6. Logan
6
LOGAN
The only thing worse than watching the love of my life die when I was eighteen years old, is watching her collapse and almost die in my arms when I’m a grown-ass man. And I still can’t do anything about it.
Andrea is on the phone with 9-1-1 before I even realize what is happening. Evie races to her car, searching for Poppy’s bag.
“Where the hell is it?” she screams at the back of my head, but I don’t stop breathing for Poppy.
One breath into my lungs, the next into hers.
Over and over.
“Her inhaler.” Evie shoves it into my hands, and I pause only long enough to try and get her to take some of the medication into her lungs, but nothing changes.
Doing the only thing I can, I go back to breathing for her.
Please. Please don’t leave me.
Silently, and to a higher power that I’m not even sure I believe in, I pray.
Don’t let her die. I can’t lose her again.
Our parents stand, watching and talking to 9-1-1, but they don’t try to push me away.
Still, I breathe for her.
First five minutes, and then ten.
The entire time, Poppy’s fear-filled eyes are locked on mine. I feel her pulse racing, and I watch as she can’t hide her feelings anymore.
The ones she turns away from me in the dark of night to keep me from seeing.
I swear if you keep her alive, I will fix this.
“I love you,” I whisper against her lips right before I breathe into her lungs. “Never stopped. Never will.”
I tell her everything between those agonizing breaths.
All the secrets that I’ve kept locked away for a decade. With every breath I take, counting the seconds until I push more air into her lungs.
All of the dreams that I have for our life together.
Anything I can to keep her calm.
“Stay with me, Poppy.”
Another breath.
“I’ll do anything you want, baby. Just don’t give up.”
Tears clog my voice, and her eyes shut, but I don’t stop. I’ll never stop.
“I’m not giving up. So you can’t give up.”
In silence, I keep breathing for her, refusing to move when Finn tries to help.
“I love you, Poppy. And you need to fight, because I will fix this.”
I swear. I’ll do anything you want if you let her live.
“Hurry,” I hear Bax say. “Let’s get this shit packed up. We’re following the ambulance.”
I don’t even give a shit what happens to our stuff. I just need Poppy to breathe.
When her heart stops eleven minutes after she collapses, I start compressions.
“Come on, Poppy,” I grunt between exertions. “You’re not doing this shit to me. Not again.”
“Where’s the ambulance?” Andrea’s question, followed by the pause, fills the space of five compressions.
“I don’t give a flying fuck if you can’t tell me exactly when. My daughter’s not breathing, and now her heart isn’t beating. Tell me where they fucking are!” Never, in all the years I’ve known Andrea, has she ever yelled like that.
“Five minutes.” She lowers her voice, disbelief coursing through the air. “Five minutes. Logan, you keep her alive for five more minutes.”
I nod, because I can’t speak. I can’t even take a deep breath at this point, because I’m too focused on keeping Poppy alive.
I can feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins, keeping the exhaustion at bay.
Every thirty compressions, I lean back and let Evie give her sister two rescue breaths. I can’t do both. Not with the way I’m struggling to keep my shit together.
We work like that, in silence, while my mom and Andrea cry. While Finn and Bax tear apart all of the tents and load everything into the backs of the cars.
Suddenly, it doesn’t matter how much we’ve had to drink or what our plans were.
The only thing that matters is keeping her alive.
When Emily moves to Poppy’s other side and nods at me, I fall back and let her start compressions.
Someone’s hand on my shoulder has me looking up, my chest heaving.
Dean, Poppy’s father, stands there with tears in his eyes and desolation on his face.
“She’s not going anywhere.” My broken words are the only thing I can think to say, the only plea I can make.
Once I catch my breath, I take over for Emily again and do my best to ignore the tears falling from not only her, but from Evie as well.
We stay that way, alternating every two or three minutes, for a lot longer than five minutes. Sweat pours down my face, mixing with the tears that I’m not trying to hold back anymore.
You can’t die, Poppy.
I scream the words in my head because I can’t force them out of my mouth.
Until the sound of sirens fills the air and there are paramedics shoving me out of the way to get to her seconds after they arrive on scene.
We watch, all of us together, while two medics pull a machine out and hook leads onto Poppy’s chest.
“What was happening?” the medic not currently shocking the love of my life asks. “Before she collapsed?”
