86. Ouch
Chapter 86
Ouch
Luca
B eeping wakes me up. Did Ariana set an alarm on her phone? It’s not my normal alarm tone, and my girl doesn’t set alarms unless it’s absolutely necessary. She usually just relies on me or Lil or her body deciding it needs coffee to wake her.
But something’s wrong besides the beeping. She’s not on my chest, and I’m not curled up with her, spooning her body with mine the way we both love. With more difficulty than normal, I crack my eyes open and stare at a ceiling that isn’t ours.
What the fuck? Where the fuck am I? My eyes are drawn toward the beeping, to a machine showing my heartbeat. My left hand is covered in tape, keeping some kind of IV attached to it. I’m in the hospital. I close my eyes again, trying to figure out why the hell I’m in the hospital.
I was digging my ring out of my bag after my fight. I open my eyes again, looking at my finger, and see the pink band right where it belongs, but I don’t know how it got there.
It all comes back to me in a rush. Getting hit from behind in the locker room, having my teeth pulled in the back of a van, being beaten and stabbed in that cabin, and my queen rescuing me like the little badass she is.
Ariana. My girl. My queen. My wife! Where is?—
She whimpers softly, and I whip my head to the right. My heart flips. It definitely does something weird because I hear the machine record it. Ariana’s asleep, hunched over in a chair, her head on her arm like it’s a pillow. She whimpers again, her lips parted slightly. Her other hand is holding mine. I squeeze it gently, rubbing it with my thumb.
I try to say her name, but it comes out as a croaked cough. She jolts awake and looks around, trying to pinpoint where the noise came from. I follow her gaze to a cot in the corner and see Lil sleeping there. I squeeze Ariana’s hand again. Her head swivels, and her eyes go wide.
“Luca,” she breathes, jumping up from the chair. “Oh my God, you’re awake!” She reaches over my shoulder to hit a button on the wall behind me.
“Shhhh, I’m sleeping,” Lil groans.
“Lilith! Luca’s awake!” She looks relieved and… tired. So tired.
“What? Holy shit!” Lil cries. I don’t look at her, though. My eyes are only on Ariana. God, my girl is exhausted in every way a person can be exhausted, down to her soul, but she’s smiling like I just handed her the deed for the fucking moon.
“Hey, baby,” I finally croak out.
And fuck. It breaks her. She cracks right open. She starts sobbing, and her body crumples. Her head lands on my shoulder, but she doesn’t put her arm around me. I realize it’s because she’s afraid she’ll hurt me. Lil appears at her side, helping to keep her from sliding to the floor. My right hand is still in hers, and when I try to lift my left, it doesn’t go far because of the tube. “Fuck,” I groan.
The door opens, and a nurse pokes her head in. “Hey ladies, what do you… Oh!” Her eyes go wide, taking in the scene. “I’ll go tell the doctor he’s awake right away!”
“Thanks, Nancy,” Lil calls out to her as the door closes.
I look at Lil and ask the question with my eyes.
“Five days. You’ve been totally out of it for five days.”
Motherfucker. My sweet girl’s been stuck here while I slept for five days.
“Ariana, put your arm around me.” I feel her shake her head in protest. “Please, baby.” My voice cracks. Her right arm slowly moves across my torso—so gently it makes me want to cry. I loosen my hand from hers and wrap my arm around her waist, pulling her as close as I can. Her head shifts until it’s against my neck. It’s not exactly the way I want to hold her, but it’ll work for now. I close my eyes and breathe her in. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she whispers. She stops crying, and my heart stops hurting. We stay like that for the few minutes it takes the doctor to arrive. I reluctantly let Ariana move when he starts asking me questions and checking my bandages, but I take her hand in mine again and don’t let her out of arm’s reach. When he pokes around my ribs, I hiss a couple of times, and Ari’s grip tightens. My bed is raised so I’m sitting up slightly, and the doctor gives us a rundown.
They need to run some scans and make sure I can eat, drink, and piss on my own now that I’m awake before they’ll release me. And I have to take it easy for at least a couple of weeks once I get home. No lifting, no working out, no strenuous activity.
Part of me wishes Ariana had just blown Fred’s kneecaps off because I’d like to get a little revenge, but I’m mostly still amazed by her.
“I’ll check back soon,” the doctor says as he leaves. Once he’s out of the room, I pull Ariana close again.
“Shit, Lil, can you let them all know?” Ari asks from beside me .
