Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
DEAN
“I love you.”
No. Not now.
The suitcase slammed into the back seat.
I followed, shut the door. “Devon Memorial Hospital,” I told the driver.
Voice steady, bones and heart a jumble. The cab smelled like Febreze and cold cigarette smoke, tangling with some upbeat reggaeton remix from the speakers that felt like someone had poured static into my brain.
“I love you.”
Each time I blinked, Tay’s face swam through my mind. I just—I couldn’t. Not right now. Focus.
Get there. Gown up. Scrub in.
I reached for my phone.
En route. Please confirm donor ETA.
Sent it to Carla, the OR nurse manager. Leaned back and closed my eyes.
“I love you.”
No one ever had. Not like that.
Focus.
The cab slid into traffic, motion sickness pulling at me. I inhaled, exhaled, willed it down. Not the time. I had to get my head on straight because Brooke—she needed steady. She deserved this chance, and this would take… a lot. God, she was only eighteen. Too damn young to be facing all this.
Midday traffic rushed in my ears and head. I counted my breaths until my thudding pulse began to ease, minutes slipping away into shadow.
Focus.
The badge scanner blinked red. Come the fuck on.
Again.
Green.
I pushed through the staff entrance, suitcase trailing me like a guilty memory. The corridor was too bright—sterile floors, cold overhead light, a polished brass plaque that read transplant wing. Familiar smell of antiseptics.
My locker was third from the end. I yanked it open, tugged off my hoodie, hands moving on instinct. Scrubs on. Clogs on. Cap over unwashed hair matted from the trip. Clip badge. Suitcase shoved into the call room down the hall.
I pulled up the surgical notes on the hallway tablet: donor heart in transit, crossmatch confirmed. Brooke prepped, IV in. We’d start with anesthesia, then open once perfusion control cleared it. I’d likely run recipient side.
Which meant I needed to banish the echo of Tay’s voice to the darkest corners of my mind—my fears, the weight of wanting too much when I knew it could crush us along the way. Right now, it didn’t matter because I didn’t matter, and neither did Tay.
Brooke had only this one chance.
I scrubbed in, took the familiar route past the OR wing and into pre-op holding. Carla caught my eye with a slight smile and waved me toward the back of the room. I nodded, smiled back or maybe didn’t, and moved along—fluorescent light, linoleum under my feet, everything on autopilot.
Second bed from the end. Brooke was already gowned, her surgical cap slightly askew like a tiny act of rebellion. Surrounded by beeping monitors and a nurse checking vitals, she seemed small, tense, squinting as if she didn’t trust the world enough to close her eyes. Hard to blame her.
As soon as I drew close, her attention snapped to me. Relief glinted along her features—just for a fraction of a second before she roped it back in.
“Hi.” I pulled a stool over and sat. “Your crown’s a bit off-kilter.”
It took a moment, then her chin tipped up as she got it—our last conversation before I’d left. How life wasn’t fair, how it kicked you down sometimes and all you could do was get back up, dust yourself off, adjust your crown.
“It’s fashionable,” she said. “Also, you’re fashionably late.”
“Came straight from the airport.”
“Good vacation?” she asked like it was a test, and I forced myself to breathe through the shock of memories.
Tay. The taste of his smile, radiant under the sun, his hair sliding through my fingers. Sleep-warm skin, the sound of the ocean beneath us, how he just got me.
“I love you.”
“Yeah, it was good,” I said, nearly entirely steady. Brooke narrowed her eyes, gaze sharp in a way that reminded me of a younger Charley all of a sudden, almost painful in how it twisted through my chest.
Eighteen. Brooke shouldn’t even be here.
But she was.
“Then why do you look like hell?” she asked into that thought.
“Such flattery.” I dragged up a smile. “You, on the other hand, have never looked better.”
It pulled a reluctant grin out of her—one second only, and then it crumbled. Her face pinched up slightly, voice hardly above a whisper. “I’m scared, Doc.”
My heart cracked a little.
I reached for her wrist, fingers light as I checked the line of her IV. Nothing to fix—just a point of contact between us. “Of course you are. But the odds are very much in your favor. And we’ve got you, okay? You’re not alone in this.”
Her lips pressed into a thin line, chin quivering even though she clearly fought it, eyes glossy. “Promise?”
All throughout my medical training, I’d been taught to avoid promises, to speak in probabilities, not certainties. But this?
“Yeah,” I said, quietly firm. “I’m with you. Promise.”
She didn’t reply, but the curve of her mouth relaxed just slightly.
