Chapter 69
Lydia
I’m a snot-nosed, shrieking, screeching maniac as I run through the parking lot toward the sliding glass doors of the ER where, I’m told, the man I love is getting examined and sutured after almost getting shot in the head by a complete fucking lunatic! Colby assured me he’s perfectly fine. He said it over and over again, though I could barely hear him through my screams and wails.
I don’t care what Colby said. I won’t be okay until I’ve seen him with my eyes. Touched his living flesh with my fingertips. Held his hand and looked into his beautiful blue eyes and seen them open and close. Open and close.
Thank God, with Rosalind out of town to visit her grandchildren, my neighbor across the street was home and willing to watch the kids. Otherwise, I’m quite certain I would have had a legit nervous breakdown. Honestly, I don’t even remember driving here. I was completely out of my head.
I burst through the ER doors and barrel to the check-in desk and babble Colby’s name and describe the situation and beg to be taken to see him right away. When they tell me only family is allowed in the back, I inwardly curse myself for not being Colby’s legal wife in this moment—why have I never brought up the idea of marriage with Colby? Why? I’m an idiot.
I furiously pull out my hospital badge and show it to the check-in woman and plead with her to make an exception. Yeah, I realize my badge is for a different hospital across town. But at least it shows I’m in the medical profession and have had a background check. Thankfully, the woman at the desk takes pity on me and covertly escorts me down a hall to see Colby.
There he is.
He’s sitting on a gurney at the end of the hallway in a little nook, his face looking shockingly like it’s been put through a meat grinder. His head is bandaged. He’s visibly bruised and battered.
I choke back a sob as I run to him at full speed.
Colby.
When he sees me approaching, he reaches for me, emotion contorting his face.
“Colby!” I shriek, a sob lurching out of me. I hug him fiercely and he clutches me to him and I cry and cry and cry.
“Sssh, baby,” he says, gripping me. “I’m fine. Not a single broken bone, miraculously. I’ll be back as good as new in about four weeks. Just need to let the concussion heal.”
I’m shaking violently. Out of my head. I’m sobbing so hard, my eyes feel like they’re swelling shut. I feel dizzy. Like I literally can’t breathe or hold myself upright.
“C-Colby,” I choke out. “You could have d-died.”
“But I didn’t,” he says. His voice is calm and soothing, but his body gives him away—he’s trembling violently against me, every bit as much as I’m shaking against him. “I’m perfectly fine, baby. Merely a flesh wound.”
But I can’t be soothed. I’m convulsing with my cries and anguish and relief. On the verge of total and complete hysteria.
“I’m okay,” Colby says. “Sssh. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere, my love.”
That last comment unexpectedly pisses me off. I jerk back from him, instantly enraged. “You’re not going anywhere only by the grace of God!” I spit out. “He had a gun, Colby! The man fired a gun at you and just so happened to miss!” My teeth are chattering. My eyes are bugged out. “You came this close to leaving us! This close!” I throw my arms around him again and sob my eyes out and he embraces me again. For a long moment, we hug and kiss while I cry and cry.
Finally, my anger morphs into relief. And then gratitude that he’s okay. And then love, love, love and nothing else. Finally, when I pull away from our fervent embrace, the look of pure exhaustion on Colby’s face makes me realize how selfish I’m being. He’s the one who’s been through hell, not me. And I’m making this all about me.
“I’m sorry,” I say, wiping my eyes. “Forgive me. Let’s get you home. You need to rest.”
“I have to wait for the nurse to come back with my discharge papers and after-care instructions,” he says. “She said she’d be back in fifteen minutes.”
“How long ago was that?”
He looks at his watch blankly. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, honey.” I kiss him gently, taking great care not to touch anything that looks like it hurts. “What happened? I don’t understand from what you told me on the phone why you were even there?”
“I was there because that kid had nobody else to turn to for help,” he says simply.
I bring his hand to my lips and sigh. “You’re always going to be the guy who rushes into the fire, aren’t you?”
He smiles ruefully. “It’s who I am, Lydia.”
I nod. This isn’t news to me.
