Chapter 23 #2
After he typed out the pertinent information, Adam slumped into a blue vinyl waiting room chair, clinging to the arm rests like he needed their structural integrity to prop him upright, and let his head loll back against the wall.
I sat beside him, close enough that the heat of his discomfort radiated from him, but not so close that I’d risk brushing the wrong nerve or brushing him at all.
“Please don’t wait,” Adam gritted out through clenched teeth, eyes fixed on the monochrome TV bolted high in the corner.
It was set to cable news, closed-captioning garbled into a string of nonsense, but he watched it with the intensity of a man trying to levitate the screen off the wall.
“You don’t need to stay. I’ll be here all night. ”
“No way. I’m not leaving you alone with those nurses. You might escape.” I deadpanned. “Or be taken advantage of. I don’t trust the look of a few of them.”
He blew out a sigh but didn’t turn to look at me. “I don’t need a babysitter, Billie.”
“Good. Then consider me your bodyguard.” I turned his own words back on him.
He made a weak sound, almost a laugh but more of a wince. “Go home. I’ll text you when they let me out.”
I shook my head. “Nope. You’re stuck with me.”
He shifted in his seat, cringing at the movement. “This is stupid. I’m not dying.”
“I know.” My voice came out small at even the mention of the word dying, so I tried again, “But you scared the hell out of Andi and Joey. You scared me.” I regretted the admission the second it left my mouth, but it was too late to snatch it back. “Just let me be here. Just like you were for me.”
“That was different.”
“Why?”
“Because…you were…”
“A big baby—”
“Terrified,” he cut me off. “I know how much you hate hospitals, just go.”
“I’m fine.”
I did hate hospitals. I didn’t need a PhD in psychology to figure out why. At the age of three almost four, my mom checked into one to have my baby sister and left through the morgue. Ever since then, I’ve gotten panic attacks at the mere mention of the word “hospital.”
Which almost killed me when I was eleven and my appendix burst, and I tried to convince my grandparents I just had a stomachache and went to bed.
Thankfully, Adam checked on me when I wasn’t responding to my walkie-talkie.
He climbed up the side of the house and crawled through my window, and when he couldn’t wake me up he went and got my grandparents, and they rushed me to the ER while I was basically unconscious.
I could have died, I would have died, if he hadn’t climbed through my window. Knowing how scared I was of hospitals, he snuck in all three nights I had to stay there and kept me company so I wouldn’t be alone because I was petrified.
What thirteen-year-old boy does that?
Adam Knight, that’s who. So even though sitting in the ER waiting room made me want to crawl out of my skin, I was not leaving.
After a couple of hours, a nurse called his name.
Adam’s jaw clenched as he stood, swaying, then shuffled to the admitting area.
I followed, ignoring his protest. The nurse raised an eyebrow but said nothing, ushering us into a cramped exam cubby with a tattered curtain for privacy.
She asked the usual questions—pain scale, allergies, last meal—and Adam answered in monosyllables until she left him to put on his paper gown.
He undressed, and I stared down at the floor.
“If you’re going to be here, at least help me tie the thing,” he muttered.
I looked up and found him clutching the open back with more dignity than I thought possible.
I rose and began to do the ties, not able to help myself as my eyes drifted over the sinewy landscape of his broad shoulders and muscled back.
I felt heat rise to my cheeks as I fumbled with the thin strings at the base of his neck.
His skin was clammy, and every muscle in his back stood rigid as rebar, snapping me out of my gawking.
“Oh my god, is that eagle holding…?” I asked.
“Yes.”
On his back he had a tattoo of an eagle and in its talons, it was holding walkie talkies that looked exactly like the ones we had.
“When did you get this done?”
“On my twenty-first birthday.”
I traced them with my finger.
“I missed you.” His quiet admission was barely a whisper.
He shifted from one foot to the other and I realized he needed to sit.
My fingers worked to finish the other three ties. “Done.”
He turned to face me, causing me to stumble back.
Instinctively, he reached out and grabbed my wrists, pulling me closer to him, causing him to wince and me to flatten against his body.
His flinch melted as he stared down into my eyes.
The energy between us shifted as my fingers wrapped around his bicep.
“You saved my life, you know,” I blurted out, not knowing why the words were coming now.
His brow furrowed. “What?”
“The appendix thing. When you crawled through the window, then you stayed with me.” I licked my lips. “I never really said thank you.”
Adam searched my face, what was he was looking for, I had no idea, but after several seconds he released my wrist and took a step back. His voice was deep and filled with emotion as he began, “You scared me that night. I thought I was going to lose—"
The doctor appeared then, brisk and impersonal, and I sat in the chair in the corner.
He poked and prodded and took a million notes.
He ordered X-rays and muscle relaxers and an MRI, then vanished as quickly as he’d arrived.
Adam’s wit had started to return by the time they wheeled him to imaging, but the bravado was gone, replaced by a pale kind of exhaustion I’d never seen on his face.
When Adam was out of sight, I found a vending machine, bought two bags of pretzels and three bottled waters, and returned to wait. I didn’t look at my phone or read the hospital brochures, just sat there with my knees drawn up, counting the tiles on the floor, one row at a time.
He was gone for over two hours. When they wheeled him back, his arm was in a sling, and he looked half asleep, his eyes bleary and unfocused. I offered a pretzel bag and he took it without a word, popping three in his mouth at once.
“You get in a fight back there?” I joked.
“You should see the other guy,” he mumbled, crunching the pretzels.
He slept a little, or at least pretended to, while I counted his breaths and the beeps of the nearby monitors.
The doctor finally returned, he said the good news was they were ruling out surgery for now and he was lucky he hadn’t done any real damage by his “cowboy” closed reduction, aka popping his shoulder back into place.
The bad news, he said, was he had not one but two slipped discs and that they were sending Adam home with a prescription for pain medication, physical therapy.
and four to six weeks of recovery time which he’d have to have his arm in a sling with greatly reduced activity, including no stairs, no lifting, no sudden movements, no bending, basically he would need help.
I could see in his eyes that he was never going to take the pain medicine, I was pretty sure he would do the physical therapy but had no plans on “taking it easy.” But I’d heard the ramifications if he didn’t follow the doctor’s orders, it could cost him a lot in the future. It could cost him his mobility.
He saved my life, it was time to return the favor.