Elise
Adrian took me to the hospital and didn’t leave my side until I was called in. They sat me down on a hospital bed and closed the curtain so I was left alone. The nurse came around minutes later and wrapped my hand up and then asked me if I needed anything for the pain.
“Alcohol,” I told her, deadpan.
She just stood here, smiling and then not smiling when she didn’t know if I was joking or not. “Um, what?”
“For the pain,” I explained.
“Well, alcohol isn’t on the hospital menu, Elise,” she explained, like I was a fucking moron. Clearly she thought I was unhinged, probably had heard all about my meltdown from a friend of a nosey friend. News travelled fast around these shitty parts.
“I was joking,” I replied, rolling my eyes.
She nodded. “Of course you were.”
“I don’t want anything.”
I liked the pain and didn’t want to numb it just yet.
She smiled nicely and left me alone. It felt like eons sitting there, listening to the hustle and bustle outside the curtain. I heard a man – clearly intoxicated out of his fucking mind – lose his shit before he started singing Christmas tunes. I heard Jingle Bells about four hundred goddamn times until a nurse came around.
“Sir, did you pee yourself?”
“I facken did what da want,” he cursed.
“Can you please get up?”
“Fack off.”
Fucking hell, nurses were saints. I’d have blown it by now. She tried again, but he shot her down. She left him alone after that and he proceeded to sing Jingle Bells for the four hundred and sixty seventh time.
Fuck my life. I shouldn’t have wrecked Aston’s room. I wouldn’t have been here otherwise, listening to this fucking tool curse and sing. This was worse than watching Aston drive off.
He didn’t even glance back.
“Good afternoon, I’m Doctor Crowe. How are we doing?” asked a voice.
I looked up just as a man stepped into my partition. Even in my distress, my eyes briefly widened at him and my brain’s circuit blew, leaving behind smoke and debris.
Just look at him.
Was this dude seriously tending to me? Were doctors really this hot? He looked like a musclier version of Matt Bomer, but with dark eyes and messier hair.
I looked away from him. “I’m fine.”
He grabbed the over-bed clipboard. “Are you in any pain? Would you like some painkillers?”
“No.”
He read whatever was there with a furrowed brow before he glanced at me. He studied me for several moments, and then he set the clipboard back down and took a seat on the bed. “Can I have a look at your hand?”
I reached my hand out and he took it into his own. I frowned. Why were his hands warm? From my experience, doctors always had really cold hands, like they’d been juggling ice in the breakroom.
He carefully unwrapped the gauze, and when it was totally free, he studied the inside of my palm, at the deep gash that was aching more than ever now.
“I’m just going to touch around the gash, Miss Wright,” he told me.
He prodded around the edges, closing the cut so it formed a perfect line. I flinched in pain and he glanced at me apologetically. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
God, it felt raw, and it was thumping like it had its own pulse.
“So what happened exactly?” he then asked me.
Oh, you know, I was swinging an axe around my brother’s room, destroying everything in my path because he kinda broke up with me.
“I was chopping wood,” I answered gravely.
I felt his eyes on me. He took a few breaths and then, “You were chopping wood.”
“Mhm.”
“For your wood fire oven in the summer?”
“Yep.”
“And then what happened?”
I licked my dried lips. “I can’t remember. I think it was in the heat of the moment. I must have grabbed some wood with one hand and swung with the other. I didn’t even know until Adrian said something.”
“Adrian Guildford the police officer in the waiting room?”
I looked away. Great, he so knew. “Yep.”
Another few moments ticked by. “Are you on something, Miss Wright?”
“Like what?”
“Can you look at me?”
I looked everywhere else but him at first, and then slowly my eyes levelled out to his. He moved closer and stared into my eyes. Fucking hell, he was a Matt Bomer doppelganger, I swear to god.
It felt like he was unusually close. Should you be feeling your doctor’s breaths on your face when they inspected you? Was my Matt Bomer unaware of personal space? He looked from eye to eye, and I sighed after a while because he kept looking. The hospital staff had a lot of patience, and I currently had none.
