping with the physical ‘getting Ezra into the hous
e’ stage. Ezra had barely waited until he was set up on the pulled-out sofa-bed before dismissing Pete, obviously half-furious, half-upset at being seen in a less than ideal state.
“He’s seen worse, you know,” Jesse told him once Pete had gone, but he was brushed off too.
Ezra was more or less better, apart from the right leg. His dislocated shoulder cramped occasionally, and the cruel gash across his forehead had scarred, but in Jesse’s opinion it only made that long face more beautiful. His left leg had healed and the cast had come off last week. The right one was still in plaster and still ached for ninety-nine percent of the time. He was constantly tired, because he hadn’t been able to move much for almost two months, and irritable from a mixture of sexual frustration and that love of tactile contact that had made Jesse deem him ‘a whore for hugs’ within the first month of their relationship.
Jesse had unfolded the sofa last night into its double-bed contraption that looked rickety but was surprisingly solid. Ezra would be living downstairs for the time being. The downstairs bathroom had a shower, whereas the upstairs one only had a bath, and Jesse hadn’t liked the idea of Ezra having to go up and down stairs to eat if he was out or at work.
By the time he came back from showing Pete out, Ezra was asleep, a cat at each hip, and breathing deeply. Jesse stroked back his hair and wandered off to do some chores, mostly getting the bathroom ready for when Ezra woke up and demanded the inevitable shower, and beginning to make a lot of freeze-able meals for when he had to go back to work. Ezra couldn’t cook at the best of times, never mind with one leg in a floor-to-arse cast, and Jesse had no intention of letting him try.
It took an hour and a half for the noise to start.
Jesse hated that noise. The half-choke, half-cry that was filled with such complete fear that his gut twisted into a hard knot and he was out of the kitchen and into the living room before it could repeat itself. He’d left both doors open for just this reason. Flopsy was sitting on the carpet, eyeing the bed dubiously, and Jesse stepped right over her as another strangled plea rose from the sofa-bed, an incoherent word in the middle of it.
“Ezra!” he called loudly, bending over the bed and tapping his cheek sharply. “Ezra, sweetheart, it’s all right. Wake up now, come on, baby.”
Ezra struggled. The shift of his hip turned the whimper into a scream, and Jesse slapped his cheek again, light enough to avoid a mark but hard enough to break through the first layer of the dream and force Ezra’s eyes open, lost and roving. He was white as the sheets and sweating, eyes huge and terrified in the afternoon light.
“Please, please, Jess, I can’t do this, please—”
“Ssh.” Jesse cupped his face in both hands, pushing down until their foreheads touched. “Ssh, baby, you’re not in the car. You’re home, you’re safe, you’re with me. It’s all right, sweetheart. Come on, wake up for me. Just wake up, baby, that’s it.”
Ezra blinked, clutching painfully at his biceps, then the awareness flooded in and he relaxed back into the pillows, breathing harshly. “Jess?”
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Jesse smoothed back his hair. “You’re safe, I promise. There’s plenty of room. You’re not trapped.”
He had been expecting this. Coming off the painkillers a few weeks ago had lessened the frequency of the nightmares, but hadn’t stopped them, and Jesse reckoned they wouldn’t stop until the cast was taken off and Ezra could move his leg freely again. He’d had nightmares long before the accident, about being trapped or the crash that killed his father and brother. Now—now, it would take a lot longer for the bad dreams to fade away.
“Hey, hey,” Jesse soothed as Ezra locked his arms around his neck and began to cry, still shaking in his hands. “Ssh, baby, you’re okay. You’ll be even better once I can get you some painkillers, but you’re okay. It’s fine. You’re fine, I promise you. Ssh, sweetheart, calm down.” He slid his hands gingerly around Ezra’s back, trying to avoid moving his hips. By the tension, Ezra was in pain. By the grip, he didn’t care.
When the panicked crying eased, Jesse dared to sit up a little, Ezra’s hands sliding back to his bruised biceps and his breathing rattling around tears and pain.
“I’m going to get you some painkillers, all right?”
“No,” Ezra croaked.
“Ez—”
“No.” The edge of panic was still here. “Stay here, Jess, please. Please.”
“Okay. Ssh, sweetheart, okay,” Jesse sat on the edge of the mattress, tangling one hand in Ezra’s hair and stroking gently, his other holding Ezra’s left hand in his lap and rubbing his thumb across healed knuckles. The tears had abated, but the tightness in his face hadn’t, and Jesse bent to kiss away one of the telltale lines.
“I want you here,” Ezra croaked.
“I was just cooking.”
