“Together,” I say, because I want the night to hear it.
“Together,” he answers.
The screen dims to black, leaving our reflections faint in the glass—his shoulder angled toward mine, my hand still curved over the place that tapped. The apartment listens.
Tomorrow knocks from the other side of the hour. Nine a.m. is already walking down the hall.
Chapter 30
Hold On
Jason
The apartment isquiet enough to hear the heater click and the rain argue with the window. I’m halfway through folding a blanket that never wants to be square when Riley’s breath shears the room in two.
A sharp inhale—then a sound I’ve only heard from her once, when a player’s skate caught her wrist years ago. Not loud. Honest. She doubles, one hand fisting in the counter, the other clamping low across her belly like she’s trying to convince something inside to stay where it is.
“Riley.” My voice drops two octaves and loses its edges. I’m already moving. The blanket hits the floor and I don’t notice. My hands find her shoulders first, then skim to her waist, not lifting, just there—heat, steadiness. “Talk to me.”
She shakes her head once like she can rattle the pain loose. A breath. Another. “It’s—tight,” she gets out. “Low. Not like before.” Her mouth is uncharacteristically open, the way it gets when she’s actively managing pain instead of narrating it. That scares me more than anything on a scoreboard ever has.
“Shoes,” I say, calm I borrow from some better version of myself. I slide hers on, fingers not trusting their own strength with the laces. “Jacket.” I guide her arm into the sleeve. She’s trembling. I am too; I keep mine on the inside where it belongs.
“I don’t want an ambulance,” she says, jaw set, the stubborn I fell in love with wrapped around fear. “It’s faster if you drive.”
“Okay,” I say, because I need a word that isn’tokayorGod. I grab my keys, her bag, the folder we started for the doctor like it’s a talisman. The ring on her finger flashes in the kitchen light and my chest does a painful, hopeful stutter.
The hallway outside smells like dust and someone else’s dinner. The elevator takes a century; we take the stairs. I stay one step below her so if she slips I’m the floor. She breathes in counts—four, two, six—the metronome she taught me. By the second landing she’s gripping the rail hard enough to blanch her knuckles. I put my palm under hers. “Lean,” I tell her. “I’ve got you.”
Cold air slaps us on the sidewalk. The car chirps awake and the headlights knife the wet. I get her into the passenger seat, belt across her carefully, fingers checking the angle at her hip like I’m fitting gear that matters. She folds forward as another cramp tightens; I brace my forearm across the dash and let her press her forehead to the crook of my elbow, the way I used to offer a shoulder to a rookie bleeding through his first mistake.
“It’s going to be okay,” I say, which is not a promise I know how to keep yet and exactly the one I need to say aloud. She nods without lifting her head.
The streets are slick and mostly empty, city lights smeared into commas. My hands choke the wheel at ten and two, a death grip I try to loosen because white knuckles don’t make me faster. “Breaths,” I remind, and take them with her, syncing my lungs to hers until the engine’s idle feels like a heartbeat we’re sharing.
She exhales shakily. “I hate hospitals,” she whispers. “I love them. I hate them.”
“I love you,” I say, because I need her to have that sentence to anchor to even as the world tilts. A light turns green like permission.
The ER canopy appears, fluorescent and unkind against the night. I pull to the curb and I’m out before the car stops breathing, around to her door, my jacket over her shoulders because rain doesn’t get a vote tonight. Inside, the lobby smells like bleach and overripe hand sanitizer, the PA crackling a language of numbers I don’t speak.
“Patient?” the triage nurse asks. She’s good—eyes on Riley first, then me, then back to Riley.
“Contractions,” Riley says through her teeth, clinical even now. “First trimester—early second—doctor on file is Dr. Hassan—no bleeding—pain six pulling seven.”
The nurse’s eyebrows go up a millimeter; she recognizes one of her own. “Come on, sweetheart,” she says, efficient kindness. A wheelchair appears out of the ether. I’m at Riley’s elbow as the nurse steers us through double doors and into a bright, too-clean maze.
I keep pace with the Wheelchair even though everything in me wants to sprint.
Hold on, I tell the part of me that laces skates and pretends nothing can hurt it. Hold on, I tell the kid we haven’t met yet. Hold on, I tell the woman I love, because I’m not letting go.
The ER corridors hum like a bad dream—fluorescents flickering, wheels whispering, the antiseptic tang so sharp it turns every breath into a swallowed wince. A curtain hisses on a rail and we’re in a bay the size of a hotel bathroom with better lighting and worse promises.
Riley lies back against starched sheets that crackle when she shifts. A nurse with kind eyes and a barcode scanner clips a pulseox to Riley’s finger, tightens a cuff around her arm, and belts the fetal monitor across her lower belly with practiced hands. The machine answers in soft beeps and a faint ocean hiss that I want to bottle and make the world drink.
“Name?” the nurse asks, typing without looking down. “Allergies? How many weeks along?”
“Riley Lane,” Riley says, steadying on her own name. “No known drug allergies. Eleven and change.” The cuff inflates; she doesn’t flinch. She watches the numbers like they’re a game clock she can outstare.
