Chapter 30
Hold On
Jason
The apartment is quiet enough to hear the heater click and the rain argue with the window. I’m halfway through folding a blanket that never wants to be square when Riley’s breath shears the room in two.
A sharp inhale—then a sound I’ve only heard from her once, when a player’s skate caught her wrist years ago. Not loud. Honest. She doubles, one hand fisting in the counter, the other clamping low across her belly like she’s trying to convince something inside to stay where it is.
“Riley.” My voice drops two octaves and loses its edges. I’m already moving. The blanket hits the floor and I don’t notice. My hands find her shoulders first, then skim to her waist, not lifting, just there—heat, steadiness. “Talk to me.”
She shakes her head once like she can rattle the pain loose.
A breath. Another. “It’s—tight,” she gets out.
“Low. Not like before.” Her mouth is uncharacteristically open, the way it gets when she’s actively managing pain instead of narrating it.
That scares me more than anything on a scoreboard ever has.
“Shoes,” I say, calm I borrow from some better version of myself. I slide hers on, fingers not trusting their own strength with the laces. “Jacket.” I guide her arm into the sleeve. She’s trembling. I am too; I keep mine on the inside where it belongs.
“I don’t want an ambulance,” she says, jaw set, the stubborn I fell in love with wrapped around fear. “It’s faster if you drive.”
“Okay,” I say, because I need a word that isn’t okay or God. I grab my keys, her bag, the folder we started for the doctor like it’s a talisman. The ring on her finger flashes in the kitchen light and my chest does a painful, hopeful stutter.
The hallway outside smells like dust and someone else’s dinner.
The elevator takes a century; we take the stairs.
I stay one step below her so if she slips I’m the floor.
She breathes in counts—four, two, six—the metronome she taught me.
By the second landing she’s gripping the rail hard enough to blanch her knuckles.
I put my palm under hers. “Lean,” I tell her. “I’ve got you.”
Cold air slaps us on the sidewalk. The car chirps awake and the headlights knife the wet.
I get her into the passenger seat, belt across her carefully, fingers checking the angle at her hip like I’m fitting gear that matters.
She folds forward as another cramp tightens; I brace my forearm across the dash and let her press her forehead to the crook of my elbow, the way I used to offer a shoulder to a rookie bleeding through his first mistake.
“It’s going to be okay,” I say, which is not a promise I know how to keep yet and exactly the one I need to say aloud. She nods without lifting her head.
The streets are slick and mostly empty, city lights smeared into commas.
My hands choke the wheel at ten and two, a death grip I try to loosen because white knuckles don’t make me faster.
“Breaths,” I remind, and take them with her, syncing my lungs to hers until the engine’s idle feels like a heartbeat we’re sharing.
She exhales shakily. “I hate hospitals,” she whispers. “I love them. I hate them.”
“I love you,” I say, because I need her to have that sentence to anchor to even as the world tilts. A light turns green like permission.
The ER canopy appears, fluorescent and unkind against the night.
I pull to the curb and I’m out before the car stops breathing, around to her door, my jacket over her shoulders because rain doesn’t get a vote tonight.
Inside, the lobby smells like bleach and overripe hand sanitizer, the PA crackling a language of numbers I don’t speak.
“Patient?” the triage nurse asks. She’s good—eyes on Riley first, then me, then back to Riley.
“Contractions,” Riley says through her teeth, clinical even now. “First trimester—early second—doctor on file is Dr. Hassan—no bleeding—pain six pulling seven.”
The nurse’s eyebrows go up a millimeter; she recognizes one of her own. “Come on, sweetheart,” she says, efficient kindness. A wheelchair appears out of the ether. I’m at Riley’s elbow as the nurse steers us through double doors and into a bright, too-clean maze.
I keep pace with the Wheelchair even though everything in me wants to sprint.
Hold on, I tell the part of me that laces skates and pretends nothing can hurt it. Hold on, I tell the kid we haven’t met yet. Hold on, I tell the woman I love, because I’m not letting go.
The ER corridors hum like a bad dream—fluorescents flickering, wheels whispering, the antiseptic tang so sharp it turns every breath into a swallowed wince. A curtain hisses on a rail and we’re in a bay the size of a hotel bathroom with better lighting and worse promises.
