Chapter 22 Dane #2
I’m locked in, shouting “Move!” at everyone not paying attention, and when they can’t hear me, I plow right past them.
Over the music and the crowd noise, I can hear Connor’s shallow, wheezing breaths and desperate whines.
But so long as he’s making sound, he’s alive, and that’s what I cling to while my mind races with how this could have happened.
Did he get stung? What the fuck is a bee doing mixed up in the Venice Beach EDM Fest?
“Almost there,” I tell Connor after we make it out of the crowd. I laser in on First Aid and pick up the pace, shouting to get their attention.
They help me lay Connor down on a gurney, and I shimmy his camera bag off his shoulder to hang it on my own. Immediately, the paramedic asks me what’s going on, and I tell them exactly what Connor told me. He can’t breathe, and he needs an epinephrine shot.
One paramedic asks me what Connor’s allergic to while the other jumps into the back of the standby ambulance.
“Bees,” I tell her, “and…” My heart stops as my throbbing brain connects the dots. “And pineapple. I think…he may have had pineapple.”
My confession comes out in weak breaths and hopeless mumbles. When I look down at Connor’s pale, fearful face, he’s staring right back at me, like he’s realizing what I’ve done.
It had to have been less than an hour ago when I bought that tropical cocktail from one of the drink vendors.
“Heavy on the juice,” I’d said, not wanting to end up too buzzed to enjoy myself.
I was giddy when the vendor stuck a skewer of pineapple chunks into the cup.
Like a dumbass, I ate every one of those chunks, savoring the electric flavor while hyping myself up to spend the afternoon dancing my ass off with Connor.
Then, I’d kissed him in the crowd. Not just any kiss, either. A plundering kiss with invading tongues, mixing my saliva with his until I’d filled his throat with poison!
I’d thought the worst thing that could happen to him at this thing was someone taking advantage of him.
I should have known the worst thing that could happen to someone like Connor is me.
I wrecked his relationship, thrust him into an identity crisis, made him homeless, and now he might die because of me.
Finally, I get someone to love me the way I love him, and it nearly kills him.
“I’m sorry,” I mutter, backing away in case I somehow make things worse.
The second paramedic zips back with a large soft-shell case and pulls from it something that looks a lot like the plastic pen Connor kept in the medicine cabinet at home.
The one I’d chucked in a junk drawer the night he moved in just because it had his name on it.
But I didn’t know then that I would fall in love with him.
I didn’t know that Connor’s pineapple allergy meant he could really die.
But those are just excuses. Excuses to be reckless and selfish. Excuses to justify hurting yet another person who tried loving me until I showed them they shouldn’t.
“We’re taking him,” says one paramedic. “If you’re family, you can come with.”
“Dane,” Connor mumbles, arm reaching out toward me, fingers twitching.
Vision blurring with tears, I give him my hand and feel his strength just as tight as he clung to me before realizing this is all my fault.
“He’s my brother,” Connor tells them with his eyes on me. “Stay with me? Please?”
As soon as the ambulance reaches Saint John’s, the nurses stash Connor in a small, cubical room in the bustling Emergency Room and help him into a hospital gown.
Laid up on the gurney bed, Connor breathes through an oxygen mask, and there’s an IV running from the ditch of his arm to a saline bag hooked to the side of a monitor screen that beeps and flashes his vital numbers.
While one nurse injects something into his IV, another hands me a clipboard just like Connor’s dorky one, except this one is packed with a fat stack of insurance paperwork.
“Is he gonna be okay?” I ask, mind racing with worst-case scenarios. Everything from he’s never gonna forgive me to he’s gonna die.
“It sounds like you got him help just in time,” she says, pointing me to a plastic chair in the corner.
“We gave him another epinephrine injection, and he’s getting a round of steroids and antihistamines right now.
He’ll need to stay here a while, but he should be fine.
The doctor will be back around in a bit, and you can bring those forms to the desk when you’re finished. ”
After the nurses leave, I slump into a plastic chair against the wall. The packet in my lap derides me with my own uselessness. The only questions I know the answers to are first name and last name. I don’t even know Connor’s fucking birthday, or if he has a middle name. Some brother I am.
