The doors slammed shut. The siren wailed. The beautiful morning disappeared behind us, replaced by the harsh fluorescent light of the ambulance interior and the steady beep of monitors.
I held his hand the entire time.
"Fight," I whispered, watching his face for any sign of consciousness. "You fight for us. You hear me?"
The paramedic across from me was talking into a radio, relaying information to the hospital. I caught fragments, trauma team, neurology consult, ETA six minutes.
Six minutes. An eternity.
Miles's fingers twitched again in mine.
"That's it," I breathed, squeezing back. "That's it. Stay with me. Just stay with me."
His eyes didn't open. His face didn't change. But I could have sworn, I could have sworn I felt the faintest pressure of his fingers against mine.
A squeeze. Barely there, but real.
I'm here, it seemed to say.I'm still here.
I pressed my lips to his hand, holding it close.
"I'm not going anywhere," I promised him. "No matter what happens. I'm not going anywhere."
The ambulance screamed through the streets, and I held onto him with everything I had, and somewhere beneath the fear and the guilt and the desperate prayer, a single thought burned bright and fierce:
He had squeezed my hand.
He was still fighting.
And so would I.
12.Miles
Charlotte's face.
That was the first thing. The only thing that mattered. Her face above me, blocking out the sky, and something was wrong with it, something was wrong withher, because Charlotte didn't look like that. Charlotte was calm. The Charlotte I knew was steady hands and dark humor and the quiet certainty that everything would be fine.
She was screaming.
"Miles! Miles, can you hear me? Look at me!"
I tried to tell her I was here. That I could see her, even if the edges of her face kept blurring and sharpening like a camera that couldn't find its focus. But my mouth wasn't taking orders anymore. None of me was.
"Don't move. Don't try to move, okay? You're going to be fine." Her hands pressed against my chest, warm and steady, even as her voice cracked. "You're going to be fine. I've got you."
She didn't sound like she believed it.
The sky behind her was impossibly blue. The same sky we'd been running under five minutes ago. Or was it five hours? Time had turned liquid, unmeasurable.
All I knew was that moments ago, I'd been turning to tease her, and the sun had been catching the honey strands of her hair. I'd been thinking that I wanted to kiss her when we got home. That I wanted to spend the rest of my life finding excuses to kiss her.
Now there was screaming. And sirens, somewhere distant. And a pain so deep it had transcended pain entirely, becoming simply a white noise that filled every corner of my body.
"Help! Somebody call 911!" Charlotte's head whipped around, her ponytail flying. "Please! There's been an accident!"
I wanted to tell her that I wasn't going anywhere. That I'd spent fifteen years without her, and I wasn't stupid enough to leave now. But darkness kept lapping at the edges of my vision, pulling me under, and all I could do was stare at her face and try to memorize every freckle, every line, every detail I might forget.
But I couldn’t see anything.
