Chapter 36
Chapter Thirty-Six
Hunter
On the upside, I get to watch this thunderstorm from indoors, behind the thick glass of my hospital room. The rain lashes against it, the sky almost black, the flashes of lightning intermittent shocks of white daylight.
It’s quite a show.
As it’s happening, I get an honest-to-God sponge bath. I try to convince the two kindly, middle-aged nurses that I could take a shower, but they fuss at me that I have second-degree burns over a sizable chunk of my body, and until I heal up a little, running water isn’t a good idea.
Honestly, I just want them to hurry up, because I’m secretly hoping I can see Clementine before visiting hours end. I know it’s not very likely, and I know that, at worst, she’ll come see me in the morning
They have to go through ten buckets of water before it stops turning black with soot, and then they can finally bandage me up. I’m not quite sure that my burns warranted all that, but after my day, I don’t mind letting other people bathe me while I lie there.
At least I’m not Porter, who got rushed into surgery the second we were in the hospital.
The guys in the helicopter, who rescued us, could barely look at his leg either.
I heard one of them muttering to the other hope he doesn’t lose that, but I was too busy sucking in oxygen from a mask to really listen.
I do hope he doesn’t lose it, though.
After they treat my burns with a sponge bath and gauze, I get to see the pulmonologist. She listens to my chest very seriously, asks me lots of questions, listens to my chest again, then frowns.
“I’m going to keep you overnight,” she says. “In the morning we can see if you’re going to need a pulmonary CT scan or not, because you likely breathed in some superheated air and it could have caused permanent scarring.”
I swallow and breathe in. All I know is my lungs kinda hurt.
“How much?” I ask her.
She shakes her head.
“No way to tell just yet,” she says, but pats my shoulder. “But you’re here, so you’re out of the woods.”
Then she laughs.
“Literally!” she says, and laughs again. “But seriously, there could be permanent damage. We’ll know more soon.”
“Thanks,” I say.
I get a mask to wear. I get an IV, because I’m dehydrated, but at least they don’t give me a catheter since I’m still perfectly capable of getting up to pee.
They do let my parents see me, but not for long. My mom cries and talks a lot about Jesus. My dad makes me pray with the two of them for a good ten minutes, even though I run out of stuff to say to God after about forty-five seconds. I’m just not very religious.
Around ten that night, after hours of waiting and prodding and wrapping and more waiting and poking and more waiting, I get moved to a regular room at last, walking along with my oxygen mask and IV. At least my hospital gown closes all the way up the back.
When I open the door to my room, it’s absolutely fucking stuffed with flowers.
There are arrangements on every horizontal surface, so many that they’re overflowing onto the floor.
There are roses, sunflowers, carnations, lilies, and that’s all the flowers I can really name but I swear there’s a hundred kinds of flowers in here.
“I swear, every other phone call to the nurse’s station was someone delivering flowers for the fireman,” the nurse who escorted me says.
I look up at the ceiling. It’s choked with GET WELL balloons, plus one that says Happy Birthday.
“I don’t know what to say,” I tell her. “People are always nice, but... wow.”
“You earned it,” she says. “Hope you’re not allergic.”
After I get into the bed, another nurse seems to visit every ten minutes. I wish they’d let me sleep, but they’re coming in offering more pillows, chamomile tea, warmer socks, a white noise machine. They’re all so nice and sweet that I can’t even get annoyed.
None of it’s what I really want, but I know I just need patience. Tomorrow morning. I’ll wake up, eat breakfast, and she’ll be here.
I’ve just drifted off to sleep again when the door opens.
Please don’t give me anything else to make me more comfortable, I think. Just let me sleep.
Then whoever opened the door pauses, like they’re uncertain. I open my eyes, but I can’t see them yet because of how the room’s laid out.
After a moment the bar of light cast by the open door disappears, and the door clicks shut. Quiet, tentative footsteps enter the room, and then a dark shape comes around the corner.
My heart leaps.
“Hey,” I whisper.
“You awake?” Clementine whispers back.
“No, I’m talking in my sleep,” I say, keeping my voice low, since she obviously sneaked in somehow.
She comes up to my bed, leans over, and kisses me gently on the forehead. I slide one of my hands into hers, and she squeezes.
“You missed,” I murmur. “The proper hello kiss is down here.”
