Chapter 8
EIGHT
Aidan
Ever since I woke up in this damn-fucking place, confusion and pain have been my constant companions, but as I open my eyes and see Ludo heading towards me, somehow, he grounds me.
The confusion is gone.
Shame I can’t say the same for the pain. It’s everywhere, as if the surgeon has taken a hammer to every joint in my body—because drilling into my knee and thigh wasn’t enough. Only the magic shot I begged for in recovery is stopping me vomiting all over myself, and I’m a fucking wreck.
Ludo ghosts around my curtain. He tucks something into my drawer, then his gaze settles on me, piercing and yet comforting. I want him to look at me for as long as possible so I can look at him.
“You’re back,” he says after a minute.
I make a sound low in my throat, half moan, half grunt.
Ludo treats me to a fleeting, magical touch—a brush of fingers down my forearm. “You’ve been gone ages. I thought you’d died.”
I can’t tell if he’s being serious, but I imagine he is. Ludo doesn’t joke much. He’s honest and earnest, and nice—basically my opposite. “I . . .” I pause to moisten my cracked lips. “I didn’t die. Just wish I had.”
Ludo stills, and his gaze sharpens. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s true.”
“It’s not, or you wouldn’t be living.”
I’m too addled for this conversation, but through the nightmare my life has become, I know I’ve fucked up. “Ludo.”
His name is all I have, and it comes out as a plea.
Red-hot spikes are being jammed into every part of my body and I need him to stop frowning at me the way he is right now.
As if I’m an unexploded bomb he’s not sure he wants to dodge.
As if he wants my pain to be his pain because he deserves it more than I do.
Fucking psychic, are you?
Hell no. But I apparently consider myself an expert on what Ludo is thinking, despite the fact he’s never, ever told me.
Twat.
Ludo’s silence is deafening. For a long moment, I fear he’ll leave. Then he sags and drops into the chair I’ve come to think of as his. “You’re in pain.”
It’s not a question. He knows. He touches my arm again, and I barely contain the shiver that will make me hurt a thousand times more.
I focus on his icy fingertips and note that he’s wearing only a T-shirt and pyjama bottoms. The baggy hoody he usually wears is missing, and though his cool touch is soothing, I can’t bear that he might be cold.
On cue, he shivers, and I realise he’s trembling, digging his teeth into his bottom lip to keep his jaw still.
Fuck this. “In the cabinet,” I grind out.
“What?”
“My hoodie. Put it on.”
“Why?”
“You’re cold.”
“I like it.”
It takes me a moment to compute his words. And even then it doesn’t work. Nope. Not doing it. “Please.”
Ludo sighs and rises from his seat, using his uninjured arm to lever himself upright. “I’m only doing it to stop you having a tantrum.”
His choice of words is so legit ridiculous I laugh, and it hurts, but it feels good.
Seeing his slight frame dwarfed by my huge hooded sweatshirt feels even better, and for the first time, I’m grateful to the paramedic who plucked it free from Bernard’s ruined van. It’s all I have, and I want Ludo to have it.
Ludo returns to his seat. He doesn’t touch me again, but I don’t mind. He’s warm, and that’s enough for me until another wave of pain eclipses any coherent thoughts I have left.
I groan as my body tightens to fight it. Tension ripples through me, adding to the jackhammer in my bones.
This shit is insane.
I can’t take it—
Cool fingers brush my forehead, easing my hair back from my face. They’ve lost their icy edge but none of their magic. “Shh,” Ludo whispers. “It’ll get better, I promise.”
But I don’t believe him. The surgeon warned me I’d have a rough twenty-four hours after the surgery, and it’s barely started. If anything, it’ll get worse, and my morphine pump is empty.
I clench my fists and grind my teeth. I can’t do this.
“You can,” Ludo counters, letting me know I’ve spoken the words aloud. “If you survived that fall, you can survive anything.”
“It should’ve killed me.”
“But it didn’t.”
It’s an incomplete echo of our previous exchange, but when I open my eyes, Ludo doesn’t seem angry anymore. Just worried. And I hate that I’ve made him frown again, all the while my heart skips a beat for the fact that he’s worried about me. That he cares, for reasons only he understands.
Ludo
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone suffer like Aidan is right now, and worse than that, I can’t see how he’s ever going to get better when he has nothing but pain to keep him company.
