Justine
About a week had passed, and Cole Carter still had not woken up.
I had to keep the faith, but I had to admit that every passing day that Cole did not wake up made it more and more difficult to do so. It didn’t matter that I knew these kinds of things had no rhyme or reason, at least not one we understood yet. The only thing that really mattered was Cole wasn’t waking up, and people were starting to get concerned.
Today’s concerned guest was none other than his wife. As usual, I let her into the room and stood just outside, giving her a chance to talk to her husband in private. A couple of Black Reapers eyed me with what looked like disgust, as if I was somehow holding back treatment that could wake Cole from the dead.
If only they knew how much I wanted him to wake. If only they knew how poor of a job I was doing detaching from all of this madness.
“Dr. Elks?”
I looked into the room. Lilly was asking me to come in. I welcomed the chance to have a friendly face—or at least not a bitter one—to discuss the case with.
“You’re sure that he will wake up at some point?”
What did I do, say that nothing was a guarantee?
“The odds are stacked in his favor that he will,” I said. “He’s young and healthy, and while the blow obviously put him in this, there doesn’t seem to be any type of brain damage that would cripple him for life. He’ll probably take some time to adapt, but as far as patients go that wind up in comas, he’s certainly among the healthiest.”
Lilly nodded. In just the two weeks that I had seen her coming by, she looked like she’d aged two decades. The poor woman…people this age didn’t deserve to worry about if their significant other would ever wake up from a coma. People this age didn’t need to spend their waking hours wondering if their S.O. would survive, especially when their S.O. had enough money and status to remove himself from a world like this.
“Are you familiar with the Black Reapers?”
I looked up, surprised. Lilly had only asked me medical questions up to this point.
“I’ve had them come in to the hospital from time to time,” I said. “And I occasionally see them down here, but I try and keep a professional distance.”
Minus Zack. Whom I try and treat like he’s not a Black Reaper. Even though he is.
Even though half the time I’m begging to have him again and half the time I think I need to be away from him for good.
“The world needs more men like them,” she said. “But when you’re married to one, it’s so hard.”
I couldn’t tell if Lilly wanted conversation about it, or if she just needed to get some thoughts off her chest. I remained in the room, my eyes toward Cole, following Lilly’s gaze.
“How so?” I finally said, not quite sure if it was a question I needed to ask.
“Men today are too soft,” Lilly said immediately, suggesting I had chosen wisely. “They’re too afraid to offend, too afraid to do anything but apologize for things that don’t matter, and too afraid to make shit happen. A guy like Cole is actually on the gentler side for a Black Reaper, but compared to the average guy, he’s a real man.”
She sighed.
“Unfortunately, such men tend to have enormous egos and personalities that don’t back down. It’s a sort of double-edged sword. And when those personalities run into conflict with other men, you don’t get two guys staring at each other or honking at each other on the highway. You get…this.”
I grimaced. It wasn’t just in reaction to her turning her eyes to Cole. It was the knowledge that amongst the Reapers here, Zack fit that description to a T.
The nicest and gentlest among the guys that I knew? That was definitely true, and it wasn’t even that close. Still rough and wild compared to the other men? I think my experience going on dates with guys in medical school said it all.
So was the question, then, not if, but when Zack wound up under my care like this? If I had trouble detaching from Cole for work like this, what would happen if it was a guy I’d once slept with? What would happen if it was a guy I had more serious feelings for?
Thankfully, the questions were all hypothetical, and one thing a med school teacher of mine had once emphasized was to only consider hypothetical questions that could actually happen; he said the fastest way to go insane was to ponder a trolley problem for a long time, considering such a thing had never happened in real life.
Unfortunately, Zack and I dating was no trolley problem. It wasn’t a real problem yet, but I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t a possibility.
However much I’d thought detaching from him would make my life easier, it had not. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“I told Cole that he needed to stay out of the world when we moved to New Mexico,” Lilly said. “And for about ten months, it worked great. We had money, I got to act in local productions, and he prepared to be a stay-at-home dad. But in the little moments, I’d see him get anxious. He’d go on long bike rides to clear his head, but I knew he was just looking forward to being on the bike once more. He’d ask if there was something greater he still needed to do.”
Lilly laughed as if knowing there was nothing she could have done to prevent this situation from happening.
