Page 121 of Sweet Oblivion

I gather her face in my hands and force the air into her lungs one more time. “Breathe for me. Take my air. Take my breath. Take it all. It’s yours. I’ll give it all to you if you just breathe.”

I press my head to hers, my heart breaking as anguish sits heavy, crushing my soul. “Don’t do this, Lane. Don’t fucking leave me.”

“Keep fucking going,” Hendrix demands between compressions. “Don’t you give up on her.”

I hear him. I hear every fucking word, and I feel each one in my goddamned soul.

I wait for him to pause and go again. Two more breaths. We do this two more times before I feel a faint pulse beating against her throat.

It’s faint, but it’s there.

Shit. She’s breathing.

I hold her face in mine, frozen, as the ambulance pulls behind the building.

Hands reach for her.

For me. And I nearly take their head off.

“No,” I argue, flashing back to the last time an EMT tried to pull me away from her. “I’m her husband.”

“Ryker, let them help,”Hendrix signs.“Help,”he repeats.

I get it. I do. I understand help. But my hands don’t get the memo.

My gut is still buried somewhere back on the kitchen floor where I found her.

Where I may have fucking lost her.

My body goes numb as I watch my wife loaded onto a gurney for a second time.

“How about we go get a cup of coffee from the cafeteria, son?”Dad leans against the wall across from me as Delaney sleeps between us, a tube down her throat keeping her airway open as oxygen is pumped into her lungs.

She coded twice before they got her to the hospital.

Twice where her heart stopped beating and I could have lost her.

But she’s here.

She’s fighting.

Even if she’s not awake to do it just yet.

“Youneed?—”

“I need to be right here when she wakes up. That’s what I need. But thanks.”

I take her small hand in mine. Pale and cold. Always so cold. “How much longer before she wakes up?”

“It can be?—”

I shake my head, stopping him. “You’ve been a doctor a hell of a lot longer than you were ever a football player, Dad. Just give it to me straight. Please. No one will give me any goddamn answers. How am I supposed to know what to do, or what to expect, if no one will answer me?”

My voice is raw from the smoke, from the begging and pleading and demanding she live.

It’s been nearly twenty hours since she was brought into Kroydon Hills Hospital. Nearly an entire day since they shoved that damn tube down her throat and forced her to breathe.

Twenty hours since I’ve left her side.