Chapter 11
Blaise
The script flips when we arrive at the hospital and the staff immediately freaks out about a pregnant woman in the emergency room.
I guess they don’t like dealing with pregnancy.
I attempt to dip the moment I drag Tilly up to the help desk, having done my job, but three nurses immediately surge forward, and she grabs hold of my sleeve.
“I don’t want this,” she tells me, and the frantic tone in her breath has me feeling the barest modicum of sympathy.
She totally doesn’t deserve my help, but I pull on the strings of my hoodie to conceal my face a bit better and stand there next to her.
I’m not going to take her home, but I feel like if I ditch now, she’ll chase after me.
The nurses are exchanging looks as they take her temperature and her blood pressure.
The looks are . . . well, they’re definitely not reassuring.
Especially when they fast-pass Tilly into a wheelchair despite the waiting room being mostly full.
One nurse wheels her to an elevator bay as another corrals me over to the desk. “I need patient information from you.”
Information I don’t have. I don’t have her last name, and the shit Andy was just telling me, about how they were struggling to find anything about her based on the extra info I gave him, has me worried Tilly isn’t her first name, either.
Makes sense. Con artists don’t usually use their real names, I’d wager.
I glance up at the conniving little snake, debating if this is my opportunity to leave.
Hell, just because I’m a nice guy, I can even go back to her place and grab her wallet for her.
Yeah, I’ll snoop around a bit, I’m owed that, but I’ll bring her shit here.
It’ll make me less liable for anything, and that’s got to give me some Good Samaritan points, at least with Gabe and Joss.
I have to call him. Fuck. I don’t want to interrupt his babymoon, but he’ll be pissed if I don’t tell him I had to take her to the hospital.
There’s a shriek before I can tell the nurse I don’t have Tilly’s info.
My heart sinks immediately. She’s yelling at the nurse, saying she doesn’t want to get in the elevator.
The screech, it’s not something someone fakes.
She has the most panicked look on her face as she tries to get out of her chair and the two nurses try to keep her seated.
She’s crying, too, and she sounds absolutely terrified when she yells, “Blaise!”
It hits me in the gut. My back is to the waiting room.
With my hood up, it’s impossible for anyone who isn’t directly in front of me to see my face.
And my name isn’t super common, but I’m not a one-name kind of guy.
If anything, it’s Sinclair. That’s what the jersey says. So no one reacts to her scream.
Except the nurse trying to pull Tilly up in his system. His eyes go wide.
I shake my head. A quick, almost invisible gesture, but he nods. “We’ll have someone come up to you to get everything once—”
I don’t like the way he freezes there. There are any number of reasons why he might have stopped talking.
Really, he doesn’t know who Tilly is to me, so he shouldn’t be explaining too much of anything.
But there’s a look of fear about him, like I might react really badly to whatever he’s about to say.
I’m Blaise Sinclair. I have a history of doing mostly dumb shit, and a lot of that dumb shit comes off as blowing up over small stuff. He doesn’t want me to blow up.
I don’t want to blow up, but I’m a pusher. I lean over the desk between us. The man’s in decent shape, fairly tall. We could scrap a couple rounds. But no one wants to scrap with me. “Once what?”
His look softens. Not fear. Sympathy. It makes me want to throw up, and I don’t even like Tilly. “The doctor will talk to you.”
He says it grimly enough that there’s nothing else for me to do except run to Tilly. I don’t know what’s about to go down, but she’s a human being. She deserves having someone, even if that someone might be her mortal enemy.
The moment Tilly’s hand grabs mine in the elevator and refuses to let go, no matter what happens, will stick with me forever.
The moment an entire team of doctors and nurses shows up in the room will stick with me forever.
The moment that, in the midst of the chaos, everyone pauses for a single second when the sound of a heartbeat, the baby’s heartbeat, is broadcast, will stick with me forever.
The moment the doctor tells her, doesn’t ask, tells her that she’s getting emergency surgery and the tears pour from her eyes.
The moment the nurse attempts to take her wig and she tries to stop her, but there’s already an IV pinning her arm down so I’m the one who puts my hand on top of her wig to keep it in place because she deserves this one modicum of vanity. Of dignity.
