Chapter 49
“If you don’t letme see my wife, you’re gonna have a fucking problem!”
The bellow pulled me from the thickness of unconsciousness. The back of my hand stung as I tried to roll over onto my side. I blinked in realization that I was in a hospital bed and I was hooked up to an IV.
My hand went to my forehead and gingerly encountered a bandage.
The door to the room opened and Bones strode inside. His crisp white shirt was untucked and the front of it was stained with blood.
My blood.
His face was drained of color. He looked shaken. Bones never looked shaken.
With a deep breath, he came to the side of my bed and crouched down and gently took my hand in his. “You scared the living shit out of me.”
“I—what happened?”
“What happened?” His eyes pinned me with an intense stare. “You went to use the bathroom and when you didn’t come back, I went to find you. You were on the bathroom floor and your head was cut open. You didn’t even wake up when they loaded you into the ambulance.”
“Oh.” I struggled to lift my hand, but I managed, and then I was touching his stubbly cheek.
“Yeah, oh.” He sighed. “Tell me what’s going on, Hayden. I know something isn’t right. There was that day you slept eighteen hours straight, and all the dietary restrictions, and now this? They brought you here and immediately rushed you off to do some tests. An MRI, I think. Do you have some sort of neurological disease? Seizures? What’s going on?”
I swallowed; my throat dry. “Can I have some water?”
He dropped my hand and stood. Bones went to the bedside table and poured a cup of water from the pitcher and brought it to me. I sipped from the straw and when I’d had enough, I lay back, exhausted.
“I don’t know if I have a neurological disorder,” I said quietly. “They don’t know what it is.”
He frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“This…whatever it is…started a few years ago. Whenever I get really stressed, my body sort of checks out. I faint, or I sleep for fourteen to eighteen hours. Usually, I can tell when these episodes are going to occur, but I was in the bathroom when I felt the stabbing pain in my temple. Before I knew it, my vision was winking in and out and then I fell. I must’ve hit my head on the way down.”
“Stress,” he said slowly. “Stress is what causes it?”
I nodded. “As much as the specialists I’ve seen can deduce, anyway. They’ve run a bunch of tests. MRIs and CAT scans are normal. Bloodwork, normal. Hormones, normal. The last specialist I saw recommended a strict diet—to see if that limited the episodes.”
“Strict diet,” he murmured. “It’s why you don’t drink.”
“It’s why I don’t drink,” I agreed. “And why I don’t eat sugar or eat red meat…or have caffeine.”
“Has it helped?” Bones asked.
“Apparently not,” I said. “Limiting stress is the only thing that really prevents it. It’s why…”
“Why, what?”
“Why I didn’t go to business school. Why I didn’t want to get involved with my father’s company. Why it looks like I waste my days doing whatever I want instead of something useful.”
He took a deep breath. “Christ, Hayden. Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Why did you hide this from me?”
“What was I supposed to tell you? That I have this condition that’s not really a condition? I had a few doctors tell me it was all in my head. They thought it was psychosomatic. One even told me to see a shrink.”
“Well, fuck them. I’m not a doctor, I’m your husband. And you should’ve told me. I have to know these things so I can help you. So I can know what to do when an episode happens.”
“You’re right,” I admitted. “I just…”
“What?”
“Didn’t want you to look at me differently. When you’re sick, people treat you differently.”
“I know,” he said quietly. “God, I know.”
“You do?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
Bones looked down at the floor.
“Bones,” I pressed.
He dropped my hand and then went to grab the chair and brought it to my bedside. He took a seat and rested his elbows on his thighs and interlinked his fingers.
“You might not want people to treat you differently, but do you know what it’s like to find the person you love passed out on the floor? Do you know the terror, Hayden?”
I shook my head.
“It’s fucking terrifying.” His blue eyes bored into mine. “The blood…the pallor of your skin, the coldness of your hands…”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I should’ve told you.”
“Yeah, you should’ve.” He paused. “But while we’re clearing the air, I haven’t been completely honest with you, either.”
Dread curled in my stomach like a rattlesnake waiting to strike. “Honest about what?”
“About my past.” He clenched his hands together. “I’ve been married before, Hayden.”
A gasp escaped my lips.
“I was nineteen years old and I married my girlfriend at the time. She was dying of a rare type of blood cancer. She died three days before her twentieth birthday. It was a gorgeous day. Not a cloud in the fucking sky. Birds singing, wind blowing through the trees. It was perfect, except…” He shook his head, his brow wrinkling at the memory.
He gestured to the spot on his arm where the Golden Snitch tattoo was buried underneath his clothes. “I got this for her. It was the only thing…it made her happy. Hours and hours, the first few movies on repeat while she grew thinner and sicker.”
