He steered me toward the restroom, but I pulled away from him.
“No, I have to go.” I hurried toward the door, not even feeling any pain from the glass still deep in my arms.
“You’re not going anywhere,” he said, carefully snatching my wrist. “Not until the glass is out of your arms.”
My lips quivered, and I turned around to face him. “No …” I shook my head. “I have to go. You don’t understand. Mom is going to die.” Tears streamed down my face. “She’s going to die, and I can’t do anything about it.”
I thought I could tell that he didn’t know what to say. But then he took my hand in his, squeezed tightly, and brought me toward the restroom.
“Give me two minutes. Then, I’ll take you wherever you need to go.”
I let him because the glass would have to come out sooner or later, and Mom would be disappointed if she found out I’d rushed to the hospital—when she still had to be in surgery—with glass in my arms and blood gushing out of my wounds.
“Please, be quick.”
After pushing open the restroom door, he turned on the sink, lifted my arm, and looked into my eyes. “This might hurt.” He carefully took a piece of glass between his fingers and started to pull.
Pain shot up my arm, and I seized his bicep, my fingers curling into it. “Michael …” I said. “Just pull.”
He hesitated, then pulled it out of my arm, immediately covering my wound with a bunch of paper towels. He threw the piece in the garbage and started on the second one, which hurt even worse. I rested my head against his shoulder, trying to take deep breaths to disperse the pain … but the hurt festered inside of me.
And I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between the physical pain of my cuts and the pain of hearing that Mom was close to death. She was my rock, the only thing that kept me happy in this shitty life I had to endure.
More tears streamed down my cheeks, and my body heaved back and forth. I didn’t want to lose her. I couldn’t lose her. All of this would have been for nothing. My life would be meaningless without her in it.
“Stay here,” Michael said, disappearing into the hallway. “I’m going to get some bandages.”
“The first-aid kit is—”
“I know,” he said, walking back into the room with the first-aid kit. The corners of his lips were turned up in an attempt to make light of the conversation. “I haven’t forgotten.” He washed the blood off my arms and wrapped some gauze around them.
I stared at him while he helped me, frowning. He glanced down at me, spinning the gauze around my arm, his gray eyes so soft that I felt … I felt safe. And again, that feeling was so unfamiliar it made me shiver in fear. Yet part of me wanted more of it. I wanted to feel safe and cared for likethisall the time. Not only when it mattered.
When he finished, I wiped my tears with the back of my hand and hurried out of the bathroom, desperate to get to Mom as soon as I could. I grabbed my bag and locked the bar doors, spotting Michael’s car.
I started toward it, then stopped. If I let him take me, he would find out about Mom and how this had happened before. He’d start to look at me differently. He’d pity me for what had happened to my family.
“Mia,” he said, nodding toward his car, “let’s go.”
But … taking the bus would add another hour that I didn’t have. I swallowed my pride and walked with him toward his car, sliding into the passenger seat and gripping my bag as if it held my entire life in it.
“Can you drive me to Mercy Hospital?”
Within ten minutes, we were standing at the reception desk at Mercy, waiting for the fucking woman to get off the phone. She looked up at me through her lashes, giving me thatplease waitstare.
She hung up the phone, smiled sweetly at me—as if she hadn’t just scolded me with her eyes—and asked, “How can I help you?”
“My mother. Eden Stevenson. Where is she?”
She typed something into her computer and frowned. “Eden Stevenson is being moved to the ICU as we speak. Go down the hall—”
Before she could finish, I hurried down the hallway. I had been here about a thousand times before; I knew where it was. Michael stepped onto the elevator with me, and I pressed the button for the fourth floor a million times.
If Mom was in the ICU, that meant she had made it out of surgery already. But being out of her first surgery didn’t mean that this was all over. She would go through more, the hospital bills would pile even higher, and soon, even Mason wouldn’t want to help me with her.
When I made it to the fourth floor, I hurried to the front desk. “Eden Stevenson?”
The woman, much friendlier than the other one, smiled at me. “She’s still being moved up here. Once we get her settled in, I will let you know. For now, you can wait in the waiting room.”