“She’s been rubbing her chest all day,” I say blindly. “Since she got here. At sixteen, she took a bullet to the heart and survived.” My bullet , I add silently. “She’s thirty now.”
“Any medications?”
“None,” Andrea answers. “Wait. An inhaler. But nothing else.”
“Got a pulse,” the EMT performing the shocks says loudly. “Let’s load her and go before she codes again.”
They have her strapped on a gurney and in the back of the ambulance in a matter of seconds.
“I’m going with her,” I tell everyone and no one at the same time.
It isn’t a question, isn’t up for debate. I don’t care if Andrea wants to go with her. Or if Dean needs to see his daughter being worked on. I give zero shits about anyone else but her. I’ve almost lost her once.
Never again.
“Take my truck.” I follow the paramedics into the ambulance and throw my keys, not caring who grabs them.
Poppy codes three more times on the way to the hospital. And every single time, another piece of my soul shatters right along with the flatline on the monitor.
By the time they unload her, I’m barely holding on to my sanity. When I try to follow her, a nurse stops me with one hand on my chest.
“You can’t,” she says simply. “Go to the waiting room. I’ll come get you when I know something.”
After one long second, I nod.
I know better than to argue with a nurse, especially when Poppy’s life is the one at stake.
When I step into the waiting room, the doors from the outside are opening and our families rush in together.
“Anything?” Andrea’s eyes seek out mine with hope, but I shake my head.
Swallowing down the bile that has been sitting at the base of my throat since the first time Poppy’s heart stopped in the ambulance, I pull her into a hug to keep her from seeing the devastation on my face.
“Her heart stopped in the ambulance. Three times.” I don’t bother sparing any of them the information that I know I’d want in their situation.
Dean is there, his hand on my shoulder. “Is she?”
“No.” I clear my throat. “They’re working on her, but she’s alive.”
Andrea starts crying again, this time against my chest, and I feel Dean’s hand clench and then release my shoulder in a silent show of support.
“Then we wait.” He coughs, hiding the tears I can see in his eyes when I look over my shoulder at him. “Because she’s a fighter. We all know it.”
With a nod, I take the seat closest to the doors, needing to be as close to her as possible. The entire time, wondering if I’ll have the chance to beg for her forgiveness. God wouldn’t take her away from me like this. Not after the life she’s lived.
“I love her,” I finally tell my mom hours later while my eyes are locked on the doors.
She grabs my hand in hers and squeezes tightly. “I know you do.”
“I’m gonna marry her.”
I haven’t said those words out loud. Not since I was eighteen years old and she was sixteen.
My mom’s eyes fill with tears, and she nods. “I know. You’re gonna need your grandmother’s ring and not the one you bought as a child. Come get it when you’re ready. She’d want you to have it. She always wanted it to go to you and Poppy.”
My dad, on the other side, brings his hand down onto my shoulder, pulling me into a half hug. “I’m glad you’re pulling your head out of your ass, even if it’s a little late.”
“In my defense,” I can’t help but tell him, “Finn already convinced me, before they even got to the campsite, to go after her. Life just decided to kick me in the balls for taking so long to realize it.”
Before anyone can agree with my idiocy, the waiting room doors open again, and I hold my breath. The first time they opened, it’d been someone leaving the emergency room. The other six times they opened weren’t for us, either, so I’m afraid to get my hopes up.
“For Poppy Blake.” The same nurse from before moves immediately to stand in front of me, her face completely unreadable.
In my entire life, I’ve never been unable to face anything. Bullets, grenades, the death of my friends or my sister. None of it compares to the anxiety and fear that eats through my gut in the five seconds it takes for her to open her mouth.
“She’s stable.”
Those two words knock all the oxygen out of my lungs, until I have to force myself to breathe.
“I’ll take you to her now, although she might not wake up for a few hours. ”
“What happened?” The question rips itself from my chest. “Do you know yet?”
“She had stress-induced cardiomyopathy,” the nurse says quietly as our families circle around us. “The doctor will tell you more about it in her room and give you a full update on the expectations of her condition.” She leads the way, and without looking back, I follow her.
“Google says that’s broken heart syndrome.” Evie’s pronouncement is the last thing I hear before the doors shut behind me.
The doors closing don’t do shit to keep me from knowing that it’s all my fault.
