Chapter Forty-Four
Forty-Four
I slink by the main nurses’ station and spot the only other door monitored by an officer.
Finn’s. I slow slightly as I near it, and the officer, a woman with her hair slicked back and a tense expression on her face, lifts her chin.
Her lips part, forming the beginning of the inevitable inquisition, but before she can release it, someone steps through the doorway.
Nora. It’s only the second time since I’ve known her that she isn’t wearing her token red lipstick. No makeup at all, and her usually pristine nails are peeling, one of the acrylics gone, like she’s been picking at them.
The moment she sees me, a relieved smile lights up her face. She moves forward as the officer does and stops, turning to the woman. “She’s okay.”
“Only family allowed—”
“She’s his girlfriend,” Nora interrupts.
Heat rushes up from my toes, flushing across my skin and leaving what I know is an unsubtle blush. While the label might do some good at getting me in the room, it still makes me squirm to hear. Makes me wonder if it’d be better to turn around and beeline back to my room.
“She’s okay.”
“Immediately family only, Miss Shipman—”
“Oh, come on, Ava. Look at her. Does she look like a threat? She’s not even wearing shoes,” Nora says, propping a hand on her hip. “And I know he wants to see her.”
I am apparently unneeded in this conversation. Which is okay, seeing as I lost all ability to speak when I walked up. It takes all my energy to not bolt.
The officer, Ava, isn’t thrilled at the use of her first name, but she also doesn’t seem to want to enter this fight with Nora. Even if she wins, Nora will make it painful enough she’ll wish she hadn’t.
“You have ten minutes,” she says. “And then I want you out. Understood?”
“Thank you, Ava,” Nora says, reaching over to pat the officer on the arm. Ava gives her a curt look.
“Thank you,” I repeat. Ava waves a hand and takes a few steps away from the door. Not leaving but no longer guarding the room.
Nora reaches me before I get to the door and pulls me into a fierce hug. I’m a little surprised by it, hesitant only a moment before I’m hugging her back with one arm.
I pull back, and Nora’s arms fall away, but she doesn’t move. Her eyes shine with unshed tears.
“You look like hell, Jo,” she says.
I laugh, but it’s more of a croak.
“I don’t even know what to say.” She sniffles. “You’re one of the only people who believed me. Believed in him.”
“I mean, it wasn’t that hard, considering he planted himself in my bedroom. I couldn’t not believe in him if I wanted.”
Nora lets out a tiny laugh. “Yeah, he filled me in.”
I shift my weight. “How’s he doing?” Last I saw him, he was barely conscious, fighting hard to stay on his feet. He was weak and thin, a hand practically stretched out to Death’s.
“Doctors are still trying to figure out the extent of the damage. It’s like everything is depleted or something. It’ll be a while before he feels back to normal.”
Relief lifts some of the weight off my chest. “He’s okay, though?” I ask.
Nora nods.
“You should ask him yourself. I’m in desperate need of coffee, and my mom and stepdad went to buy him some clothes and stuff, so maybe you can hang out with him until I get back.”
Alone, she’s saying. I mean, sure, Officer Ava is right outside the door, and it’s hardly the first time Finn and I have been alone, but we’ve never been on the same plane of existence.
All the fears about closeness I was able to strangle into submission have rocketed back to the surface. Finn isn’t a phantom anymore. He’s as real as I am.
I fold my arms tight across my torso, leaning into the railing. “Why is all of this so hard?” I ask.
She gives me a grim smile. “Caring about people is dirty work,” she says.
She’s right.
All of the anger is armor. It’s a spiky exterior I’ve cultivated to be impenetrable.
Beneath it is the fear of having someone else to lose. And the other emotions, too, the ones I’m still not brave enough to give a voice to.
“I don’t think I can handle losing anyone else.”
“Tough shit,” Nora says, and again there’s nothing harsh about her tone. It’s brutal honesty. “Everybody loses everybody. We’re born, and then we die, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. The only thing we can do is make it a little more bearable while we’re here.”
“I don’t know how to do that,” I say.
“Yeah, you do,” Nora says. “You did it with me. I know you did it with Finn and Sloane and Aisha. So, yeah, it might be horrible and painful and sad, but it’s better than the alternative. Better than being alone.”
“Hell is other people,” I say, thinking of that Jean-Paul Sartre play; we have a dozen copies in the store, and we even had an existentialism endcap for a bit.
“You’re not wrong,” Nora says. “But they’re all we have.”
