Chapter 20
Twenty
If anyone needs me, don’t.
—Creed to Boone
Creed
“Y’all seemed to get along for a short while there,” I pointed out. “Right after your mother died.”
She winced.
I’d seen them around each other a lot there for a while.
That was where my fascination with Birdee had begun—even if I hadn’t allowed myself to admit to that fascination.
Then one day, she’d just not been at any of the get-togethers at her house anymore.
Just…gone.
And that was when I started to get annoyed that I would always see Vito, Cody and Mable together but no Birdee.
She started, but a nurse flung the curtain aside and breezed inside. “Are you ready to rocket?”
“As long as we don’t actually rocket,” Birdee agreed with a small smile on her face.
“How about we turtle then?” the nurse suggested.
“Perfect. Right up my alley,” Birdee teased.
I stood up and gathered my jacket from the chair.
“You gonna use that?” Birdee asked curiously.
I frowned. “No. It’s too hot in here.”
“Then can I borrow it?”
I only then noticed her shivering slightly.
“Oh, I can get you a blanket,” the nurse offered.
But I’d already laid my jacket over her upper torso.
She sighed when it covered her shoulders and chest. “Thank you.”
“All right, I’ll get you a better blanket when we get to the med surg floor,” she said. “Sir, do you want to push her? I’d do it but you look more capable.”
So that was what I did. I pushed her through the halls of recovery, then into an elevator where we then spat out on the second floor.
I wheeled her down to a room that was at the end of the hall, and the nurse got her moved over to a much more comfortable-looking bed than the one she’d been in previously.
“Okay,” the nurse said as she hooked the urine bag onto the new bed. “How’re your legs feeling?”
“Um, okay?” Birdee sounded confused. “Should they be feeling anything?”
“I am more asking because of the catheter,” the nurse said. “Oh, by the way, I’m your nurse for the day. Medina, at your service.”
Birdee flushed bright red and glanced at me before looking at the nurse. “I think they’re fine to get me to and from the bathroom, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“It is.” Medina winked. “Let me take this bed back up to surgery and I’ll be back with some warm blankets and to get this catheter out.”
“Sounds good,” Birdee whispered.
The nurse left the room like the whirlwind she was, leaving the two of us in silence.
“Was she super bubbly or was that just me?” Birdee asked awkwardly.
“Very bubbly,” I admitted. “I’m going to step out in the hall and call Charleigh and Court back when she comes to remove your catheter. I’m also going to go find out where all of your things are.”
“Charleigh probably has them,” she admitted. “Or they’re still at work.”
“Well, that’ll be what I figure out,” I said. “I haven’t seen you without a book since I met you.”
She tilted her head. “You know I like to read?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You read all the time. I don’t think you even know what’s going on around you half the time because you’re so caught up in them.”
“It’s easier to escape than to think too hard about what’s going on in your life,” she admitted quietly.
“Back!”
The nurse popped back into the room like she was riding a pogo stick, bouncing all the way.
“I’ll be outside.” I squeezed Birdee’s toes. “Yell if you need me.”
She nodded, her cheeks heating, and I stepped out into the hall and called Court.
“What?” Court grumbled.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Court sighed. “Nothing, per se. She’s just fuckin’ nuts. You didn’t tell me she’d try to kill me.”
I let that hang for a second before I said, “I’m not quite sure what you would’ve done to have her killing you but…”
“She didn’t want to leave, so we made her leave. Remember? She got in the car all nice like. I drove her home. She went into her room and came out with a baseball bat and told me to wait outside.”
I barely contained the urge to laugh.
“Is she there?” I asked.
“She’s inside. I’m outside,” he grumbled. “It’s fuckin’ cold out here.”
Courtland was in the same boat as I was in. He’d hailed from Georgia, where it was never too cold during the winter. It got some snow, but not like what we got here.
“Knock on the door and let me talk to her,” I requested.
“Hold on,” he mumbled as a muffled sound of him pressing the phone to his jacket sounded, then a soft knocking on the door. “Hey, Crazy Pants! Creed wants to talk to you!”
The sound of hissing could be heard, then, “Let me talk to him.”
There was a muffled scuffling sound and then Charleigh said, “How is she?”
