I knew what had caused it. I knew that every second that ticked by, hope was draining like an open vein.
But I felt safe, holding Ryan like this.
“No what?” he pressed. He squeezed me as the monitor beside me started to dig frantically. “Come on, Atlas. Don’t let go now, okay?”
I let out a breath and found the strength to speak more than three words. “Don’t give up. Please don’t give up.”
“On you? Of course I won’t?—”
“Onyou.”
He went silent. I couldn’t see him now, and my arms felt like cold spaghetti, but he was still holding me. “Atlas?—”
“Promise me.”
He let out a trembling sigh. “Only if you promisemeyou won’t either. We’re going to get you to the ER. They’re probably going to take you right into surgery. I don’t know what’ll come after. I think you know it’s serious, but if I do this—if I listen to you and don’t give up on what makes me happy—you have to listen to me too. You have to go on living.”
Yes, I wanted to tell him.I’ll try. I’m shit scared and think I might be dying, but I’m not going to give up.
Except I couldn’t make the words come. I’d used up all my strength to speak, and the best I could do was squeeze his fingers one last time.
The world around me went dark. I was floating in a void of my subconscious, full of numbness and pain, and it felt like every time I reached out, reality was slipping through my fingers. But I could still feel him. He was still there.
Holding me.
My ballast.
Ryan was a complete stranger, but it didn’t matter. For that moment, for these few, weak heartbeats, he was mine.
Four
ATLAS
“You have a visitor.”
I’d been in and out of consciousness for days. Or was it weeks? I’d lost track somewhere around the fourth surgery to put pins in my spine to stabilize the column so it would stop putting pressure on my spinal cord and hopefully bring back feeling in my legs.
It hadn’t.Yet. But I had movement, so there was hope.
I stared up at the nurse, Perlah, who had been my morning shift nurse for the last several days in a row. She was frowning, which wasn’t a good sign.
“Who is it?” My hopes were a little too high. I knew it wasn’t my brother or his wife because no one bothered announcing them anymore. And I doubted very much it was anyone from the band, considering there hadn’t been a single call or text from anyone—not even my manager or my agent.
I wanted to believe the label wasn’t full of sociopaths that would come threaten me legally while I was in the middle of, you know, not dying, but I didn’t have a lot of hope for that. At best, I could fantasize about them feeling so sorry for me, they let me out of the contract without paying a shitload of fines.
But I didn’t want it to be any of them either. There was only one person I wanted to see. Only one person who sparked a sort of desperation in my bones that I wasn’t used to feeling. Not since I was young and had hope that love could be anything other than pain.
I couldn’t remember his name, but I remembered his face. And his gorgeous golden-brown eyes and the freckles on his cheeks. I remembered his sweeping brown hair and glasses, who had spent what felt like hours talking me away from going into the light.
Not that I’d seen a light. Or if I did, I couldn’t remember that either.
The shock from my injury had overwhelmed me in the ambulance, but I remembered hands holding mine, and a soft voice, a quiet laugh, and something about an island you could sail to from Savannah.
Though there was a very good chance in the haze of my pain, punctured lung, and internal bleeding, I’d made that all up.
I realized Perlah was waiting for an answer. “Um…yeah. Send whoever in.” It took until she was gone for me to figure out she hadn’t actually told me who was here to see me.
My heart beat hard enough to make my monitor ding for a second. I wanted to sit up a bit more, but I also had a fractured wrist, so trying to maneuver my lifeless legs into doing anything at my will was next to impossible.