The moment the doctor says I have to go and Tilly begs her to let me stay, and I give the doctor the most baleful look and mouth a promise that I’ll leave once she’s under, just let her think that I’m here.
The moment I kiss the top of her head and make that promise that I’ll stay with her and do feel guilty about lying, even if it’s in everyone’s best interest, and even if she’s the bigger liar between us by a wide margin.
The moment her eyes close and the anesthesiologist nods to the doctor that she’s unconscious.
The moment the door closes behind me and I’m left with nothing but my thoughts and the prayer that she survives because fuck, I don’t want to be the guy who has to tell Joss
who has to tell the world
who has to be the last familiar face
who has to stand here on the other side and pray for her because if I don’t, who will?
That moment will stick with me forever.
I’m in the waiting room long enough that I realize I’m not in the maternity ward.
I’m in an area where people aren’t excited; they’re scared.
I’m not the only one praying, and by comparison to the people with their heads hung, gathered in tight circles or tucked in their own worlds, holding their necklaces or their own hands or each other’s shoulders, I’m not doing a good job of it.
Gammy made me go to church for a few years, but life ran away from us.
I was busy. She was doubly busy having to run me around while managing her own life.
I have faith in my own distant way but not enough to put words to it.
Just vague, selfish hope that’s tempered with the inescapable truth that if something terrible happens here, it would simplify my life in the most horrible way.
This is the part of the hospital where terrible things happen. The placid, wordless posters on the wall depicting serene landscapes and abstract, muted colors are enough to make that obvious if the other visitors in the waiting room do not.
Because we’re in this room, with death all around us, I think everyone is as startled as I am by the sudden outburst of shrill wails on the other side of the ominously closed doors. Everyone looks around at each other. It feels like they all, as a unit, look to me then.
I stand and take two steps to the door as the sound nears us on the other side.
I taste my heart in my throat.
I feel the cool wick of a tear trickling down my cheek.
I open my mouth and gulp in air like I just had to run my own ball in for a sixty-yard touchdown. I’m hyperventilating, but just hearing that sound has my whole body on high alert.
I’m not ready for this.
I had a week, barely, and for half of it, I convinced myself that, like Andy said, it was part of the con. But I know that’s my baby I’m hearing.
I’m not ready for this.
The door swings open, and a doctor appears with a swaddled, squalling bundle in her arms. Someone behind me starts laughing; it’s the manic sort of laugh you get when every emotion hits you all at once and there’s nothing left to do but laugh and take every ounce of joy you can in the moment, even if it’s not your own.
It’s the grim hands of Death here, and I can only imagine that seeing new life in a moment of acute grief is a balm.
Despite the wails, the doctor whispers, “I believe this is yours,” with a big smile.
“Oh shit,” I breathe out, but I don’t hesitate to take the bundle being offered to me.
A distant, detached part of my brain thinks this is probably not protocol.
My cousin’s baby had a damn Lo-Jack on her that her husband accidentally triggered just taking the baby for a walk outside the maternity ward.
But this isn’t the maternity ward, and I’m not going to steal this baby.
Well.
The jury is out on that one.
Because the moment that little, tiny, wrinkled thing, so angry their face is bright red, lands in my arms, they look up at me, sigh, and fall asleep.
And I just want to gobble them up so they’re part of me and no matter where I go, they’ll be with me.
Mine.
“Congratulations, man,” a guy says from behind me, resting his hand on my shoulder in a fatherly way, something my father would never bother to do.
“Thank you,” I say, except the words don’t come out.
The doctor fusses with the tiny hat and the blanket. I look up to her and clear my throat so I can actually ask, “Am I holding him? Her? Am I holding them right?”
She laughs, and I swear I see tears glimmering in even her eyes.
She’s older, looks like she’s been around the hospital a long time, and there’s a severity about her that makes me think she’s doubling as the baby’s bodyguard and that’s why she got away with bringing them out, but she’s misty-eyed.
“A boy, and here. Just make sure you support his head right here, and you’ll do fine. ”
“Yeah, okay,” I mumble, flashbacks to every single time I’ve ever fumbled a ball flying through my brain as I carefully inch my arm around. “A boy?” I repeat.