“She just came to,” I lied. “She’s doing good. They moved her down to room 2203. She’s on the second floor, end of the hall. She’s asking for some of her things. Do you know what happened to her phone and her purse and stuff?”
“I have her phone. Her purse is still in her locker where she locked it this morning.”
“Cool,” I said. “Can you and Court go over to her house and get some of her things?” I asked.
“The front door is fucked up and she has a dresser in front of it. I’ll have to go through the back door, and I’m short. I can’t get up there.”
“I have someone over there working on it. The door will be open,” I promised.
Her door would likely already be fixed. I’d had a crew over there to fix it first thing this morning.
Granted, I’d thought that she would be able to let them into her house, and hadn’t expected for her to already be at work.
But the crew was Koen’s, and Koen had promised that he would take a look and supervise as they fixed it.
I trusted him to figure out how to get into her place and get started without her actually there.
Koen also was supposed to be changing her locks and fixing any issues with her windows, too.
“You have someone fixing it?” Charleigh asked.
“Yes,” I promised.
“Good,” she muttered. “I’m still not happy with you about that.”
She shouldn’t be.
I’d been out of line.
Speaking of the reason I was out of line, my sister texted, and I pulled the phone away from my ear to see her say “landed.”
Texting back “good,” I put the phone back to my ear to hear Charleigh say, “We’ll go back to Great Dane’s to get her things once she can tell me the code. I’ll stop by and get that, then your asshole of a friend can take me to Great Dane’s and we can pick up the SUV that they gave her.”
That explained the SUV in Birdee’s driveway.
“Sounds good,” I said. “Also, be nice to Courtland. He hasn’t done anything wrong.”
“If you say so,” she muttered and hung up.
The nurse, Medina, breezed out and said, “She’s all ready for you. Going to get the blankets now. I forgot them.”
I came back in to see Birdee hooked up to a whole lot less wires and tubes.
She looked tiny with my jacket draped over her entire torso and even some of her thighs.
I scanned my eyes slowly over her from her messy hair to her toes.
“What?” she grumbled.
“You just look smaller than usual in that hospital bed,” I muttered.
She scoffed. “You act like I’m small. I’m not. Charleigh’s small.”
“Charleigh is fun-sized. You’re small,” I pointed out. “Then again, pretty much everyone seems short to me that’s not five-nine or over.”
I took the seat beside her bed and leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees.
“I’ll just have to agree to disagree with you then.” She twisted her head so that she could see me without moving her body. “Do you know what happened after…”
After she’d damn near lost her entire body weight in blood?
“From what I understand, after you passed out, Hershel put a tourniquet on your arm to keep any more blood from spurting out. They got you to the hospital pretty fast. It was really quite lucky you happened to be near the county hospital in Jawbone. I think the response time was something like two minutes. They got you into the ER quickly, and then the general surgeon took you up all within about fifteen minutes of your arrival. Though, they did have to drain the blood bank of O-negative blood.”
“Damn,” she said. “I guess that’s not something they’ll know all that fast, is it?”
“No,” I answered truthfully. “What’s your blood type?”
“To be honest, I don’t know.” She scrunched up her nose in embarrassment.
“I can answer that for you.” Medina hurried in with an armload of blankets. She tossed two to me, and then took one with her which she promptly laid over the length of Birdee. “You’re O positive.”
“That’s good to know.” She paused. “Though hopefully I don’t ever have to utilize that knowledge.”
Nurse Medina patted Birdee’s arm. “Do you want another blanket? Or is one enough?”
“Um, one more,” Birdee answered.
Medina did the same with a second blanket, then placed both of her hands on her hips. “Now that you’re situated, I’m going to get another surgery patient settled. If you need anything, hit that buzzer by your hand right there.”
She breezed out of the room before Birdee could reply.
“I like her,” Birdee said as she closed her eyes.
I did, too.
She was no-nonsense, and I liked that about a woman.
“I hate being in the hospital.” She yawned, but kept her eyes closed. “It’s so loud and impossible to sleep.”
But she totally negated her words in the next second as she dropped off into sleep, and didn’t wake back up until Charleigh arrived forty minutes later.