He dozes in fits and starts. When he’s awake, we talk.
Well, I do, and he listens, and while he’s sleeping, I study his barren bed bay with building unease.
There’s literally nothing here—a water jug, a couple of folded T-shirts, and a hoodie that I’m wearing.
He still has no phone, no books or magazines, and until last night he didn’t know how to access a TV.
What does he do all day?
But I already know the answer. He thinks and wishes he could stop.
Been there, mate.
I’m still there, but Aidan isn’t like me.
He can probably read a book without the narrator taking up residence in his head for a week after.
Scan a newspaper without fretting for the rest of the day about impending nuclear war.
I study his hands—hardened and scarred—and wonder what he likes to do with them when he’s not climbing trees.
My brain is like a malfunctioning sink. Sometimes I turn the tap on and nothing happens. Others the sink fills so fast with ideas that I’m scrabbling for the plug to catch them all.
It’s late when Aidan’s morphine pump reloads.
He takes every drop available and finally falls into a sleep deep enough to last more than ten minutes.
His hand is wrapped, like a baby’s, around my index finger.
For long minutes I can’t bring myself to pull away, but then the sink threatens to overflow, and I know I have to before every scrap of good intention is washed away.
I retreat from his bed and back to my own.
My bag is stuffed in my bedside cabinet.
I dig it out and rummage through it, emptying the contents onto my bed.
Notebooks and pencils. A crime novel my neighbour gave me that I’ll never read.
There’s even a newspaper, though it’s days old, and it’s the kind of newspaper no one admits to buying.
Me? I bought it for the crossword . . . honest.
Regardless, it’ll do. I pile it all up and traipse back to Aidan.
He hasn’t moved—he’s more immobile than ever—but I linger a moment anyway.
Though I know it’s the morphine that’s smoothed the lines of pain from his face, that he has months of recovery to endure, his peaceful expression is everything.
But I still have work to do. I dump my first bounty load in the chair by his bed and set off again.
“I’m hungry,” I say when the night sister questions why I’m leaving the ward. “I want some chocolate from the kiosk.”
She lets me go, and I shuffle through the hospital with socked feet until I come to the all-night shop by the A & E department.
There’s a different vibe in this part of the hospital, a frenetic energy that sets my teeth on edge the moment it hits me.
Sirens. Pacing relatives. Blood-soaked patients stacked up in chairs.
I’ve never been to this A & E, but sordid déjà vu prickles my skin, and I picture how Aidan must’ve looked when he was first brought in—leg smashed up, bleeding from his head, and unconscious.
Or maybe he wasn’t—maybe he was awake and afraid.
I don’t know how that feels . . . to be hurt and scared of what that means. For me, every injury has been a relief.
He’s not like you.
Of course he’s not.
I speed-walk past the A & E waiting area and reach the kiosk.
Even at this hour, there’s a queue, and by the time I get to the front, I’m sweating, anxiety pouring out of me so fast I half expect my feet to get wet.
I grab chocolate, sweets, and every magazine I can think of that isn’t a bullshit gossip rag.
Gardening, photography, fishing. On my way back to the ward, I question the wisdom of gifting Aidan a fitness magazine and dump Men’s Health in the bin.
At his bedside again, I stack his entertainment stash on the table. It doesn’t seem enough, but the itch to go back and buy more brings the worst parts of me to life, so I stamp it down and flee.
Back in my own bed, I realise that I’ve forgotten to say goodnight or leave a note explaining the corner shop I’ve dumped on his bedside table. Panic seizes me again, but a nurse is doing the rounds, and a stern glare from her keeps me in bed.
She lingers on purpose, apparently finding the contents of a nearby patient’s chart fascinating enough to sit down and read it.
Heart thumping, I curl up in Aidan’s oversized hoodie, drawing it tight around me until I’m surrounded by enough of his clean, woodsy scent that my pulse slows and my racing thoughts even out.
I fall asleep.
It’s morning when I wake, and Aidan is my first thought. I scramble out of bed and dash through the ward to get to him, only to find that he’s still asleep, and my collection of things that now seem ridiculous are exactly as I left them.
The urge to gather them up and hurl them in the nearest bin is strong, but my nurse nemesis from the night before is preparing to leave the nurse station.
I take my chance and slope back to my own bed. When I get there, the surgeon is waiting for me, and Dr Farsi is with him.