Riley lies back against starched sheets that crackle when she shifts.
A nurse with kind eyes and a barcode scanner clips a pulse ox to Riley’s finger, tightens a cuff around her arm, and belts the fetal monitor across her lower belly with practiced hands.
The machine answers in soft beeps and a faint ocean hiss that I want to bottle and make the world drink.
“Name?” the nurse asks, typing without looking down. “Allergies? How many weeks along?”
“Riley Lane,” Riley says, steadying on her own name. “No known drug allergies. Eleven and change.” The cuff inflates; she doesn’t flinch. She watches the numbers like they’re a game clock she can outstare.
I take the paperwork I’m handed and immediately hand it back because words swim and the pen feels like a blunt instrument.
“I’ll fill it,” the nurse says with a half smile that says she does this for husbands and hockey players and men who think they can outskate fear.
“Just breathe, big guy. She’s okay right now. ”
Right now is a dot I can stand on. I pace three steps to the curtain and three back because anything longer feels like leaving.
I count her breaths under the monitor’s soft beep: in-two-three-four, hold-one-two, out-two-three-four-five-six.
I match her so she doesn’t have to change rhythm for me.
The world narrows to the rise and fall of the sheet over her ribs and the green digits that insist on translating her into numbers.
The monitor catches a tightening. Riley’s mouth goes flat; her fingers fist the sheet, then unfurl. “Six,” she says before anyone asks. The nurse nods like she already knew and checks the belt position, small adjustments, tiny mercies.
I bargain with every god I don’t believe in and some I invent on the spot.
I promise games, years, good behavior. I promise to sit for a season if it buys us one more minute of nothing worse than this.
I promise to learn patience like it’s a second language and to never again confuse silence with safety.
I promise anything to the air if the air is taking requests.
The curtain ruffles as someone pushes past with a portable ultrasound for the next bay.
The soft jelly sound, the wheeled click—my body thinks of a tabloid headline and a window flash and wants to break something that isn’t a rule or a person.
I close my eyes until the impulse passes, jaw aching with restraint.
“Jason,” Riley says, calling me back from a place that doesn’t help. Her hand is there, palm up, so simple I almost miss it. I take it like it’s oxygen. Her skin is cool and dry; mine is damp. She squeezes once—here—and some of the buzzing in my teeth drops to a bearable frequency.
A tech appears, scans the bracelet on Riley’s wrist, and checks the monitor leads. “Dr. Hassan’s on her way down,” she says. “Labs are ordered. Try to relax.” She says it like anyone has ever succeeded at that instruction in this room.
Relax is not on my list of skills tonight. Hold is. I hold her hand and the line where her pulse beats my name against my fingers. I hold my feet to the floor. I hold the part of me that wants to pace the hall into submission because leaving the square of this curtain feels like losing ground.
A beeping down the hall quickens, then settles. The ER makes a sound like a rink before a faceoff—loud, then suddenly, watchfully quiet.
I count the next six of Riley’s exhales like they’re lifelines and tell myself that if I get to sixty, the doctor will appear. I start at one because it’s the only number that feels honest.
The nurse returns with a blanket warmed to kindness and drapes it over Riley’s legs.
“Vitals are steady,” she says, voice a cushion.
“What you’re feeling can happen. Bodies practice.
It’s a scare, not a catastrophe. We’re going to run labs and keep you on the monitor.
Doctor will be here any second.” She says scare like it’s a thing with edges we can hold without bleeding.
Riley nods, jaw unclenching a fraction. I inhale that word and try to make it bigger than the room.
A phlebotomist rolls in with a tray that rattles like a pocketful of change.
Tourniquet, alcohol, the sharp lemon sting that rewires my brain to a childhood flu shot and my mother’s hand on my neck.
Riley looks away as the needle slips in; I don’t.
I owe her my steadiness more than I owe myself comfort.
“Sorry for the pinch,” the phlebotomist murmurs, labeling vials with the boring efficiency that keeps this place from falling apart. She’s gone in thirty seconds. The monitor keeps up its patient beeping like it’s counting for me.
I grip Riley’s hand, careful and too tight anyway. Knuckles white. She wiggles her fingers pointedly until I let up. “Hey,” she says, a small smile trying on her mouth. “Hands are for holding, not breaking.”