I didn’t break her heart, literally.
But I know that I caused her stress. Keep causing her stress. Even if I don’t want to.
The nurse leads me into the room, and I move immediately to Poppy’s side.
Her red hair stands out against the white sheets of the hospital bed, and I can’t help brushing an errant curl out of her face before I take her hand in mine.
When the man I walked by on my way in clears his throat to get my attention, I turn an annoyed glare at him.
“What?”
The doctor, whose badge I can’t see, just watches me with patience I definitely am not feeling.
“Poppy suffered from stress-induced cardiomyopathy. It’s a temporary heart condition that is caused by stress. It’s also known as broken heart syndrome.”
Exactly what Evie Googled right before I walked out of the waiting room.
Hearing him put words to what happened causes a jolt of pain to go from my neck down into my chest, landing in the empty space where my heart should be. But I don’t interrupt him. Not when he is telling me everything I need to know about Poppy’s pain. About her suffering.
“It’s rare to see a case move into the extremes as quickly as it did with her, but from the descriptions that the paramedics provided, she may have had symptoms earlier in the day that she didn’t treat or even understand.”
Poppy takes a deep breath, drawing my attention away from the doctor. But her eyes are still closed, and she sleeps restlessly. Instead of keeping my other hand at my side, where I’ve had it clenched to keep from touching her, I reach out and touch her, sitting right next to her bed so that I can keep both hands on her at the same time.
“Unfortunately, there’s no treatment for broken heart syndrome. Usually, I would prescribe some medication while she’s recovering here in the hospital, but I think the best option is bed rest.”
His eyes are locked on Poppy’s chart in his hand, and there is something in the way his eyes flash that has me questioning everything in that moment.
“Why?”
When he watches me with a question in his eye and doesn’t give me an answer, I cough to clear the hesitation out of my throat.
“Why can’t you medicate her while she’s here?”
“Because of the baby.” The doctor keeps perusing her chart like he hasn’t just dropped a bomb on my entire life.
Poppy’s fingers clench around mine. “Baby?” she whispers hoarsely. “Who’s having a baby?”
The doctor’s eyes flash with something close to regret as he looks between the two of us. “I’m sorry, I thought you already knew. You are.”
Poppy tries to pull her hand out of mine, but I don’t let go. I can’t.
Not when the doctor has given me everything that I’ve ever wanted, without even knowing.
And then Poppy starts crying.
“I’m so sorry.” Her sobs break my heart, and her tears shred every single one of my nerves into pieces. “Lo. I swear I didn’t know, and I’m so sorry.”
“Hey.” I get up, shifting so that her eyes are locked on mine. “You have nothing to be sorry for. You weren’t alone in that bed. Or in the shower. Or any of the other places.” I lower my voice, trying to get her to smile. She doesn’t. Instead, I brush the tears from her eyes and kiss her forehead as gently as I can. “You need to stop crying, sweet girl. I don’t want you adding any more stress to your heart, do you understand?”
Rather than say anything else to her, I turn to the doctor and ask him the question that is burning its way into my brain as I try to figure out when we made a baby.
“How far along is she? Were you able to tell?”
He glances down again, and the way his lips purse makes my heart stutter in my chest.
“We went ahead and did an abdominal ultrasound when the lab work showed you were pregnant. You’re twenty weeks along.” He taps a pen to the top of his folder. “Since this is news to the two of you, let’s go ahead and get another ultrasound in here and make sure everything is okay. I’ll also make sure that we get an obstetrician here too.”
Less than an hour later, Poppy and I are staring at our baby on the monitor.
“Congratulations,” the bubbly ultrasound tech announces. “It looks like you’re having a boy. Doc Martin will be right back in to go over the rest of the results with you.”
She leaves moments after, giving us a string of printed out copies because she’s excited that she’s showing us our boy.
An hour later, after she’s been moved into a different room where she’ll be staying for the next forty-eight hours, Poppy cries in my arms.
I’m not sure which is worse, to be honest. The fact that she’s crying and apologizing over and over, even though I keep telling her that she has nothing to be sorry for… or the fact that I can’t even figure out if she wants to be pregnant.
Me? I’ve never been happier about anything in my life.
The woman I love more than life itself is having our baby.
I just need to figure out how to make her realize that she’s mine.
And prove I’ll never let her go.