Chapter 35 Sloane
SLOANE
Iheard the change in the crowd before I saw it.
It wasn’t a cheer. It wasn’t a groan. It was a full-body shift in sound that prickled across my skin and hit the base of my neck. I lifted my head from the tablet, eyes already searching.
Oliver was down.
Not slow to get up. Not crouched. Flat.
Flat on the turf. Motionless.
I froze for half a second. Then I moved.
My headset dropped to the bench. I stepped over the sideline before Ivy even spoke. She yelled for William. I didn’t wait. My shoes hit the turf, and I didn’t stop running. The field shifted under each stride. I felt the weight in my limbs. My chest was already tight.
He hadn’t moved. He wasn’t moving.
Why wasn’t he fucking moving?
Get up. Oliver. Get up!
My heart lodged in my throat as I stared at his still body. The roar of the stadium dulled to static. Everything else went muffled, like the world had been dunked underwater. My pulse hammered in my ears, louder than the crowd, louder than the refs—louder than reason.
Every training drill, every worst-case scenario I’d rehearsed in sterile meeting rooms evaporated. Nothing prepared me for this.
I couldn’t feel my feet hit the ground anymore. I was momentum and terror, sprinting toward the one thing I couldn’t lose.
Please. Please move. God, just breathe. I’ll take a twitch, a curse, anything. Just—move.
I reached him first. I dropped to my knees. My gloves were on but useless. I didn’t need to palpate vitals to know something was wrong.
“Oliver,” I said, loud, sharp. “Oliver. Look at me.”
No response. No blink. No shift in breathing.
William dropped beside me, and we took off his helmet. Ivy came in next. Booth barked into his headset behind us. The cart was already being waved in. The stadium noise was gone. It had dropped out completely. I couldn’t hear anything but the rush of blood in my ears.
“Pulse is elevated,” I said. My voice cracked. “Chest is barely rising.”
I touched his face. It was warm, but his skin was pale. Clammy. His eyes were half-open but unfocused. I tapped his cheek twice, firm. “Oliver. Come on. Talk to me.”
Then I tried to move his pads, needing to get to his chest. I made a fist and pushed with my knuckles. This was gonna hurt like a bitch, but I needed him to respond to something, and if it had to be this pain then so be it.
Nothing.
I had his file memorized. Resting HR baseline. Recovery patterns. Known thresholds. The telemetry William flagged the day before. The numbers flashed behind my eyes, but none of them mattered. Not right now. Not with him on the ground.
I knew he shouldn’t have played. I knew that feeling in my stomach, that pit of worry that grew and grew. I let my feelings for him outweigh the right choice, and now… what if…
I kept one hand on his sternum, watching for consistency in his breaths, while my mind tore through worst-case trajectories. My training screamed at me to stay clinical, stay steady, but every beat under my palm felt too faint, too fragile.
Less than ten percent of players who collapsed on the field walked off without consequence.
Four percent required full cardiac intervention.
Less than one percent experienced sudden cardiac arrest, but I’d seen it happen twice in my career.
Once in college. Once during a combine. And both times, that one second before it went wrong—the silence, the stillness—felt exactly like this.
I catalogued symptoms even as my hands trembled. He must have experienced something prior to the fall. Disorientation, vision changes, something we couldn’t see. God, why hadn’t I seen it?
Sudden-onset disorientation. Nonverbal. Nonresponsive. Now, his respirations were shallow, the color drained from his face, and he was completely unresponsive. His name echoed somewhere in my head, a silent plea I couldn’t afford to say out loud.
If this was SVT and not cardiac arrest, he had minutes before this unconsciousness turned into something worse. But if it was neurological—if it was a delayed trauma response from earlier contact—then we were already behind.
Head injuries had a seventeen percent rate of presenting delayed. If he blacked out from a secondary hit, I wouldn’t have seen it. Nobody would. Jay had come after him hard.
I should’ve pulled him when he seemed off in the third.
God, I should’ve pulled him. I should’ve yelled at William, Mac, Booth, Ivy—anyone who would’ve listened. This was on all of us.
He was supposed to be cleared. He was stable this morning. The labs. The telemetry. The echo. The meds. All green. But they missed something. Or I missed something.
And if I missed it—if my blind spot cost him—how was I ever supposed to live with that?
I let him go back in. I told him he was fine. And now he was lying here, still and silent, and I couldn’t breathe past the guilt clawing its way up my throat.
“Pupils reactive but slightly sluggish,” Ivy said, pulling me out of the spiral. They cut his pads off and had an AED on him within seconds.
William reached for the oxygen unit. “We need him off the field. Now.”
