Chapter 19
Nineteen
I’m only responsible for what I say, not what you don’t understand.
—Birdee’s secret thoughts
Birdee
I woke up to an empty room and my head full of cotton.
I blinked several times as I stared at the white checkered ceiling.
“Ahh, you’re awake.”
I turned my head to see a nurse in navy-blue scrubs and a scrub cap on her head. She had a stethoscope around her neck which she pulled off and placed into her ears.
She placed the bell of the stethoscope against my chest and listened without talking anymore, which had me holding in my questions until she was finished.
“How’s your pain?”
I shrugged. “I don’t really feel anything.”
Except, as I said that, I lifted my arm to gesture and hissed out a breath. “Ouch.”
“Don’t move that,” she ordered. “You just woke up from surgery. Do you remember what happened?”
I blinked in surprise. “Um, not really. I…” I trailed off as I thought back to what I last remembered.
Lunch. Pig nipples. The can. The door. The…
“Oh,” I gasped as I looked at my arm. “I cut my arm really bad.”
“About as bad as it can get,” she agreed.
“You had to have surgery on your brachial artery. When the door opened and the can lid sliced into you, it was at just the right spot to cut right into your brachial artery. Hershel, your boss, was able to get a tourniquet placed, and we were able to get blood flow reestablished to your hand.”
“Oh,” I said. “How…is my arm okay? Will I be able to move it?”
She gestured at her hand. “Give it a try.”
I did, and pain once again flooded me.
“Ouch,” I said as I watched my fingers move.
“Looks like you’ll be just fine,” she said. “Your doctor will be in to talk to you a little later this afternoon. He had another emergent surgery.”
“Okay.” I smiled. “Um, how long do I have to stay in the hospital?”
And can I go home right now? Because hospitals freaked me out.
“You’ll be here for two days at a minimum. We want to make sure that the repair holds. So until we’re sure, you’ll be hanging out with us. Though, you’ll be moved down to the med-surg floor once you’re ready.”
How did one know if they were ready?
She must’ve read my confusion because she said, “I worded that in a way that made it confusing. We’ll get you moved down there once you’re fully cleared of the anesthesia.”
“Ah,” I said as I yawned.
“Your fiancé will be here any minute. I sent another nurse to go fetch him.”
I frowned, opened my mouth to ask her what the hell she was talking about, and slammed it closed when Creed came barreling inside. His eyes were huge on his face, and even scared to freakin’ death, he was the most handsome man I’d ever seen.
Today he was wearing a pair of jeans, brown duck boots, and a white t-shirt.
He had one of those Levis sherpa trucker jackets thrown over one forearm. The other hand held a hat that looked like he’d been curving the bill in his hands for hours as he nervously waited.
“What are you doing here?” I croaked.
The nurse patted my shoulder and said, “I’ll just leave the two of you alone.”
She was gone before I could protest.
“Are you okay?”
Was I okay?
No, no I was not okay.
“I think I just squirted my entire body’s worth of blood all over Charleigh,” I admitted. “Added on top of that, you’ve somehow been called my fiancé? I’d say I was just a little bit confused.”
He walked to the table where there was a little Styrofoam cup waiting with a bendy straw in it.
He took it, pinched the straw between two fingers, and held it up to my mouth.
I took a few healthy swallows before pulling away.
“I’m here because, apparently, I’m your emergency contact.”
I blinked. “That was an accident.”
He flashed me a grin. “I don’t really care what it was, to be honest. I’m just glad to know.”
Was he?
I couldn’t see why.
“Creed…”
“I fucked up,” he whispered. “And the reason I lied and told them I was your fiancé was because I was freaking the fuck out. I wanted to see you, and I didn’t see any other way for that to happen without the title of fiancé.”
I said nothing.
“Not to mention, since Charleigh and I aren’t family, we would have no clue what was going on until you woke up and let everyone know we were allowed to be in here,” he admitted. “And Charleigh and I made an executive decision not to call your dad.”
Relief hit me straight in the chest.
“Good,” I breathed. “Where’s Charleigh?”
“I had a friend come and pick her up and take her home to shower and change,” he said. “A nurse gave her a set of scrubs, but she looked like she’d just run a marathon in blood. She needed to get cleaned up, and she wouldn’t leave. So I had a friend take her.”
“She’s not going to be happy with you about that,” I pointed out.
Charleigh was the most fiercely independent person that I knew. She had a chip on her shoulder a mile wide, and I was afraid that Creed had just dug his own grave.
He scoffed. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
Well, if he knew, then there was no reason for me to remind him.
I worried my bottom lip with my top teeth before saying, “Why do you care?”
He jerked back as if he hadn’t been expecting the question to come out of my mouth.
He opened his mouth, then closed it.
Taking a seat on my bed, I had to resist the urge to lean into him as he stared at me intently.
“My sister is my world.”
I swallowed hard past the lump in my throat.
“When I was a kid, like I’m talking a baby myself, my little sister was born.
She was this incredible, perfect little human being that my mother had in the bathtub in our single-wide trailer.
Within an hour of giving birth to her, my mother placed Bernice in my hands and said, ‘Take care of your sister. I have to go get some smokes.’” He studied his hands. “I was seven.”
I inhaled.
“From that moment on, Bernice was mine. I raised her. From the age of seven. She was mine to take care of. Mine to protect. And I had to do that a lot. I missed more school than I made for two years after Bernice was born. Then Mom cleaned herself up for a couple of years, and everything was great. Then she got back into drugs and alcohol, her boyfriend decided she wasn’t worth the trouble, and then I was back to taking care of her.