To my horror, tears well in my eyes. I reach up to swipe them away angrily.
“No one’s saying it’s easy. But if you can break into a madman’s bunker and rescue four kids, surely you can tell my teenage brother how you feel.”
When she says it like that, it sounds so easy. But even hearing it, my stomach is in knots and my chest is tight.
“I didn’t rescue anyone. The firefighters did that.”
“Okay, well, it was eighty-five percent you,” she says. “Be brave, Jo.” She leans over to bump my shoulder with hers.
“Ava, I’m getting a coffee. Want one?” Nora calls over my shoulder.
Ava says nothing. Then, after a beat, “Two sugars, please.”
“Gotcha,” Nora says. She squeezes my shoulder as she passes, and then it’s Ava and me outside the door.
Once she’s gone, Ava catches my eye.
“Ten minutes,” she says.
I nod. My stomach is already clawing up my throat, and if I had eaten anything, I’d probably throw it up. My heartbeat is a steady, fast melody in my chest. If it weren’t for Ava’s expectant expression, I might haul ass back to my own room.
But I can’t hide forever. And I don’t want to.
Because as scared as I am to see him, I want to. So I’ll do it scared.
—
I slip through the door, letting it shut behind me with a snick.
The room is identical to mine. Speckled linoleum tile flooring, sad white walls, a hospital bed and monitors. And in the bed, hooked up to the aforementioned monitors, an IV sticking out of his arm, is Finn.
His hair is damp from a shower, and tiny dark curls stick to his cheeks and forehead.
There are small bruises dotting his neck—where the tubes were placed, I think.
The bags beneath his eyes are dark and his skin is pale, much paler than Nora’s.
He’s wearing a pair of hospital pants and a T-shirt.
It’s the same Finn who popped into my life all those months ago, if not a little thinner and sporting more bruises. But it’s still my Finn.
Alive.
“Nora, I told you, if I’m not allowed to have coffee, you’re not allowed to drink it in here where I can smell…” Finn’s words trail off as his gaze skates over to me. His lips part, and there’s this look in his eyes, one I don’t have a word for, but it makes my stomach flip and tumble.
I clear my throat.
“Hey,” I say. It’s probably the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever said. After everything we’ve been through, all I can come up with is a measly hey.
“Jo,” he breathes. “They told me you were okay, but last time I saw you…”
“I’m okay.”
“I tried to get back in,” he says. I remember the pounding on the door. He must have hung back as the others went for help. “But the door…” His gaze drifts down to my arm, up to my bruised neck and busted lip. “You sure you’re okay?”
“It looks worse than it is,” I say.
Finn’s lips pull into a smile, and it’s a smile I’ve seen a dozen times before.
“The nurses say I should be discharged by the end of today. Soon as my toxicology report comes back.”
Finn snorts. “Lucky you. I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that this is my home for the next week at least. If they knew exactly what Holden did to us, it’d be easier to treat, but I guess he’s not talking.
” He sits up, and it takes clear effort to do so.
“Makes me miss your house. At least there I had good music. And company.”
The blush that has moved into my cheeks flames hotter. I swallow dryly.
I make my way slowly across the room, lingering at the side of his bed. Without a word he shifts his legs over, and though there’s a chair to the left of his bed, I sit in the spot he made for me.
“How are you feeling?” I ask.
A smile plays on his lips.
“I mean, I took my first shower in years. That was pretty nice. As for the rest…I feel like I went through a meat grinder.”
“I bet you’re missing that whole non-corporeal thing right now, huh?”
His gaze lingers on my face. He shifts his legs, and his knee bumps into my back. We both freeze, and Finn’s eyes dart down to his knee, to my back, and back up to my face.
“You know, not really,” he says.
My breath catches. We’ve been closer than this but never close enough to matter. And now we are, and everything is different.
His hand slides across the sheets, bumps into mine. His fingers are cool and callused and there. Inarguably real.
I dragged him out of the tube with my two hands, pressed my mouth to his and pushed air into his lungs, and helped carry him down the hallway and out of the lab. But this is different. He has reached for me a dozen times and never found me.
For a moment, my reservations give beneath the weight of it all, and I come out the other side lighter than I’ve felt in almost a year.
I flip my palm up. Thread my fingers through his. Squeeze once. And he squeezes back.
“Thank you,” he says eventually. “You saved my life, Jo. You saved all of us.”
And with those words, the peace shatters. As beautiful as this moment is, it could all be taken away tomorrow. It probably will be.
It’s the way the world works.