Chapter 40 #2
I take a step closer to her and rest my hand on her arm.
The move seems to snap the last remaining resolve she had been clinging to and she breaks down into tears.
Shielding her eyes with her hands, her shoulders slump over themselves, shaking as she cries.
I close the gap between us and use a strong arm to pull her into my chest, wrapping her up like a safety blanket.
Her hands cover her face as she sobs and I can feel my shirt becoming stained with her tears.
“He could have died,” she weeps against my chest.
“But he didn’t,” I say, trying to comfort her with the truth.
“But he could have. And if he had, the last thing we would have done together was get into a stupid fight.”
“What were you fighting about?” I ask.
This is the first I’ve heard about the two of them being on the outs. Sure, they get on one another’s nerves, but it never went so far as to be called a ‘fight.’
“It doesn’t matter anymore, it’s done. It was stupid,” she muffles out. She pulls away from me and wipes her eyes with her hands. “I’m sorry for what I said earlier.”
I shake my head at her and kiss the top of her head. “You don’t have to apologize. We’re good, Willow.”
“You sure?” she asks, her voice still wobbly from crying.
“I’m sure,” I repeat, pulling her back into a hug. She frees her arms and wraps them around me, squeezing me tight.
“I love you, Miles.”
“I love you, too, Willow.”
Sunday rolls by one machine beep at a time.
Carter is in and out of tests for the majority of the day and they’re pumping him full of medication to keep him sleeping to give his lungs time to heal and recover.
At one point, the doctors told us he’d be in procedures for several hours so I took that as my chance to head home to shower and change.
Hanna drove me since I didn’t have my truck and together, we got in a fresh shower after stopping by her place for a change of clothes for her to wear.
I wanted to get back to the hospital as quickly as I could but when Willow texted me he was still in procedures, I gave in to Hanna’s insistence that I try to get some sleep.
She laid next to me, running her fingers through my freshly washed hair and it wasn’t long until sleep finally overtook me.
When I opened my eyes again, she was still lying next to me, smiling as she watched me sleep.
A little after dinnertime, Ivy called to tell me Carter was back in his room and off the intubator.
Not only that, he was awake and asking to see me.
Knowing I need to do this alone, Hanna offers to drive Ivy home so she can get some rest while I sit with him.
Willow shows me how to properly put on the gown, gloves, and mask, before letting me go into his room.
He’s in the burn unit now while they wait for him to be stable enough to do surgery to place some skin grafts.
Stepping inside, I see all the machines they have him hooked up to, the most jarring one being a massive oxygen mask they have strapped over his face.
Bandages wrap around the upper half of his leg that sustained the most damage.
They’re deformed and uneven, telling me that he’s now missing a large piece of flesh on the upper half of his leg.
“Do I look that bad?” he wheezes. My eyes dart to him and I see that he’s looking back at me. Through the fog of his mask, I see his quintessential goofy grin shining through the thick plastic.
“I’d never lie to you, brother. So yeah, you look like shit.” I chuckle, grabbing onto the footboard of his bed.
He chuckles along with me until it becomes too much and he has to stop to catch his breath.
His breathing is strained and sounds like he’s using all of his energy to take in a single breath.
I take a couple of steps around his bed and sit in the chair next to him.
An uncomfortable silence lingers between us as we wait for the other to speak first.
“You have every right to be mad at me,” he says just above a whisper. I can only imagine how raw his throat feels every time he speaks.
I lean over my knees and drop my head, nodding towards the floor. “Oh, I’m mad at you.”
“What I did was stupid—”
“Stupid? Carter, stupid doesn’t even begin to describe it. How about reckless? Or selfish?”
He doesn’t say anything. After a beat I lift my eyes to look at him.
“You almost died, Carter. What if I hadn’t gotten to you in time? If Brooks hadn’t found me and helped me save you from under that beam? What were you thinking?”
He takes a few deep breaths and removes the oxygen mask from his face, turning his head to look at me. His cheeks and the skin around his face is bright red like he has a really bad sunburn. The heat of the fire that almost killed him still touches him hours later.
“I wasn’t. I wasn’t thinking. I just heard that woman screaming and took off. I’m sorry.”