“Are you checking if my pupils are dilated?” I asked, smirking bitterly. “I can assure you they’re not. I’m not high, Doctor…what’s your name again?”
“Crowe.”
“Doctor Crowe.”
“I’m just making sure, Miss Wright.”
“I was angry, not high,” I told him firmly.
“Like I just said, I’m only checking.”
I made an irritated noise. “Well, what’s it to you anyway? Are you even allowed to ask me these questions? It’s none of your fucking business. You’re here to patch me up, not interrogate me. I have a police officer for a father, so I’m well acquainted with these rounds of twenty questions. Not in the mood, Doctor Crowe.”
He backed away from me, a deep frown on his face. “I need to know the condition you’re in, Miss Wright.”
“My condition is in my hand and nowhere else.”
We looked hard at one another for several moments, and it was like a game of who could look away first.
“Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way…”
I groaned at the song and face-palmed myself with my other hand. Great, the doctor won. I shut my eyes shut tightly as the words I’d just said echoed through my head. I have a police officer for a father. “No, you idiot,” I whispered aloud, “I had a police officer for a father. Had. He’s dead. He’s not a fucking cop anymore. Do you have a salve for that, Doctor Crowe?”
My body broke out in trembles, and I sniffed quietly. I kept those eyes shut so the tears wouldn’t escape, but I felt them at the corners. God, how embarrassing was this? Not only did he win our staring competition, but he had to watch me break down like a crazy person afterwards.
A hand settled on my back. “It’s alright,” Doctor Crowe said quietly. “You’re alright.”
I collapsed against him, my head hitting his chest. I sobbed, clutching the shirt of a stranger as I broke down. His arm wrapped around me now in a warm embrace. It felt perfect. Like Aston kind of perfect. In this bubble, I was clutching on to Aston and he was holding me, telling me it was alright, giving me the love I’d begged for since Dad’s death. For a split second, I couldn’t remember what was wrong.
I needed this. I needed it so badly.
My trembles eventually died down, and my tears stopped. A euphoric wave passed over me, and then…realization. I was holding on to my ER doctor, not Aston. He smelled like antiseptic wash, not spices. He also had dark eyes, not green, and I kept waiting for him to break out with lines from White Collar, but he did not. It was a day of disappointments.
I pulled away abruptly, like I’d been jolted. His arm dropped straightaway as I backed into the bed, staring at him with wide eyes.
“Aren’t you supposed to be tending to everyone else?” I asked him, forcing a fake smile. This was unbearably awkward, especially when I glimpsed at the wet patch on his chest. His hard chest.
He smiled back warmly. “No, I’m all yours for the time being. I’m going to be back to administer a local anaesthetic and clean that wound up. It should be a relatively painless procedure.”
“What procedure?”
“You need stitches.”
“It’s that bad?”
“It could have been worse.” He got back up. “Give me a few minutes.”
When I nodded, he left and I sat there, listening to more jingle fucking bells.
*
Doctor Crowe was very gentle. He put me back together again. Physically, that is. If only it worked that way with feelings.
There was a nurse in the room with us, and I kind of wished she was gone. I liked when he had held me and told me it was okay. He’d been human to me, whereas now he was painfully professional. I kept waiting for him to act awkward about the whole hugging him thing, but he didn’t look flustered in the slightest. I realized very quickly this was a man that controlled every inch of his emotions. Like Aston. I should have been tired from guys like that.
“It’s going to heal very slowly,” he informed me after he’d finished and bandaged it. “It’ll be red, then pink for a long time. You can use topical creams to help it fade. Take it easy with your hand, don’t prod at the stitches. If anything happens, you come right back. Aside from that, you’re all set to go.”
When I nodded, he stood up. “Have a good afternoon, Miss Wright. And… take care of yourself.”
He left a beat later, not a glance over his shoulder. Why was I expecting anything different?
The nurse led me out. Adrian was still in the waiting room, and he smiled kindly at me as I joined him. We didn’t speak, but he wrapped an arm around me and took me back to the car.
