“We have access from the passenger side as well now,” Gifford said.
“I’ll crawl in,” Kaelan said. He was lankier than me, so it would be easier for him on that side.
What followed were a few tense minutes as we wriggled our way into the mashed-up car so we could set up tourniquets on both of her legs. As soon as I tightened the first one, Amber passed out, which was both concerning and for the best. She’d lost so much blood already that she’d need a blood transfusion as soon as she got to the hospital. All I could do now was give her fluids.
Once we’d stopped the bleeding, Engine 3 went back in and managed to drag her out, keeping her spine as level as possible as they strapped her to the board and carried her to the rig for us.
Seeing her legs made my stomach spin for a second. That right lower leg was beyond saving. That would be an amputation for sure. I’d seen enough injuries like that to know—including Creek’s. Her left leg might be salvageable, but I wasn’t sure.
We loaded her into the van, and I sat next to her, hooking her up so I could monitor her vitals. Gifford closed the doors and banged on them, the sign for Kaelan that we were good to go. With lights and sirens on, we set course for the hospital as I hung another bag of fluids, hoping it would be enough to stabilize her. Kaelan called it in, so the ER knew we were coming in hot because Amber was running out of time. She was young, so that was a plus, but she’d lost so much blood. That poor, poor girl.
Amber never regained consciousness as we made it to the hospital, where the trauma team stood waiting for her in the ambulance bay. I quickly rattled off the vitals for the handover,and they wheeled her inside, leaving me standing there with bloody gloves and a heavy heart. As much as I loved my job, this part sucked.
But at least it left me little time to sit and worry about the boys and if they’d be okay, about Forest and what the hell was going on with him, and about myself and whether I’d be alone for the rest of my life—a thought I squashed down hard whenever it popped up.
Yeah, staying busy was so much better.
CHAPTER FOUR
FOREST
There were three things I was an expert in besides my field of academia: procrastinating, putting my head in the sand to ignore what was right in front of me, and getting shit done when I had to.
One of those things contradicted the other two, but in my head, it made sense because the other thing that defined me as a person was my intense aversion to confrontation. I could tell that Nash wasn’t going to let the whole seizure thing go, so the first thing I did when I got home was call my GP for a referral.
“We’re emailing you a list,” the receptionist told me after speaking with the physician’s assistant.“Give any one of them a call, and we’ll fax the referral over.”
So the next thing I did was that.Forty-five minutes of call after call until I found one willing to take a new patient.
The woman on the phone had been kind and told me there was a six-month wait for an appointment, so I took it because what choice did I have?I could go back to my GP for standard tests, but those had never turned up anything, so what was the point?
Luckily, she asked what was going on, so I explained, and half an hour later, she called me back and said the doctor could see me in three days.
I’d been kind of hoping for the six-month wait so I could pretend like nothing was wrong, but I wasn’t ignorant. I knew damn well that their finding availability to see me so soon meant the very real possibility that something was seriously wrong.
And that left me plagued with insomnia, sick to my stomach more than I had been since all my weird symptoms had begun, and stressed beyond measure.
It was somewhere past midnight, and I had finally gotten my legs to cooperate enough to get out of bed.My eyes were a little blurry from squinting at my phone without my glasses on, and my stomach was in knots from everything the internet told me was wrong with me.A brain tumor, cholera, malaria, five chronic illnesses, and one terminal case of mad cow disease, if all the medical websites were accurate.
I wasn’t normally the kind of person who went down those rabbit holes, but this situation wasn’t like any I’d ever been in.I didn’t know what to do with myself except research until I found something that made sense.
Unfortunately, my list of symptoms didn’t make sense.So I did the only other thing I knew to do, which was get up for a glass of water, hoping it would help shake me out of this paranoia.
Going down the stairs was treacherous, but I was dizzy and thirsty and tired of staring up at the ceiling, contemplating all the what-ifs.
I might’ve been more relaxed, but Nash had been a little weird and quiet when he came home after his shift, so I hadn’t gotten my usual conversation with him. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to be calling Creek because if I did, he’d know. He had a weird sixth sense when it came to me and things going wrong in my life.
He always knew when my heart had been broken. He always knew when I was hurt. And he always knew when I was sick.
I hated icing him out, but I had no idea what else I was supposed to do.I couldn’t handle his typical smothering care right now.I couldn’t spend my time reassuring him that everything was fine when I didn’t know if that was the truth. It killed me to shut him out, but I knew—at least for now—that was for the best.
Coming around the corner to the kitchen, my legs started doing a strange thing where I couldn’t stop them from propelling me forward. It felt a bit like nightmares I used to have when I was younger. I’d be in a car, slamming on the brakes, but nothing would stop it from rolling forward.
That was my legs now. Getting them going was hard. Making them stop was harder. My muscles felt tense but strangely weak, and I was going to crash into the wall.
And then I hit a roadblock.
A tall, gorgeous, broad-chested roadblock in soft flannel pajama pants and a threadbare black T-shirt. Nash looked down at me as he caught me by the hips, his eyes half-lidded and sleepy, hair mussed like he’d been running his hands through it.
