“Alana! What’s going on? Is it your dad? Is he okay?” Jana sat up on her bed as soon as she heard my phone ring. We both ignored it the first time, figuring it was that no-good, lying bastard trying to explain away that slut. Despite our pact to ignore any contact from him, she gave me permission to check my phone on the second ring. Thank God we put aside our anger, or I would have missed the call from Dr. Underwell and his hospital staff.
“I -- I don’t know. It wasn’t Dr. Underwell. It was someone from his nursing staff or office. I don’t know. He wasn’t really clear. He just said that my dad was moved to another floor and that he wanted to speak to me immediately.” My hands shake as I search the ground for the purse I tossed to the side earlier in the night. I’m regretting coming back to the dorms so upset.
“Wait!” Jana jumps down from her bunk. She’s dressed in only a long t-shirt, but she still manages to look gloriously put together compared to me in my baggy gray sweatpants and red tank top with a messy bun on the top of my head. “Do you think that maybe this is Amy making a play for you? I don’t want to freak you out or anything, but I want to make sure you know what’s going on.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask, mystified. We haven’t said her name at all since the fight. I don’t even know if I could get it out if I tried. Just thinking about her raises my body temperature at least ten degrees. Her potentially messing with my dad makes the situation even worse.
“I didn’t want to tell you. I was going to wait until tomorrow, but we keep getting these attacks. And I did some research on Amy. Her social media pages say that she studied computer science at Nevada State. If it’s legit, I have no doubt that she could totally pull it off.” Jana opens up the laptop tucked under her arm to a white page full of code I couldn’t even begin to understand. But if she’s this worked up about it, there had to be something behind it.
Still, I shake my head and grab the black pullover sweatshirt sitting on my desk. “I know I have to be careful. After tonight… well, I am taking this thing between… him and me seriously now. That includes this Amy shit.” I take a deep breath as I try to get over those painful words. “But if my dad needs me, I’m going to go to him, and no one, not even fucking crazy Amy is going to stop me.”
Without another word, I open the door and head out into the night. With only my truck to get me there, I chug along to the hospital with thoughts of Liam popping in and out of my head. I struggle to push them aside, but all I can see are Amy’s red curls brushing up against his shoulders, his body shaking as he began to fall, the cries of the crowd, their lips touching…
Headlights hit me, and I’m back, swerving to avoid hitting an oncoming car from the opposite lane. I can’t let him do this to me. The most important thing in the world is in a hospital room, asking for me, and I need to get there alive. No guy is worth this kind of pain.
I don’t bother checking in at the front desk when I make it to the new wing of the hospital, but something strange strikes me. This floor is more urgent. It’s not like the ICU with nurses constantly dashing from one nearly dead patient to another, but there’s this busy-ness that feels totally unnecessary for a patient like my dad who is in the recovery phase. My heart drops as I think about him taking a turn for the worse while I was home worrying about what I would say to Liam the next time I saw him.
321… 322… I count the rooms, scanning the names on the wipe boards for my dad’s. The person on the other line told me 325, but his name isn’t written anywhere. All there is is a leftover smudge of an unfamiliar name. I look around for a nurse or an orderly, but I’m so far down the hallway that there’s no one in sight. I take a deep breath as I push the door open slowly, careful not to wake him if he was sleeping. But no one is sleeping in this room. Instead, two men talk loudly and nervously to one another.
“Three weeks, Mr. Murphy. It’s not a lifetime, but it could be if you go out there and do more damage to your brain and spinal cord.”
“Three weeks is a fucking long time to be benched, Doctor! Do you know what it’s like to be a prize fighter whose entire career depends on him knocking out as many fighters as he can? I can’t be taken out now!”
I instantly recognize Liam’s pained, frantic voice. I’ve never heard him like this. His rough, bass voice has been replaced with an almost shrill cry. I peek in, just enough so that I can spy through the crack, at the doctor leaning over his bed. Next to him, his coach runs his hands through his hair.
“But he can fight?” Ricky asks, “In three weeks, he can fight again?”
“If all the scans come back clear, then yeah. I don’t see why he couldn’t. And that’s what I am saying to you. This isn’t a death sentence. I’m not telling you to give up your dream or anything. I’m telling you to take it easy.”
“What if I don’t listen to you? What’s the worst that could happen to me?” Liam looks away towards the window and then at the clock. There’s even a glimpse towards the door as he avoids the doctor sighing heavily to himself in frustration.
I know that I am the person he is looking and waiting for. That voice on the other line was Ricky’s. It should have been clear as day to me, but I was so desperate, so worried that I couldn’t see through a simple and stupid plot that only Liam could think up. How fucking selfish could this guy be to use my dad as a ploy to get me to come out here? If he would have just asked…
No. If he had asked, I wouldn’t have been here. I would have told him to go ask his slutty girlfriend Amy to take care of him. She was obviously so eager to please…
But where was she? I open the door even further to get a picture of the room, but there are only the three men -- the doctor, Ricky, and Liam. There’s no purse, no scarf, no lipstick stains on glasses. There isn’t even a chair pulled out for her. Liam wouldn’t have gone into the hospital with just Ricky. If he wanted her in the way that I thought he wanted her, he would have insisted she be there. He was alone. He was calling for me.
My heart beats fast as I listen in further. The doctor is sternly answering his question about fighting without permission, “Well, Mr. Murphy. By the rules of this boxing federation you’re a part of, a doctor has to give you the all-clear to get back into the ring. I will not sign off on that, but I am sure there are other doctors who will.”