I dropped her off at her first day of school.
I picked her up from class every day until she turned twelve and asked to walk herself home.
Then one day after I turned eighteen, I took the measly savings I’d managed to gather up over working odd jobs, and I moved out with Bernice.
Into a one-bedroom apartment over a barn.
That’s where we lived for a year and a half until my mother found us.
She was pissed as fuck because I’d changed the address to where her social security checks and our food stamps were coming.
I’d been forging her name on them for a solid eighteen months, and she was pissed as hell. ”
I had a feeling I knew where this was going.
Bernice had told me enough that I could put together the pieces that he hadn’t said yet.
I lifted my bad hand and placed it on his thigh. “Don’t say anything here.”
I gestured with my head at the flimsy curtains separating us from the rest of the very large room.
I could hear nurses talking just beyond the curtain, and it didn’t matter how quietly he was speaking. I didn’t want him to chance it.
“Bernice told me,” I whispered. “Don’t say it again.”
He ground his teeth together for a few seconds before he gritted out, “I can’t say that I reacted the best that I could have.”
No, he hadn’t.
But I understood.
Now that I knew what Bernice faced, I was kicking my own ass.
I hadn’t known.
I’d been feeling pretty low since Creed had rightly chewed my ass out.
“You reacted just the way you should have,” I promised.
He opened his mouth to say something but didn’t get to finish before the curtain was once again pulled backward and a man wearing a scrub cap and those barefoot shoes that outlined the toes came into the room.
“Ahh, you’re awake. Just like I like to see,” he murmured. “You remember what happened?”
“I do,” I confirmed.
Not sure I’d ever be able to forget, to be honest.
The look on Charleigh’s face when that first spurt of blood hit her.
The way Hershel’s cries of alarm had sounded around the small space.
The sight of blood spurting like a geyser from my arm with each beat of my heart.
The…
“Good.” He tapped my foot. “I won’t peel back the wrap right now.
We’ll do that in the morning, and I’ll show you what you’re working with.
I’m pretty confident that you didn’t permanently damage any nerves in your hand when this happened.
However, I want you to take it extremely carefully over the next week.
No heavy lifting. No working of any kind.
No strenuous activity,” he leveled us both with a look, clearly meaning sex.
“And I want someone there with you for the first few days after you get out of the hospital. I can’t begin to stress this enough, but if someone isn’t there and this repair ruptures, you could bleed out.
You won’t be able to react in time, and your loved ones will find you dead on the floor of your home. ”
I gritted my teeth.
He acted like finding someone to stay with me was just so easy.
I didn’t have that kind of life!
“Now, when you get down to med surg, be nice to your nurses. They’re short-staffed.”
“Birdee’s the nicest person I’ve ever met,” Creed murmured. “You don’t know that yet, though, so I’ll forgive your rudeness in thinking she’d ever be mean.”
The doctor snorted. “Patients can be sweet as molasses normally, but when they’re sick and hurt, they turn into raging assholes.”
“On that note.” He turned and walked away without a backward glance.
“Okay then.” Creed snorted.
I looked over at him out of the corner of my eye and felt a jolt straight to my heart.
I should’ve prepared.
Looking at Creed felt like looking into the sun.
Today his beard was a little bit more unruly than usual. His hair, which was usually combed and under control, was wavy and wild, going every which way but one. His eyes were puffy like he’d just gotten out of bed, and his usual carefree face looked lined with exhaustion.
“What’s going in that pretty little head of yours?” he asked quietly, jolting me out of my contemplation of his attributes.
“Pretty?” I scoffed. “As to what’s going through my head, I’m thinking about the fact that I just started a job that I now can’t go to for probably a solid ten days.
I’m thinking about how I’m going to wash my hair and do anything to it with one arm.
I’m thinking about how I have to go volunteer at the dog shelter this week, and I won’t be able to do that.
And they’re already severely understaffed.
” I looked at Creed more closely then. “You should always encourage everyone to spay and neuter their pets.”
His brows rose as a small smile kicked up the corner of his lips. “You’re the spay and neuter police?”
I used my good hand to scrub at the back of my neck. “The shelter in town isn’t a no-kill one.”
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “They aren’t?”
I shook my head. “I usually go once a week to hold some paws while they’re put to sleep. So they don’t feel alone when they go.”
Silence.
“Most strays don’t have a good life. They’re stuck in cages for the majority of it, and what kind of life is that? Our shelter is pretty small, too. Not funded like it should be. They can keep a stray for like a month before it needs to be euthanized due to space constraints.”
“Shit,” he said. “I guess that would make you passionate.”
“My sister has a dog that’s not neutered,” I murmured. “It drives me insane that she does.”
“She’s being responsible with him, from what I understand,” he pointed out.
“I know, but this isn’t something I’ll ever be rational about,” I admitted.
“It makes me come off as a real asshole. When I was in high school, I started volunteering at the animal shelter as part of my senior volunteer hours. We had to have like a hundred to graduate with this one certain honor. I chose the animal shelter. Which was where I learned the hard way that life sucked. Well, learned even more reasons as to why life sucked. I also really began to resent my stepfather and Mable even more because of the dog breeding thing they had going on. I freakin’ hated that they bred these dogs when there were a ton of dogs at the shelter that desperately needed a home. ”
“Understandable,” he said. “Does Mable know this?”
I shrugged my good shoulder. “I don’t actually know. She has always thought the worst of me. I don’t know if she knows anything about me at all.”