Metal glinted under surgical lights. An air of thick, focused quiet filled the space, interwoven with the soft beeps of monitoring equipment, the perfusionist murmuring stats.
“Cross-clamp off,” the other attending said—calm, detached.
I watched the monitor, then the heart.
Twitching. Not quite beating.
Come on. Come on.
It had looked good—clean vessels, no contusions. But right now, it sat in her chest like it didn’t belong there.
Flatline. Then—a few junctional twitches. Useless, though, no real rhythm. Sweat itched at the back of my neck, a distant hum under the bright spotlights. I didn’t move—no one did. Come on.
“Ischemic time still well within range,” the perfusionist said, a little rushed.
The attending gave a small nod. “Let’s give it a bump.”
Charge. Paddles. The heart jumped visibly under the clinical light.
Nothing.
No—there. A flutter. Another.
And then…
Oh, fuck, yes. The monitor blipped in steady green, waves that started pacing out a flow—stronger and faster, steady.
“MAP’s rising,” the anesthesiologist said from behind me. “Seventy-two and climbing.”
Blood pressure coming up, a borrowed heart that had found its rhythm—wanting to live. I swallowed thickly, blinking, and exhaled through my mask.
Breathing again. So alive I felt it in the tips of my fingers.
Time had lost all meaning.
It was past one when I made it home. Closer to two, maybe. Couldn’t even remember how long I’d been awake, when I’d last eaten. Something from the snack machine? Probably.
The door clicked shut behind me, echoing a little too loudly in the stillness.
I didn’t bother with the lights—the apartment knew its way around me.
A streetlamp shed a dim glow through the blinds that lingered in blurry streaks each time I blinked.
The microwave clock added a smudge of red that somehow made me think of a laser sword, humming like static in my mind.
For a few beats, I simply stood there with my jacket half-on, couldn’t make my hands work well enough to take it off, fingers still stiff with the lingering touch of surgical gloves and the trembling aftershock of adrenaline that had drained in a rush.
Brooke’s heart had held. I’d stayed through the ICU transfer, through the handoff, for as long as I possibly could until the shift manager had sent me home with a quiet nod. Go. There’s nothing left for you to do here.
And now—everything felt too damn quiet.
I’d grown used to being… not alone. To Tay padding around barefoot, the flick of a page as he read nearby, to his laughter and the warmth in his voice.
To his solid weight in bed, his hair tickling my nose.
Like I’d been wrapped up in a featherlight blanket and hadn’t even noticed—not until it was stripped away, leaving me shivering in the cold.
No one else to blame but me.
“I love you.”
I toed off shoes that didn’t seem to fit anymore and dropped them next to my suitcase, walked into the kitchen, and then didn’t know where to turn.
What to do with myself. Should get some sleep or maybe eat something first, only I felt hollow to the bone.
Nothing that a handful of nuts could fix. Fuck.
Stop, breathe. I pressed my palms to my eyes until darkness sparked in my head. My skin still smelled like hospital soap. It spiked a strange sense of nausea even as it grounded me, stopped the world from spinning quite this fast. I was…
Not fine.
Not even a little. God. The way he’d looked at me—steady, calm, brave.
And I’d tucked tail and run like a coward, caving under the weight of my own…
my own what? Not thoughts, nothing that rational.
This was deeper. Like… like lava under cracked basalt.
Magma? Lava, magma, didn’t matter. Just…
red-hot heat peeking through, the crust weakened, just barely holding it all together.
Light flaring out of every fracture. Jesus, stop.
I reached for my phone, not even sure why. Habit, maybe. Something familiar, normal, proof that the world kept turning—Mom checking in, Gregg, too. A reminder from Charley not to be an idiot about Tay, which… Well.
Nothing from Tay. Of course not.
He’d sounded so sure. Voice quiet, yeah, but confident, easy, like he’d said it a hundred times before. “Good luck. I love you.”
And me? Something like “Thanks, see you.” Like I’d signed for a parcel and fucked off.
An abrupt wave of dizziness slammed into me—my gut twisting into a knot that wanted to force me to my knees. I held on to the wall, inhaled through the moment. Not fine, no. But I couldn’t deal with it—any of it. Not right now.
I dragged myself toward the bathroom, flicked on the overhead light that washed me in the same artificial cold as the hospital. Toothbrush. Toothpaste. Mint on my tongue, a sense of numbness radiating out, layered over something aching, terrifying, irreversible.
Had he meant it? Or had it been the rush of landing, tropical sunsets still clinging to our skin? The memory of a high?