Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
My prayers, it seems, are going unanswered. A nurse stops me as I approach the room. “You can’t go in there right now,” she says.
“That’s my mom.”
“I know, and we’re doing everything we can.
I just need to you to be patient while we help her, okay?
” The nurse ushers me back from the doorway, and I crane my neck to see inside.
There’s a group of nurses and physicians surrounding her bed, telling her to lay still while they do whatever it is that they’re doing.
It feels like hours, but it’s probably only minutes before they’re wheeling her out of the room, an oxygen mask on her face, a tube coming out of her chest, and her wrists strapped to the bed. Her eyes look wild, but hazy.
The last nurse to come out stops in front of me. “We’re taking her to surgery. Her moving around seems to have broken off a small piece of her rib, which has punctured one of her lungs. We need to remove the sliver of bone and repair the lung.”
“Is she going to be okay?” Lungs are important. She needs them to breathe. My mom and I have had our struggles and we’re not as close as I wish I could be with my mother, but I don’t want her to die or have anything bad happen to her.
“We’re going to do everything we can,” says the nurse, already glancing back toward where his colleagues disappeared down a hallway.
“We’re hopeful that it will be a straightforward procedure, but we’ll have to see what it looks like when the doctor gets in there.
Do you want me to walk you down to the waiting room? ”
I shake my head. “I remember where it is.” If he needs to be in the operating room with my mom, I’d rather he be there than with me.
“All right.” He’s already walking away. “Check in with the receptionist when you get down there. She’ll get you the case number.”
All the nurses around me have gone back to their jobs, caring for the other patients. This is normal for them, but it’s life-changing for me. I wander in a daze down to the waiting room, where the receptionist points me to the same area I sat in last night with Ronnie.
Pulling out my phone, I text Ronnie. Mom is back in surgery. Broken rib punctured a lung.
Oh shit! Ronnie texts back almost immediately. Want me to come sit with you?
I check the time. Ronnie has class soon and I don’t want her to miss it because of me. She already has a tendency to be late, and her professor doesn’t love her as a result. She doesn’t need to miss a whole class.
It’s okay, you have class. I’m sure everything will be okay. Hopefully. I’ll keep you updated.
And I’ll keep my fingers crossed. I’m sorry everything is hitting you one thing after another, she tells me.
Not much I can do. I’m going to just sit and play on my phone while I wait for an update from the surgery. And maybe keep an eye on the updates from the upcoming World Championship. Because if I’m going to suffer and be miserable, I might as well make it worse.
No speedcubers though! It’s as if she can read my mind. Those assholes don’t deserve a second of your thoughts or energy after what they did. They can rot in hell as far I’m concerned.
I feel bad that I’ve just let her think they were the ones to end things, but at this point so much time has passed that I don’t feel like I can tell her the truth now.
And it doesn’t really matter who ended it.
It’s over, and I’ll have to find a way to make my peace with that.
No promises. I wish I could promise, but no matter how much I’ve tried to focus on school and work, I can’t stop thinking about them.
I’m just as bad as Mom. Worse, maybe, obsessing over multiple guys. But I refuse to let them become my entire personality. I will get over this. Eventually.
That doesn’t stop me from occasionally picking up my phone and opening up an internet browser window, typing the guys’ names into it so I can torture myself with their pictures and the Worlds promos. But if I’m going to avoid my mother’s fate, I need to stop. I know I need to stop.
But after I just look one last time to see when their first event is for the competition.
A familiar voice calls out my name. “Rebecca! Baby! Are you okay?” I look up to see Lukas hurrying across the waiting room. He scoops me into his arms, and over his shoulder I see Felix, Elliot, and Sebastian, all of them looking as worried as Lukas.
I’m completely stunned, and for a moment I just stand there in shock as Lukas holds me.
But I’m so tired and stressed, and it feels so good to be swallowed up in his arms. I’ve missed them so much.
I know I should be strong and push him away, tell them to leave me alone, but I can’t make myself do it.
“You should have called us.” Felix wraps his arms around both me and Lukas.
What are they even doing here? I ghosted these guys. They shouldn’t be here. How did they even find me?
Sebastian runs a hand over my hair. “Tell us what we can do to help,” he says.
“Have the doctors come out to give you an update yet on how everything is going?” asks Elliot, taking one of my hands in both of his.