“On it. Already texted everyone. They’ll all be stumbling through the door in like twenty minutes or less.”
“Thank you.”
“No problem. I would say ‘any time,’ but I’m kind of hoping this is the only time we have to do something like this.”
“No shit, right?”
“Luca, try not to get kidnapped again, huh?” Lil teases.
I roll my eyes at her. “You’re such an ass.”
“I know. But it’s been a long five days of not giving you shit.”
“She’s lying. I think she actually gave you more shit because you couldn’t respond to it.” Ari still doesn’t sound like her normal self, but closer than she did ten minutes ago. It’s a fucking start.
“Well, I had to make sure to inform him every time he missed an opportunity to harass you about coffee and pasta. Which was a lot, Luca. Five days of straight carbs and caffeine.”
“Speaking of, I have to go to the bathroom,” Ari says. I kiss her head before she goes. My mouth feels disgusting, and as much as I want to give her a real kiss, I’m not going to inflict five-day-coma-breath on her.
As soon as the bathroom door closes, I turn to Lil. “Did she sleep much?” I ask quietly.
Lil huffs a sad laugh. “Hardly.” She keeps her voice low, too. “She wouldn’t use the cot. She sat in this chair the whole time. She didn’t leave this room except to go into that bathroom, and she took the fastest showers I’ve ever known her to take because she was terrified you would either die or wake up when she wasn’t here with you.”
“Fuck.”
She shrugs. “Can you say you would have done things differently if she was the one in that bed?”
“No. Doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.”
Ariana walks out of the bathroom. I try to convince her to snuggle with me on the bed, but everyone shows up and she takes up her post in the chair while they visit. Becca and Mia cry and fuss over me. Dad and Marco try to play it cool, but I can read them both pretty well by now. Their relief is palatable.
My face is a mess of bruises. I see it in the mirror when I go to the bathroom to pee (removing a catheter is super fun, by the way) and brush my teeth, which fucking hurts too. As much as I want a shower, that’s not happening yet. I’m moving like an old man and can’t stand for very long.
“I’ll give you another sponge bath later,” Ariana whispers in my ear when I mention the shower.
“Such a minx. Can you maybe try not to give me a boner when there’s literally no hiding it?” I whisper back, gesturing to my hospital gown. “Wait, how many sponge baths did I sleep through?”
“Four.”
“Motherfucker,” I groan. She grins at me. “Maybe I can talk you into reenacting them.” I wag my eyebrows at her. She still looks tired but much less stressed and scared.
Hours later, after everyone except Lil goes back home for the night, my girl finally crawls onto the bed and curls up on her side with her head on my chest. She’s still extremely careful about where she touches me, avoiding my stab wounds and ribs.
“You lied to me, you know,” I tell her as we settle in for the night.
“What do you mean?” She pulls back and looks at me, her eyebrows pinched together.
“You can totally drive a stick.”
Her cheeks turn pink, and Lil snorts from her cot in the corner.
“Yeah, sorry about that.”
“And you stole the Maserati.”
“Lil helped.”
“Barely, that was like 95% an Ariana job,” Lil says .
“Shut up down there.”
“Let’s see… you stole the extra key, you took out the cameras in the parking garage, you removed the trackers,” I can see Lil ticking each thing off on her fingers because she raises her arm as high as it goes, “you found the hiding place for it, you bought and parked the motorcycle and then the shit box, you drove it… what exactly did I do again?”
“Hey, you tracked Dad to that parking garage.”
“Which was only like 5% of the whole operation.”
Ari groans. “I fell down a hyperfixation hole and couldn’t get out.”
“I can’t believe you kept that fucking thing hidden for a whole year,” I laugh. It hurts a little, but I try to make sure Ari doesn’t see me cringe. “And that it was you driving both times I saw that thing.”
“Hey, ‘that thing’ as you call it, was our Batmobile. We called him Bruce. And we gave him up for you, Beefcake, so you know, maybe let that lie slide,” she shrugs against me.
“Hmmmm, only if you give me a kiss.”
“Alright, but only because you brushed your teeth.” It’s a real kiss, though a careful my-husband-just-woke-up-from-a-coma-and-is-still-in-the-hospital kiss.
When she pulls back, I run a finger down her cheek. “You came for me.”
“You’re mine, Luca. I’ll always come for you.”
She snuggles back onto my chest and is asleep in seconds. It doesn’t take me long to follow her.