In some aspects, Colby’s and Darren’s personalities differ sharply. It’s definitely not hard for me to tell the two men apart. But with respect to this particular trait—their shared instinct to run into danger when everyone else is running away—the two loves of my life are cut from the exact same cloth.
“Please don’t leave me, Lydia,” Colby whispers, his eyes glistening. “I can’t live without you. Please, please don’t leave me.”
I’m shocked. That’s what Colby thinks is going through my head in this moment? “Leave you?” I say. “Colby.”
He looks like he’s holding his breath.
I gently brush his bruised cheek with the pad of my finger and say, “My love, yes, you scare the shit out of me. Yes, loving you is fraught with the risk and fear that I might lose you. But you’re worth every ounce of worry or anguish you throw my way. Honey, you’re worth the risk.”
Colby closes his eyes and exhales, the tension in his shoulders from a moment ago visibly releasing.
I kiss his red, swollen knuckles. “This isn’t about me. You’ve been through hell and I’ve put you in a position to comfort me. I’m sorry. All that matters is that you’re okay.”
“Babe, there’s no way in hell you could get a call like that and not flip out. Believe me, I tried to figure out a way for me to slip back home with barbeque and ice cream without you or the kids ever the wiser about what went down today, but I couldn’t come up with a plan.”
I chuckle. “Yeah, we’re not all that sharp, but I think we would have figured it out.” Again, I gingerly touch his battered face. “Were you scared?”
“Shitless.” He smiles ruefully. “When that bastard pulled the gun, I swear to God, I thought I was done. I truly thought that was it for me.”
I shudder.
“And you know what I thought about in that precise moment—when he pulled the gun and I thought I was gonna die? Lydia. And when he fired the gun and I thought maybe I’d been hit, I thought of you again. The life I want to live with you and the kids. How sad I was to miss all the fun.”
I slide my arms around his neck and we hold each other for a very long time.
“You’re my everything, Lydia,” he whispers.
“You’re mine,” I whisper back.
Colby kisses my tear-stained cheeks and I pepper his battered face with exceedingly gentle kisses—and, all the while, we whisper words of devotion and love and relief into each other’s ears.
“Have you called your family yet?” I ask.
“No.”
“Not even Ryan?”
“Just you.”
“Do you want me to call Ryan for you?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I don’t want anyone to know about this. They all went through hell seven months ago with me. They’ve had enough.”
“Colby, have you been whacked upside the head or something?”
He smiles. “Cute.”
“Honey, seriously. They’d want to know about this. Of course, you have to tell them.”
He shakes his head. “No, Lydia. Kat’s a month away from having her baby. Dax is furiously writing songs for the big debut album they’re gonna record in LA. Ryan’s on cloud nine, planning his wedding and his bar. Keane is more likely than not getting ready to go out Ball-Peen-Hammering at some bachelorette party tonight. And my parents are probably sitting at home on the couch happily watching some Civil War documentary. The thought of disrupting any of that by calling them and telling them what happened today makes me physically ill.”
Okay, clearly this man isn’t thinking clearly—which makes sense, of course. “Honey, I think the jig is going to be up relatively soon whether you like it or not. You told them you were starting back to work on Monday, remember? They’re expecting you to drop off Ralph on Monday morning. They’re going to ask you, ‘How’s work?’”
He makes a face that says, “Shit.”
“Plus, do you really think you can avoid seeing your family for weeks while those bruises heal? You can barely go three days without seeing at least one of your family members.”
Colby hangs his head, clearly overwhelmed.
I rub his back in silence for a moment, comforting him, until our quiet moment is interrupted by a police officer approaching and asking Colby for a statement about the incident.
Colby tells the officer his entire story, as best he can remember it with his bruised and shocked brain, and my jaw drops to the floor at what he’s describing. Oh my God. My humble hero didn’t tell me one-tenth the details he’s explaining to this cop. When Colby called me earlier, he made the incident sound so much less dramatic than it actually was—and I still freaked the fuck out at his watered-down version of events. Holy crap. Hearing the real version now, I feel like I’m going to pass out. And yet, other than a few gasps and exclamations, I somehow manage to keep myself quiet and composed during Colby’s interview.