“Yep. He’s a little underweight, so we’re going to transfer you over to maternity and get him in an incubator — the neonatal team is probably going to want him here an extra couple days — but he’s doing great.”
“He’s so pale,” I murmur, words just coming out of my mouth as the thoughts occur, but I see the doctor stiffen, and I grin. “He looks . . . he looks just like me in my baby photos. He’s just . . . he’s perfect.”
She nods. “He is. Congratulations, Papa.”
I’m not going to correct her any more than I would have corrected anyone else. I don’t need to. He is my son. This is my son. He’s mine. There’s no fucking way I’m telling Tilly I know who she is, but—
“Tilly?” I croak out, which makes the baby start to fuss, but I rock him like I’ve been taking care of babies my whole life.
The doctor nods. “She’s still in surgery, but they’re stitching her up now, and she should be fine.”
“The uhh . . .” I start, although in the rush to get her prepped for the emergency C-section, I didn’t follow much of what they said.
Everything was bad, and there were a lot of people in that room.
People who weren’t there to deliver a baby, because there were other critical issues to be dealt with.
Now that the baby’s here, in my arms, healthy and calm and so incredibly handsome I want to stare at him forever, it dawns on me that everything that just happened wasn’t normal.
That’s not how things go down, I don’t even think when it’s an emergency.
The mom is supposed to be conscious during a C-section, right?
The doctor smiles sympathetically. She deals with people who are overwhelmed all the time, I imagine.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it. She did crash but only for a couple seconds.
She should be okay. And the oncologist took a look at her ovary while she was open, got some samples, but he thinks she’s good for now.
She’s going to have a rough recovery in front of her — we didn’t have a choice with the incision because of the scar tissue, so it wasn’t as clean as we usually do for a c-section — but we’ll get her back on her feet. ”
I let the words float around for a moment, not wanting to react in a way that might upset the baby.
I hate Tilly, but when the doctor said she crashed, does that mean her heart stopped?
Did she actually die while she was in surgery?
And an oncologist was in there? I know she’s got a lot of scarring on her belly.
I remember that from our night together in July, when she lied to me about being able to get pregnant. But hell, was it cancer?
“I think I need to sit down,” I mutter, the words feeling foreign on my tongue, like they were spoken by someone else who just happens to be controlling my tongue.
“Do you think you can walk a little bit with me, or do you need to sit down first?” the doctor asks without a trace of the ridicule I’d expect from my friends if I’d just said something like that to them. Then again, I’m betting as a doctor, she sees people fall constantly. And I’m holding a baby.
My baby.
Damn.
His mother is a monster. A wolf in sexy, sweet, innocent sheep’s clothing. I want to believe that she’ll treat him well, but how can I know that?
I have to take care of him. No matter what happens, I have to protect him. I have to make sure he’s strong and healthy and safe and loved.
Which means I can’t be weak right now. I can’t let myself get fucked up about whatever just happened in there with Tilly. I have a baby I’m responsible for now.
“Yeah, I’ll walk,” I say firmly. “He’ll like the walk.
” Babies love walks. I may not know much about babies, and I’m about to go through one hell of a crash course right as practice is about to begin, so this is going to be rough to handle, but hey, I walk a lot at practice.
I bet I could just strap him into one of those wolf-pack baby carriers and take him with me.
He’s my kid. He probably loves football, too.
The doctor seems to relax at that, like she was waiting for me to freak out or, hell, like I was freaking out but I’m calmer now. “They do love walks. You’ll definitely get your steps in, not that you need to worry about that.” She winks.
Right. She knows who I am. My hood fell back at some point, and Tilly said Blaise enough times.
“Hey, that, err, hippo thing? Where you can’t talk about patient stuff?”
“HIPAA? We can’t control patients, but you don’t have to worry about this leaking to the press from anyone in that operating room. Your identity is safe with me.”
“Good. It’s . . . the team doesn’t know. It’s complicated.”
“We don’t want to make things any more complicated, then.
We’re going to transfer Tilly to a maternity room once she’s stable to move, but in the meantime, would you like to take your son there and give him his first bottle?
It’s going to be a few hours before Tilly’s able to feed him, and we don’t want him going hungry before then. ”