My heart drummed in my ears. Heavy, pulsing; carrying my life through my veins.
I reached my hand out toward him. He looked at it for a moment before unlinking his hands and taking my palm in his.
“We were at one of those traveling carnivals,” he murmured. “I was standing in the hotdog line and she was standing in the lemonade line. Suddenly, someone yelled that a person had fainted. It was Iris. She told me it was heat stroke. But three weeks later, she told me the truth. She’d been diagnosed with her condition and she was starting treatment.”
Tears gathered in my eyes as I watched Bones relive his past.
“I drove her to doctor’s appointments. I held her when she yelled at her body for betraying her. I slept on her parents’ couch when she tried to break up with me—which she did pretty regularly.” He looked at me, his blue eyes, normally so electric, so vibrant—dull and lifeless like the girl he’d lost.
“I shaved her head when her hair started falling out. I shaved mine, too. And when her father told me they were stopping treatment because it wasn’t working, I asked her to marry me. Because everyone deserves to be someone’s everything. And she was my everything. She was my future and my hope…my dreams and my only plan for the future was to love her. But all that went to shit when she got sick.”
He swallowed. “Her getting sick changed everything. Changed the entire trajectory of my life. And I never thought I’d want that again—to feel so deeply for someone, knowing that life could throw me a curve ball and shatter what was left of me. But then I saw you laugh for the first time, and that was it.”
Bones held my gaze.
“I laughed,” I repeated.
“You laughed, and I thought here we go again. There was no stopping it, Hayden. Even if I’d wanted to. I think I fell in love with you the moment I heard that laugh.”
It all made so much sense now. Why he didn’t want to leave my side after I’d been asleep for eighteen hours, why he’d run headfirst into this relationship without slowing down over the speed bumps.
I tugged on his hand to bring him closer and then I cradled his cheek. “A life with me never scared you. Did it, Bones?”
He turned his head and kissed my palm. “No, Duchess. It was a life without you that scared the shit out of me.”
“Bones,” I whispered.
“Hmm.” He hugged me tighter in the small hospital bed that he’d climbed onto to hold me.
“Were you ever going to tell me about her?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“I tried to tell you the night we celebrated our marriage with my club and their Old Ladies.”
“You tried, huh?”
“Not hard enough, obviously.” He sighed. “I wasn’t sure how you’d take the news.”
“Take the news that you’d loved someone before me? And lost someone before me?”
“Well, when you put it that way…”
I wiggled out of his embrace and lifted myself up so I could stare at him. “I’m sorry you had to live through something like that.”
He nodded; his eyes hooded in the low light of the hospital room. The overhead light was shut off and there was just the dim glow from the lamp on the bedside table.
“I wondered, you know,” I said, cuddling up with him again.
“Wondered if I’d ever been married before?”
“No. Not that. But I did wonder if you’d been serious with someone in your past. The way you treated me—from the beginning—you were very natural about it. The way you took care of me. The way you checked in with me when we weren’t together. Part of me worried it was love-bombing. The other part of me thought that maybe you’d done all this before so you knew how to be.”
“It was a good instinct.”
I closed my eyes. “My mother isn’t here. Did you call her?”
“I called the house,” he said. “And I spoke to Stanton. Your mother…she…”
“Was already asleep, wasn’t she?” I said quietly.
“Yes.” He paused. “Did you know she’s been taking sleeping pills?”
“What? I had no idea.”
“Stanton shared that with me—as an explanation for why she was unavailable. He didn’t want you to think she was purposefully staying away.”
“I’m kind of relieved she’s not here, actually. I just clobbered her with the truth about Arnold. Like she needs more to worry about.”
“She doesn’t know about your health issue?”
“No.”
“Hayden…”
“Don’t Hayden me. I’ll tell her. I promise.”
He was quiet for a moment and then he said, “I called Charlie and left a message.”
“Oh.”
“I thought she should know.”
“She already knows. About my issue, I mean.”
“Of course she does.”
“She wanted me to tell you. She urged me to.”
The door to the hospital room opened and the night nurse strode inside. She placed a hand on her hip and stared at Bones. “Visiting hours are long over, honey. It’s time for you to leave.”
“I’m not leaving,” Bones said. “So, either you find the doctor to discharge her so I can take her home, or I’m sleeping right here in this bed.”
“I really want to go home,” I said. “Please?”
“I’m not authorized to make that call,” the nurse said.
“Looks like I’m getting comfortable.” He gently removed his arm from underneath me and then he kicked off his shoes.
“You look pretty comfortable to me,” the nurse said with a grin. “I’m a sucker for true love. Night, kids. Sleep well.”