His eyes lock on mine and flicker with remorse. Clenching my jaw, I take his hand into mine.
“You can’t just take off when you’re upset about something.” His eyebrows narrow on me. “You’ve been pissed about something for weeks now; don’t act like you couldn’t tell that I noticed. You have a family, Carter. People who love you. Ivy, me, Coop, and Willow.”
He looks away from me again, setting his eyes on the old TV that’s hanging in the corner of the room.
“Willow told me you two were fighting,” I continue. “Is that why you’ve been so out of it?”
He shakes his head. “No, not entirely.”
“You gonna tell me what’s been bothering you or are you going to make me guess?”
He pulls the mask over his face again, taking deep inhales of fresh oxygen. He pulls it down again but doesn’t turn to look at me.
“My dad died.”
My eyebrows met in the center of my face.
I didn’t think Carter had any contact with his parents.
After he came to live with Ivy and I, we never really talked about his biological family.
Maybe a few times here or there in the middle of the night when we should have been sleeping, but never in great detail.
“I got a call from his lawyer that he left me money. A lot of money. Stupid bastard,” he scoffs. Tears threaten his eyelids and he tries his best to blink them back. When one goes rogue and falls down his face, he uses his hand hooked up to an IV to wipe it away.
“I didn’t know you were in contact with your parents,” I say, treading carefully. The last thing I want to do is upset him more.
“I wasn’t. Good riddance, right?” he scoffs again, rolling his eyes. “They didn’t want me so why would I want them.” He bites his bottom lip between his teeth. “But then I got a phone call from this lawyer telling me that my dad had died and he asked if I wanted the money he left me.”
“Did you tell him yes, I hope?”
“Of course I did, I’m not that big of an idiot.” He manages a half-hearted smile. “The least the man could do is give me some sort of financial compensation for what he did to me.”
“What about your mom? Where is she?”
He licks his lips and shrugs. “Don’t know. Didn’t ask. Don’t really care to know. But I figured if dear old dad is dead, she either is, too, or still wants nothing to do with me which is fine by me.”
The sounds of his labored breathing fills the room once more as I let the information he told me sink in.
My dad walked out on my mom before I was even born and she never had the capacity to have a child in the first place.
I’m not sure how I’d handle it now if they suddenly reappeared in my life like Carter’s dad had.
“Please don’t say anything to Ivy or the others. I don’t want them to know yet.”
“Of course, man. It’s your thing to tell.” I shrug.
“Carter Jensen, I swear to god if you keep pulling that mask off your face I’m going to come over there and strangle you with it,” Willow’s aggravated voice cuts into our conversation.
“God dammit,” I hear him groan under his breath before slipping his oxygen mask over his mouth. I can’t help but laugh at how he’s afraid of someone as tiny as Willow. The girl might be hardly five feet, but she’d knock you on your ass before you knew what hit you.
“I heard that,” she growls, moving to stand next to where I’m seated. “Do you want your lungs to completely dissolve into nothingness because of the toxins you breathed in? Because that’s what’s going to happen if you don’t keep your mask on.”
“Of course not, Willie. If I did, I wouldn’t be around to hear you gripping at me anymore. You’d have to be a pain in the ass to someone else,” he jokes, looking up at her.
“Bite me,” she snaps at him, checking his IV to make sure it’s in place and glancing at the different monitors around his room. He follows her with his eyes and through his mask, I can see a soft smile on his face. He reaches for her hand and takes it into his.
“Thank you for taking care of me, Willow.”
She pauses to look down at where their hands are connected. Blinking quickly, she squeezes her lip between her teeth. Sensing that they need the room, I stand up quietly and head for the door. As I slip out of my isolation gown and dispose of it, I peer in at them through the open threshold.
“I’m sorry for being selfish,” I hear him say to her. “I’m sorry for scaring you.”
She’s standing next to his bed, looking down at him as small tears roll down her cheeks. His thumb moves back and forth across the back of her hand.
“You’re a real ass, you know that?” she chokes out.
He chuckles a few times. “Yeah I know.”
Then, she leans down and presses her forehead to his. I look away to give them their privacy but can’t help a second glance at them.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
He pulls his mask down from his mouth and takes a deep breath.
“Me too.”