Page 130 of Never Alone
They had told me he was going to be fine.
I was sitting in the chair beside the bed. I had his hand in mine. The good one. The shoulder they had reset was the other side.
I let myself look at him.
I hadn't let myself look since the gravel. In the ambulance, I'd held his hand and looked only at his face. In the ER, I'd been pushed out into the hall while they worked, and then I'd been brought in to a settled man in a bed, and I'd cried and held his hand without looking at the parts of him I didn't yet have the courage for.
Now he was asleep, and there was no version of looking at him that would hurt him.
I looked.
The bruising was already setting in along his jaw and down the side of his neck. The cut at his eyebrow. The shape of his ribs under the hospital gown, taped, the tape visible where the gown had shifted. The sling on his left side. The IV at the back of his hand—the same hand I had been holding, only the IV was at the wrist, and my hand was in his palm. A small bruise at his temple I hadn't noticed before.
His mouth was relaxed in a way it never was when he was awake. He looked younger.
He looked like a man somebody had hurt on purpose.
You deserve everything you get.
Nicholas's voice came through me as if he had said it in this room.
I’d known when he said it. I’d stood at the counter with my hand flat on the wood for an hour afterward, and I’d told myself a story about what he had meant.
He had meant this.
He had meant Cole in a bed with three broken ribs and a kidney they were watching and tape across his chest. He had meant Sean running across a gravel lot with a baseball bat. He had meant a girl named Quinn, I'd met at a barbecue, stepping out of an ambulance to find her cousin on the ground. He had meant me in a chair beside a hospital bed with a man's hand in mine I had not earned the right to hold.
He had meant for me to see it.
I shut my eyes for a beat. I made myself open them again.
I made myself put the bakery away. I made myself put Nicholas's voice away. I put the thought in a small box at the back of my head where Cole could not see it from the bed. I put the box where I would find it later, when he was asleep, and I was alone, and the lights were off, and I could afford to take it out.
I leaned forward.
I kept his hand in mine.
I waited.
After a few minutes, he stirred.
His head turned a fraction on the pillow. His eyes moved under the lids. The corner of his mouth pulled.
"Cole."
His eyes opened.
He found me.
He didn't move his head. His eyes found mine and stayed there.
"Hi."
His voice was thick.
"Hi."
I leaned closer. I had his hand in both of mine now.