Liam snaps his fingers towards Ricky as he orders, “Call up your guys. Find out who will clear me.” He turns back to the doctor and mutters, “No offense, doc, but you don’t know what is best for me.”
“You didn’t let me finish, Mr. Murphy. If you go out and fight and take another blow with a fraction of the force you took on today, you’ll be looking at more than just a concussion. We’re talking memory loss, motor functions, seizures. Hell, I’ve seen athletes walk in with mild concussions and walk out with brain swelling and irreparable damage.” He walks towards the door as I spin away to the opposite wall attempting to look like just a passer-by. But as he opens the door, he gives Liam one last warning, “You do what you need to do, but I won’t be held responsible for the damage you’re going to do to yourself.”
The doctor in his white coat smiles slightly as he notices me leaning up against the wall of the room across from Liam’s. Still, I can see the wrinkled eyes and the frustrated daze. Liam couldn't be the easiest patient to deal with. Add on the stress of knowing how stubborn he was and what he was willing to risk just for the sport, and I can tell we are feeling the same kind of broken heartedness.
“Oh. Shit. You’re here.” Ricky stares at me from the open door. “Sorry about the whole--” He doesn’t mean it. He’s just as much of a bastard as Liam can be. All he cares about is keeping his guy happy. I don’t blame him. Liam is his cash cow now that he’s going, or should be going, pro.
I hold up my hand and coolly walk past him. I just need to get this over with. Liam’s room is dark, casting long shadows over the noisy equipment and the television hanging low over his bed. His eyes are fixed on some sports channel where I am sure they are talking about him tonight. But as he sees me, his face drops, his eyes light up, and his lips go to speak. There’s no sound, but the scuffle of his blue hospital gown on the bed as his arms rise towards me.
There’s something about seeing a man like Liam so vulnerable, so weak. The whole thing with Amy fades away into the background. The person before me is the real Liam, the Liam who is just fighting to find a future for himself. It’s the Liam with flowers in my van and the Liam who gives out ice cream to his fans. It’s not Liam the motorcycle club kingpin or the guy who managed to steal a ton of diamonds and sell them out of my ice cream truck. It wasn’t the guy who let Amy kiss him either.
I choke back all of the emotions spilling out of me to ask him, “Where’s Amy? Why isn’t she here?” I know the answer, but I want to hear him say it to me.
“Alana… I didn’t want her in that ring. She jumped in. I was so out of it, I had no idea. The next thing I knew, I woke up here with a million wires attached to me and her pretending to be my girlfriend.” His lips curl upwards as he says almost proudly, “I had security drag her out.”
I can’t help but smile back as I walk to the edge of his bed, sitting near his side, “How did she take it?”
Deadpan, he leans his head downward and whispers, “When I said ‘drag,’ I meant it literally.” We both laugh, and in those moments, our hands find one another. I’m careful not to rub against the IV attached to his wrist or move the monitor along his thumb.
A cold sadness overwhelms me as I confess, “I heard what the doctors said… about you not fighting. Does that mean --”
“I can’t make it to the pros on the timeline those scouts gave me. Yeah. That’s what it means. But I’m not going to listen to him. I am going to get a second opinion. Ricky’s making some phone calls about it first thing in the morning. I’ll get transferred out of here and see one of their guys. I’m sure we can find some doctor to bribe and sign off on the paperwork.” He looks away bitterly from me, probably guessing that I wouldn’t be too pleased to hear him go against everything his doctor’s told him.
“But, Liam… he’s a doctor. He knows what he’s talking about. Brain damage? My dad has brain damage! Do you want to know what kind of hell he is going through just to learn how to eat food out of a spoon again?”
“No. But fighting is my future, Alana. I don’t want to spend my life getting fat running my grandmother’s restaurant or running from the law with Steel Saints. This is my passion, and I’m not waiting around another second for another chance to come my way.”
“I don’t understand--” Before this, I thought that Steel Saints was exactly what he wanted his life to be. He had managed to create this club where he could control an entire order of men to do his bidding. He could make millions in weeks if he kept up the dealing side of things. What more could he want? Sure, there was the hazard of being taken over by his own guys and a crazy ex-girlfriend jockeying for his attention, but he could handle anything. He was Liam Murphy.
He sits straight up, leaning in towards me as he brushes a strand of my hair behind my ears. I can feel his warm breath against my cheek as he says low and soft, “This is the only way that I can be with you, Alana. If I fight, we can get out of this fucking mess and be together.”
“Liam.. I…” My mind goes blank as I close my eyes. I think about everything my life has been the last few years with going to school, working tirelessly on my blog, putting so many extra hours of my life into running that ice cream truck for my dad. None of those moments made me feel half of what I was feeling right now, in this hospital bed, with Liam gently touching the line of my neck. What if everything I have gone through, everything I strived for, had managed to lead me right here? What if Liam’s finding my dad’s ice cream truck in the middle of that park was not an accident after all?
I can’t ask myself any more questions. I do that too much already. I have to make a decision here and now. Liam was asking for a future together, and it’s a simple yes or no. Yes, and I stay -- I make this work. If it’s a no, then I am out the door, and I don’t bother to look back this time. My chest practically explodes with the possibilities. And for the first time in my life, I do the smartest and stupidest thing I have ever done -- I let go.
With clear eyes, I stare back into Liam’s as I say, “Liam, I love you.” A moment passes, maybe three more. But the space between our lips meeting, our arms wrapping around one another, and the beeps of his monitors chiming alarms, are some of the happiest seconds I think I’ll ever experience again.