I nodded, even though my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I helped stabilize his head, bracing his neck with one hand and his shoulder with the other. His body didn’t resist. No tension. No sign of consciousness.
My throat burned. Come on, Oliver. Please. Don’t let this be it.
We rolled him gently, keeping his spine aligned. His shoulder slumped against the grass. His arm slid off the side of the board. I reached for it, gripping his wrist hard enough to leave marks under the glove.
“You’re okay,” I whispered, uselessly, as my voice cracked. “You’re okay. You’re going to be okay.”
He didn’t react.
The ambulance rolled up, and we lifted him as one unit. Strapped him down. Oxygen in place. Pads discarded on the ground. I could hear the hitch in every breath. But he wasn’t speaking. Wasn’t responding. Wasn’t there.
William stepped in behind the paramedic. “I’ll ride with him.”
“No,” I said, already climbing in. “I’m going.”
He blinked at me. “Sloane—”
“I said I’m going.” My voice was sharper than it should’ve been. “I know his baseline. I know his file. I’ve been tracking every flag for months. You want the best shot at helping him on the way? You need me.”
He stared at me. So did Ivy. Booth too. Everyone. The entire sideline felt like it went quiet again.
I felt it hit me in the chest. What I admitted. But I didn’t fucking care.
“I need to be with him,” I said again. Quieter this time. “Please.”
William hesitated. He looked at Ivy. She gave a slight nod.
He stepped back without another word.
I climbed into the back, took Oliver’s hand, and didn’t let go.
I didn’t care what they knew now. I didn’t care who saw.
The door shut.
And the truth came with it.
“Please, Oliver. Please. Stay with me,” I said, holding onto his hand as a tear slipped down my face. The man I loved was unconscious on a backboard, his pulse fast and slightly irregular, his skin damper than it should be, pale and still unresponsive.
I knew what came next. The lights and sirens. The chaos about to explode in the emergency room. The testing and all the questions I didn’t want to answer. Waiting for the fallout, likely ending with me resigning.
But none of that mattered. I wanted him to wake up. I wanted to hear his voice. I wanted to stop shaking.
The sirens didn’t start right away.
The back doors slammed shut. The world narrowed to the cold metal interior, the sharp chemical smell, and the sound of the belt pulled tight across Oliver’s chest. He still hadn’t spoken. Still hadn’t opened his eyes. They started an IV.
The paramedic nearest the monitors adjusted a dial, clipped another wire to his chest, avoiding the AED pads we applied on the field, and reached for the BP cuff. “120 over 94,” he called out. “Still tachycardic. 172.”
I sat pressed against the wall, holding Oliver’s hand under the buckles. His skin was damp but cooler now. His pulse trembled beneath my fingers.
“Running the ECG,” the second medic said. “Sloane, right?”
I nodded, barely able to swallow.
“You said he has a known arrhythmia?”
“Yes.” My voice cracked. “Paroxysmal SVT. Confirmed last week. Recent meds started. Metoprolol 25mg daily. No ablation scheduled.”
He didn’t react beyond a nod. He focused on the leads, fast but practiced. “Breathing’s shallow but consistent. Pupils sluggish. No signs of seizure. No visible trauma.”
I wanted to scream. He was standing there two minutes ago. Talking. Running. Laughing. And now he was still.
The machine beeped again. The rhythm flashed on the screen above Oliver’s shoulder. I recognized it instantly.
Narrow QRS. No P wave. Regular-fast rate. 168 BPM.
SVT.
“Confirmed arrhythmia,” the EMT said, voice low. “Might start resolving on its own.”
His fingers pressed against Oliver’s neck. “Still with us,” he said, but his tone didn’t feel reassuring.
I leaned closer. “Oliver, it’s me,” I whispered, trying to steady my voice. “You’re okay. We’re almost there.”
He didn’t respond. His lips twitched, barely. His chest lifted with another shallow breath.
I didn’t realize I was crying until a drop landed on my knuckle.
“BP dropping a little,” the paramedic muttered. “Prep a saline push. Let’s keep him stable.”
One of them moved fast, clicking open a drawer and snapping the IV tubing with calm precision. The other attached the bag to the pole above his head.
Everything was happening too fast and too slow.
I felt like I was outside my body. I’d been in ambulances before. I’d been on the sidelines of worse. But this wasn’t someone else’s chart. This wasn’t another case file or patient history.
This was Oliver. The man I loved. The man I let walk onto that field.
“Sloane,” the paramedic said gently. “Can you talk to him for me? Sometimes hearing a familiar voice helps.”
I nodded, choking on air. I leaned forward and brushed the sweat-damp hair from his forehead.