She kisses me on the mouth hesitantly, like I’m made of glass, so I put my other hand on the back of her head and pull her in, harder. Then she kisses me so fiercely I can feel the sharpness of her teeth against my lips, our mouths open, my tongue reaching for hers.
I’m beyond glad I held on and didn’t run out of the shelter, because now she’s making soft little noises, her hand’s in my hair, and she’s practically pushing me back into my pillows.
When Clementine finally pulls away, she leans her forehead against mine, eyes closed.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” she whispers.
“Me too,” I say.
I’m glad I got to see you again, I think. This is what I hung on for.
I don’t say it out loud. It’s too cheesy, sounds too much like it’s from a bad made-for-TV movie.
Clementine sits on my bed, then looks around at the room like she’s seeing it for the first time.
“This is a fuckton of flowers,” she says, still keeping her voice low.
I grin and rub the back of her hand with my thumb.
“Well, I’m a hero,” I say, putting my other arm behind my head.
Clementine laughs.
“You get to use that for a week,” she says. “Two, tops.”
“I saved Eaglevale,” I go on, teasing her. “Singlehandedly. I think.”
Then I pause, because I realize I don’t actually know what happened to Eaglevale. I’m just assuming if it burned down, someone would have said something.
“How... is Eaglevale?” I ask.
She laughs in the dark.
“Unburnt,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean six months from now, you get to play the hero card to get out of doing the dishes.”
Then she stops, my room’s quiet again, because we both realize what she just said. Six months from now, she thinks we’ll be arguing over the dishes.
I like it, and I like that she said it so casually. She didn’t even have to think about it.
“After the ordeal I went through, I’m still gonna have to wash dishes?” I say. “I don’t get even one servant?”
“You do have a gaggle of nurses attending to your every whim and desire,” she teases me. “My mom had to lure them away from their station so I could sneak in.”
“I got a sponge bath from two nurses earlier,” I say. “Consider that a fantasy come true.”
“I thought you weren’t crazy about two women at once,” she says, laughing. “Or did you figure out where to put your dick?”
“Front, center, and flaccid,” I say. “I think they got off from it more than I did.”
Clementine rolls her eyes at me.
“Clem,” I whisper.
She raises one eyebrow, so I hold up my arm and flex my bicep.
“Is that how you got them to sponge bathe you?” she says.
“You can touch it if you want,” I say, and wink at her.
Before Clementine can either touch my muscle or tease me again, the door opens brusquely and the lights flash on. We both wince, squinting.
One of the nurses is standing just inside my room, looking stern. I lower my arm and act like I wasn’t trying to impress a cute girl with my muscles.
Which is, of course, exactly what I was doing.
“Visiting hours are over,” she says.
“Sorry, I was just going,” Clementine says, though she doesn’t move from where she’s sitting, next to me on the bed.
“Mhm,” says the nurse.
“It’s my fault,” I say, and rub my thumb across the back of her hand. “I just needed to see her after today.”
The nurse softens a little bit, her face less stern.
“Look, they start again at eight tomorrow morning,” she says. “But I do have to kick you out now.”
Clementine nods. The nurse turns and leaves.
“When are you getting out of here?” she asks.
“Tomorrow, day after that at the latest,” I say. “They might have to do a CT scan of my lungs, but I should be out soon.”
“Okay,” Clementine says, then kisses me again, not as deep or hard as before but not quite gently either.
“Get some sleep,” she says when she pulls back.
I lift her hand to my mouth and kiss the back of it softly, her hazel eyes dark and serious.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” she whispers. “I was really scared.”
I look at her face, so open and serious and vulnerable, and I decide to tell the truth.
“You know what I kept thinking of?” I ask.
“What?”
“When that mountain lion was on the tower, and he wouldn’t get down, and you said I’m sorry the mountain lion doesn’t respect you. For some reason, I just thought that over and over, and I got through it.”
She smiles and looks down, but I think her eyes are bright with tears.
“That’s the thing you thought?” she says.
The nurse pops her head back in and clears her throat.
“I gotta go,” Clementine says, and kisses me quickly. I squeeze her hand, and then, just like that, she’s out of my hospital room and it’s dark again.
I fall asleep slowly, the scent of flowers in my nostrils. I hope I dream of Clementine but I don’t dream of anything at all.