Spelling out “Connor Whitlock” on the top of the first page feels like etching it into a headstone, and my eyes finally spill all those tears I’ve been trying to keep down. They drip onto the pages I can’t look away from, because the only other place for me to look is Connor.
A muffled word that sounds a lot like, “Hey,” forces my chin to lift and my eyes to confront Connor’s sagging lids. His arm lifts from the mattress. Two curling fingers coax me nearer.
I swipe the downpour from my cheeks and scoot my chair up to his side. Another urging with his hand convinces me to fork over the clipboard. Instead of doing anything useful with it, Connor lays the thing on his stomach before curving his arm around my shoulders.
“I’m so sorry, Connor. This is all my fault. I ate pineapple before I kissed you. I did this.”
Even as he strokes the top of my back to the nape of my neck, I know he’ll never forgive me, because I’ll never forgive myself.
“I’m sorry.” I hang my head and whimper like a baby. “I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t paying attention. I’m sorry.”
His hand leaves me, and I tip my chin to peer at him from the tops of my watery eyes while he lowers his oxygen mask under his chin.
Hoarse, but partially healed, his deep voice murmurs, “You saved my life. Again.”
“I poisoned you,” I cry.
“It was an accident.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re in the hospital because of me. You almost died because of me.”
Cold fingers thread through my hair and comb my scalp in lazy swirls. “I forgive you.”
I gasp for breath, my body trembling with shame. I squeeze my eyes shut behind my palm, cowering from Connor’s pity.
“It’s okay, baby,” he whispers. “Don’t cry.”
I stand and Connor’s hand slips from my hair. Swiping my fists across my wet cheeks, I croak that I have to get some air, but I don’t think there’s enough air in Los Angeles to cure whatever’s wrong with me.
“I love you,” he says, and I hate it so much because I can’t even kiss him without making him sick again.
“I’ll be back soon.” I make for the door.
“Promise you won’t leave?”
Halting in the doorway, I grip the frame just to keep from falling over, and with a quick glance over my shoulder, I promise to be right back.
I don’t even make it to the nearest men’s room before I’m bawling again, my guilt over Connor melding with the guilt I still carry from the last time I saw Lori. She was right to be afraid of me, and I don’t know why Connor isn’t afraid of me too.
“Aw, honey,” a kind voice and a gentle hand on my arm lifts my head, and I’m confronted with the nurse who dumped a mountain of paperwork on me. “Your brother’s going to be okay. They’re just going to observe him for a few hours until the medication does its job.”
“It was my fault. I should’ve been paying more attention. I should’ve been protecting him.”
“Is he older or younger?”
“Older, but it doesn’t matter. He’s like a puppy. I’m supposed to look out for him.”
“Deep breaths.” Gentle hands cup my shoulders. “You’re a good brother.”
“No, I’m not,” I sob into my hands. “I’m not a good anything. Not a good brother, not a good son, not a good friend, not a good…”
Boyfriend.
The word hangs on the tip of my tongue. All my life, I’ve wanted a boyfriend—a ride or die to hold me up, talk me down, and make love with until the sun comes up—but I have no fucking business being anyone’s boyfriend. I can’t take care of Connor. I can barely take care of myself.
Smearing tears across my face, I tell the nurse that I have to leave.
“Hon—” she tries, but my legs are long, and once I decide I’m leaving, I’m already halfway gone.
The tears don’t quit until I’m outside, standing on the sidewalk where I ping an Uber driver to pick me up.
I have the guy drive me back to Venice Beach and to the nondescript curb where Connor left his Jeep.
I never took Connor’s camera bag off my shoulder, intent on protecting it the way I couldn’t protect him.
His car keys are hooked inside the zippered pocket along with his wallet and…
A Polaroid.
New tears form as I’m met with an image of better times. Not happy, I don’t think, but better. Lori holds onto me for dear life, just as I hang onto her memory while I grieve like I killed her.
If I leave now—if I leave Connor after what I’ve done—will I spend the rest of my life grieving him too?