“Uh.” I can see the receptionist watching us, probably wondering if she should call security. I give her a little wave and smile to let her know I’m okay. “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be on your way to Seattle?”
“We’ve been worried about you,” Felix tells me, running a hand along my jawline and cupping it gently around the back of my neck. “You haven’t been answering our calls and texts, we didn’t know what was going on.”
“We came to your campus. We’re sorry, we didn’t mean to stalk you, but we didn’t know what else to do,” says Sebastian.
“I blocked your numbers,” I say softly. I’d ghosted them specifically because I didn’t want to do the hard thing and end things with them to their faces.
I’d taken the coward’s way out because I knew I wouldn’t be able to say it to their faces.
“We’d gotten through my list. I figured it was best if we just stopped seeing each other. I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“Well, it hurt,” murmurs Felix, dropping his hand and taking a step back, like he’s afraid I’ll push him away.
“I can’t believe you just cut us out like that without saying anything.
I know you didn’t want to call what we were doing dating, but what we had was special, at least to us.
We thought you knew that. We never thought you’d just disappear on us without even saying goodbye.
” The others nod their agreement. Their pain is etched across their faces, and my heart twists seeing and knowing I put it there.
“Even if you don’t want us anymore the way we were, we still want to be your friend,” says Lukas.
“It’ll be hard, but we want you in our lives, however you’re comfortable being there,” says Elliot.
Fuck, I miss them.
Tears are brimming behind my eyelids, but I blink them away as something occurs to me. “Wait, so you went to my school, but how did you know I was here?”
“Your roommate, Ronnie,” says Lukas.
“Ronnie told you where I am?” That doesn’t sound like her. Ronnie keeps referring to them as “the assholes” every time she catches me watching videos of them.
“Well,” hedges Sebastian, “not at first.”
“Definitely not at first,” agrees Elliot, his eyes wide. “At first, she ran over to us at warp speed and yelled at us. A lot.”
Okay, that sounds much more like her.
Felix shudders. “She’s quite terrifying.”
I crack a grin at that, imagining the scene.
“We explained everything to her,” he continues.
“And we’re sure you had your reasons for not telling her the whole story, and we’re sorry for telling her. Now she’s mad at you and made us promise to tell you that you’re, quote, ‘in for it later,’” says Lukas. “We’re also sorry she’s mad at you because of us.”
Fuck. I’m definitely going to have a lot of explaining to do to Ronnie. That’s going to be a rough conversation.
“We really are sorry, but we explained to Ronnie,” says Felix.
“The whole thing was very confusing.” Sebastian brings the conversation back around to the story.
“Yes, it was very confusing,” agrees Felix. “But we explained to Ronnie that we hadn’t broken up with you.”
“You couldn’t have. We weren’t dating,” I say, my voice so small I’m not sure they’ll even hear it.” And we did get Ronnie to promise not to take her anger out on you until your mom is doing better,” Elliot says. Maybe they didn’t hear me. It’s probably for the best.
I shake my head, forcing myself to focus on the basics. “Okay, so now I understand how you knew where I was, but that still doesn’t explain why you’re here.”
“Because your mom is in the hospital and you shouldn’t be here alone,” says Sebastian. Confusion knits his brows together as he tries to figure out why I don’t understand.
“But shouldn’t you be leaving today for Worlds?” I glance at the clock on the wall, calculating how much time I might have with them before they absolutely need to leave, even as I’m telling myself I have no right to want them to stay after everything I’ve put them through.
“You’re more important,” says Lukas, taking my hand and leading me back to my seat.
“I’m not. You might not get another chance at the title.” They’ve worked most of their lives to get to this moment and they can’t give it up. Not for me, or for anyone.
“The only title we want is one from you,” says Felix, sitting on my other side and taking my hand.
“Rebecca?” says a nurse, coming out to find me. She pauses briefly when she sees that I’m deep in conversation with the guys, but then comes over. “Your mom came through fantastically. You can head back up to the room whenever you’re ready.”
“Why don’t you lead the way,” says Elliot, offering me a hand and pulling me to my feet.
We ride the elevator up to my mom’s floor and they follow me down the hall to her room. As soon as we’re outside her door though, the guys hang back.
“You go in and check on your mom, we’ll wait out here,” says Elliot.