The officer concludes his interview and tells Colby his account of the incident is perfectly consistent with what the wife and kid told him at the scene. And then he adds, “The wife said you saved her life, Colby. She said she’d one hundred percent be dead right now if you hadn’t jumped in to help her at precisely the moment you did. You’re a true hero.” He glances at me and half-smiles. “Again.”
Colby waves at the air. “I just did what anyone would do in my shoes.”
The cop shakes his head. “You’d be surprised how many people would have done absolutely nothing in your situation. Because of you, that kid has a mother tonight.”
Colby shrugs and says simply, “You know how it is. We’re first responders. We have no choice.”
The guy fist-bumps Colby. “Much respect.”
“Back at you. One of yours saved my life today. Tell that guy I said thanks, would you? Actually, no, give him my number, if you wouldn’t mind. I’d like to thank him myself. I wouldn’t be sitting here now if it wasn’t for that guy’s steady hand.”
“Will do. It’ll mean a lot to him to talk to you, too.”
When the police officer leaves, I fawn all over my brave boyfriend, as well I should, until a discharge nurse interrupts us to give Colby after-care instructions for his sutures, concussion, and various contusions. Basically, my hero is going to be resting for about four weeks, thanks to that concussion, but in about a month or so, he’ll be good as new and ready to return to work.
As we make our way toward my car in the parking structure, I grab Colby’s hand. “I’m sorry this will delay you getting back to the firehouse.”
Colby kisses my hand. “It’s just a month. Not the end of the world, considering a kid still has his mom tonight.”
We reach my car and stand next to the passenger door for a moment, embracing. “I’m sorry,” he whispers into my hair.
“For what?”
“For scaring you. If I could have slipped back home with barbeque and ice cream and never mentioned what happened, I would have done it.”
“Okay, enough with that. Let’s get something straight right now. ‘Protecting me’ by keeping important things from me isn’t an option. Not about this or anything else that might come up in the future. Our relationship works so damned well because we talk. Because we’re honest. Each of us knows what’s going on with the other—good, bad, or ugly. I don’t want to love a fictitious version of you, Colby. I only want to love the real you. Forever and ever for the rest of my life.”
He looks relieved. “You’ll never leave me because it’s just too damned stressful to love me?”
My eyes trained on his, I say, “I’m never going to leave you. If I thought maybe I wouldn’t be able to handle the first-responder thing once you got back to work, then it’s now one thousand percent clear: there’s literally nothing that would make me walk away from you. I’ll take the good with the bad. The stress and worry with the joy. The love with the potential for loss. I’m not going anywhere, ever.”
He exhales with relief. “Thank God.”
“Are you the guy who’s always going to rush into the proverbial burning building, whatever that is? Yes. But, Colby.” I grab his shoulders. “That’s why I love you.”
Emotion washes over his battered face. “Let’s get married.”
“What?”
“I want you to be my wife. Damn. I should have bought a suit for the Daddy-Daughter Dance.”
I look into his stunning blue eyes. Well, his stunning blue eye. His left eye is completely swollen shut. I feel electrified. Ready. Excited. But I control myself. “Now’s not the time for you to be thinking about this. You’re exhausted. Concussed. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I know exactly what I’m saying. I want you to be my wife.”
I open the passenger door of my car for him. “Let’s get you home. We’ll talk about this again when you’ve had a chance to rest up.”
He gets himself situated into my car and I close the door.
I walk around the car, get myself settled into the driver’s side, and turn on the ignition.
“Where is ‘home’?” he asks.
“Huh?”
“You said, ‘Let’s get you home.’”
“Oh. My house. I don’t want you sleeping alone at your place while you’ve got a concussion.” But I know my words are a lie the minute they leave my mouth. “Actually, I never want you to sleep another night at your place again, period. Whether you’ve got a concussion or not, my house is now your home.”
Colby smiles. “Awesome.” He melts into his car seat and exhales. “Come on, baby. Let’s go home.”