“No, I mean—I don’t want to sleep on my own.”
Jesse’s heart flinched. “Babe, I can’t exactly cuddle you right now. I’d hurt you.”
“No,” Ezra insisted, and wiped the last of the tears away with the heel of one hand. “I mean—don’t go home. Tonight. Stay here with me.”
“You want me to stay here while you recover?”
“Mm,” Ezra squeezed his elbows. Jesse bent to kiss his temple.
“Okay,” he said simply. “I was kind of hoping you’d let me anyway. I don’t feel great about having to leave you here on your own while I’m at work as it is.”
Ezra sighed, closing his eyes and tugging lightly. Jesse settled on the bed beside him, sliding an arm under his thin shoulders and feeling the tension leech away as he rubbed his palms and fingers rhythmically over the tight muscles in Ezra’s back.
“Go back to sleep,” he coaxed. “You’re safe with me, you know that.”
“Don’t think I can sleep though,” Ezra mumbled. “When’s Mum coming?”
Mrs Pryce had returned to Norwich after Dr Yates had pronounced Ezra’s leg to be manageable. She had, after all, a demented mother-in-law and a job. Grace had never materialised at all, and Jesse was thankful for it. The last thing either of them needed was that sour-faced bitch hanging around. But when Ezra’s discharge date had been set, his mother had decided she’d come down and see him again, and Ezra had been so pleased when she’d called, Jesse hadn’t the heart to feel irritated about having their first real private time since the argument and the crash interrupted.
“About two, I think,” he said, scratching at the hair at the nape of Ezra’s neck and watching the lines in his face smooth out a little. “You’ve got time to sleep more if you want.”
“No,” Ezra said, though his voice was erring on the side of tired. “I’ll just dream again.”
“You’ve never had a nightmare when I’ve been hugging you,” Jesse pointed out.
“I have woken up panicky, though,” Ezra mumbled.
Jesse didn’t bother pointing out he hadn’t had one of those starting-awake fits since their early days together, and simply rubbed his thumb in circles over Ezra’s upper arm. He’d doze off by himself in a few minutes.
“Jess?” Ezra murmured, tucking his head against the top of Jesse’s shoulder. “You’re a git sometimes, but I love you.”
“I’m a git?” Jesse pouted. “What’d I do to deserve that?”
Ezra huffed, laughed and didn’t reply.
* * * *
The knock on the door came at quarter past two, waking Jesse from a doze. The sunlight was streaming through the windows onto the bed and baking them both in warmth, and the combination of the lazy heat and the weight of Ezra on his arm had lulled Jesse into a stupor in front of the chattering TV while Ezra napped.
The knock disturbed him, though, and Flopsy unglued an eye from her position curled around Ezra’s feet. Ezra stirred, blinking dazedly, and Jesse squeezed his shoulder before getting up and going to answer it. Thankfully, he was prepared for the sight of Mrs Pryce on the doorstep, looking almost pretty in a pale green blouse, though he was surprised to see the ben
t form of Nana and less than pleased with the presence of Grace’s long golden hair.
“Living room,” he said shortly, pointing them through to the right door, and eyed Grace with the same curled lip she offered him. “Where have you been?”
“Someone had to look after Nana,” Grace said shortly.
Jesse privately doubted that was anything more than a feeble excuse and preceded her back into the living room. Nana had taken up the armchair with an imperious manner and was already knitting, although Jesse was certain she’d not brought any into the house with her, and Mrs Pryce was perched on the arm of the sofa helping Ezra sit up against the pillows and asking questions in a low, motherly tone. Jesse distracted himself by fetching tea, listening in the kitchen to the low cadence of Ezra’s voice, deep amongst his female relatives, and Nana’s bright chirps of nonsense. By the time he returned with a tray, she was calling Ezra lazy for lying about in the middle of the afternoon, and even Grace was allowing a small smile to crease her icy features. Jesse settled back onto the bed, sliding his arm around Ezra’s waist, basking in the warm smile Ezra offered him, and felt—
Comfortable.
He was suddenly struck by how comfortable he was, despite the glance Mrs Pryce gave to his hand on Ezra’s waist, and despite Grace’s mere existence. He felt at ease, like their disapproval was irrelevant, like it simply didn’t matter.
Like what Ezra had said all along was true.
He didn’t really listen to the conversation, too preoccupied with his quiet epiphany. Too relaxed. He didn’t need their approval, all of a sudden, and it was liberating, to not care if he was making a bad impression by lounging on the sofa-bed beside Ezra, not to worry about displaying any affection in front of these people.
Enough Page 17