He took me home, but he purposely took a long, scenic route there. We drove through farmland, lakes and areas with stunning mountain views. The sky was so clear, I could see the mountain peaks, and the trees on them looked like giant green cauliflowers swaying in the light breeze. I felt soothed by the sight and the headache that had been pounding inside my skull dulled.
“I know everything is hard,” Adrian told me. “You’ve been through a lot, Elise, but…”
I glanced at him and shrugged half-heartily. “But it wasn’t right what I did. I know that.”
“I’m concerned for you.”
“You don’t need to be. What happened was…Shit, I don’t know what that was.”
“A breakdown.”
“Yeah.”
He nodded, sighing. “I’m going to talk to your mother when we get back. She seems absent.”
“You have no idea.”
“She needs to be there for you. You’ve been alone. I saw that at the funeral. Aston…I can understand his grief. That boy’s been through hell and back as a child, but your mother needed to be there for you.”
I didn’t respond. I just swallowed and numbly looked out the window again.
“We all mourn differently,” he told me. “We shut down, we get angry, we run away. But eventually we have to find ways to move forward. You have to tell your mother that.”
I just nodded because it seemed easier than to argue. He didn’t seem to understand Mom was gone. She couldn’t be brought back, not with my help anyway.
“You’ll make it,” he said, confidently. “You will, El. With or without them.”
*
After my breakdown, I stayed in the house for the rest of the summer. I didn’t break windows or smash anything else to pieces. On the contrary, I barely moved at all. I felt beaten. The tears slowed, but sometimes I’d be struck with random sob fits that lasted a few minutes and stopped in the blink of an eye. Then I was normal again. Well, normal enough not to break shit.
But I knew I’d changed. Inside of me, this anger sat, eating away at all my other emotions. I felt aggressive, like the sweet girl that loved to dance just a few weeks ago was gone. I was grieving her loss on top of everything because no amount of good music made me want to move. I was a shell.
Adrian fixed Aston’s bedroom and put up a new window. He then went to Mom and tried to speak to her, but he always left the bedroom more frustrated than he was when he went in. I didn’t think he could help her either. He probably understood me now because he never brought her up again to me. He came and went, dropped off groceries, helped me around the house. He was a godsend.
I spent my time thinking of Aston. I don’t know why, but I continued to hope. I tried to look at the bright side. He couldn’t mean what he said. He would come to his senses, pick up the phone and call me. But then days turned to weeks, and weeks turned to months, and I realized his silence spoke a thousand words. He had left me to manage our broken mother, and she didn’t want a bar to do with me.
Hope was intangible and meaningless.
Our home was an emptiness that couldn’t be filled.
We were all drifting further and further away, and I had no choice but to accept it.
*
My first semester of high school was a fucking bitch on a stick riding a two legged horse in the pits of hell – on a good day. I was talked about. My infamy had reached all corners of the student body. My episode at the house, the confrontation with Aston – all of it had spread like a virus, mutating into ridiculous versions that made the real story unrecognizable to theirs. My life was out there and in the hands of gossipers and preachy old ladies who scowled at me with judging eyes. Misinformed fucks who believed Aston was my blood brother and I was an incestuous harlot who needed God. No big deal.
It was hard. I won’t even sugar coat it. Imagine constantly putting up a front so they didn’t know they were getting to you. Because if they knew they were getting to you, they swarmed around you longer, poking and prodding for more of a reaction, until you erupted and they had a new wave of gossip to spread around.
Mom remained introverted. When she eventually went to work, she spent most of her time there. Sometimes I wouldn’t see her for days at a time, and if we crossed paths in the house, it was mute and cold. It didn’t stop me from trying, though. I tried to ask her how she was, tried to be in the same room as her just so we could warm up to each other’s presence, but I got nothing back. She shut me out without reason, and I struggled to understand what happened to the warm mother I once knew.
To top it all off, Aston didn’t return home for the holidays. He sent a Christmas card, and a small present for Mom, but that was it.
I had gone from having a full life to a completely empty one. Worst of all, I was alone.
And loneliness was a madness you couldn’t escape from.