CHAPTER TWO
Tank
Everything fucking hurts. I’ve never felt this kind of pain before in my life, not even when I was in the military. What’s worse is I don’t remember what I’ve done to cause myself to be in this agony.
The last thing I can recall is driving to the bottoms with my windows cracked, hard rock playing as loud as I could handle it, and my thoughts on the red-head spitfire who’s been ignoring me for months. I was formulating a plan to get back in her good graces, to let her know her job didn’t mean jack shit, if it meant my ultimatum kept her away from me. She called my bluff and when I got to my fishing spot, I was going to text her, let her know I’d deal with her job because fuck – I missed her.
After that all I remember is pain.
“Trevor, can you hear me?”
I’m trying to tell this woman who keeps screaming at me that I can indeed, fucking hear her. She’s shoving something into my side near my lung and it’s killing me.
I go to grab for it, feeling plastic. Maybe it’s a tube. What the fuck is going on?
“No, don’t be pulling on that!”
More noise, more bustling.
“Can someone get his hands? He’s going to yank the tube out before we can get the collapsed lung taken care of. He might be out of it, but he’s strong.”
Collapsed lung? Now I’m starting to freak out and jerk my head from side to side until someone steadies it with their hands.
“Stop, Trevor, you’re going to hurt yourself.”
I want to scream at the person speaking to me like I’m a child that I’m already fuckin’ hurt. If I’m in the back of an ambulance or at a hospital there’s only one person I want, one person who I feel comfortable enough to hand my care over to.
“Blaze,” I whisper, wetting what feels like cracked lips with the edge of my tongue.
There’s the metallic taste of blood and the indention where my lip has been split. Has someone beat the shit out of me? If they did, I’d hate to see the other guy because I know I wouldn’t have gone down without a fight. If I’m fucked up this bad, they probably aren’t living right now.
“Blaze,” I try again, this time my voice is a little stronger, because I can hear it in my ears.
“What are you saying, Trevor?”
I can feel someone lean down so they’re next to my lips. “Blaze,” I try again. “I want Blaze.”
“Can someone go out there and find out who Blaze is?”
With the knowledge they’re going to go get the one person I want to see, I slip back into the blessed darkness where I don’t feel anything.
* * *
The next time I come to, instinctively I know it’s been a while and I know it’s late at night. Fighting to open my eyes, I take in my surroundings, waiting for my vision to adjust. The room I’m in is one of the darkest I’ve ever been in, including some of the hellholes I was in while I was in the service.
Everything hurts again, more than it did last time. I attempt to move my leg, but it’s fucking heavy. My arm is heavier than normal, too. I force my eyes to open wider and see an IV in my hand, limiting my range of motion. What the fuck is going on?
A noise, I can’t tell if it’s a sigh or a moan, comes from my left. The shadows and the sliver of light given off by the machines I’m hooked up to allow me to figure out someone sits in a chair not far from me. Because of the darkness, I can’t quite make out who it is. With my teeth gritted, I lift my hand to show them I’m alive, and promptly let out a barely audible fuck me as I let it drop back down beside me. The one little movement took a lot out of me, but I’m glad I was able to manage. It feels like a major accomplishment.
The person in the chair jerks awake at my noise, or my words, puts their feet on the floor, and moves quickly toward me. Once they’re in the dim light, I see it’s Blaze.
“Damn I love you, I’ve wanted to see you all day, after I came to when they were putting a tube in my chest,” I close my eyes as I feel her hands on me. The words are hard to force through my throat. My voice is scratchy, everything feels swollen, bearing the evidence of the hard day I’ve had. I’m so fucking tired.
“I love you, too,” tears slip down her face. “God Trevor, you have no idea how scared I’ve been.”
My mind is going a hundred miles an hour. There’s only one thought repeating back and forth in my head. I croak out the question I’ve been dying to know the answer to. “What the fuck happened to me? What day is it?”
“You were in an accident. Brooks Strather hit your truck head on going almost ninety miles an hour at the bottoms. You’ve been in and out of consciousness for two days. You had surgery and a collapsed lung. You’re lucky as hell you’re still alive Trevor.”
Two days, I’ve lost two days of my life. I hear something in her voice, a monotone that sometimes we use when we’re delivering bad news to families. It’s a way to keep our emotions out of it and do the job we’ve been hired to do. I dread asking her the question, because I think I know the answer.
“Babe,” it kills me to ask, it hurts me because I know it hurt her. “Did you respond to the call?”
Her green eyes show an anguish I’m not sure I can ever understand. She deflates right in front of me, this woman who’s always such a badass. She’s usually so strong and full of life with the colors of the tattoos she sports running down her arms, but right now that woman is nowhere to be found. I watch her completely draw within herself. I watch as she leans back, grabbing the chair, sitting down before she obviously falls down. Blaze collapses in it, putting her face in her hands for a long minute. She takes what appears to be a fortifying breath and then answers my question.
“Yeah, Ryan and Ace responded first, but Logan and I were the closest medics available,” she bites her bottom lip, holding something in.
Fuck me….guilt eats at me. My best friend and my girl both saw me in the worst shape I’ve ever been in. I can’t fathom how I looked in the truck and what I’m sure I must look like laying in this bed, but I need her to be honest with me. If there’s anything we need at this juncture of our relationship, it’s honesty.
“Baby, tell me about it, let it out. It’s okay.” I know from my own experiences that you should talk about it, even if it’s with the person you’re trying most not to let in.
“I wasn’t worried, ya know?” she starts, grabbing my fingers in between hers. Hers are freezing, and I have the fleeting thought maybe she’s in shock. She plays with the tips of them, rubbing at my fingernails. “I knew you weren’t on shift, because you’d texted me the night before, asking if we could talk. But I ignored you, because I didn’t know how to talk to you, to face you after what all we said to each other the last time we argued. I was one thousand percent positive you weren’t on shift though, it never even crossed my mind it was you. I even sent you a text, warning you of the wreck, telling you to stay where you were. I said maybe we could have dinner, because sometime over the past few months, I realized the argument we had wasn’t just me or you, it was me and you,” she stops to take a breath. “I’ve been worried I’d never be able to say those words to you. As much as I was pissed at you, us breaking up was partly my fault too. I’m willing to take the blame with you.”
I hate hearing the pain in her voice. Feeling the aches I do, I know it was bad when they came on the scene. I feel like I’ve gone fifteen rounds with a pro boxer and then tumbled around in a washer spin cycle. Everything on my body hurts and aches, including my teeth. I don’t even want to think how I’d feel if I wasn’t on the pain meds I know they’ve given me.
“When I got to the scene, I saw two regular pickups. So I yelled to Ace saying it had come over the radio that there was an officer involved. When he told me it was you, I felt like my life was over. I fell to my knees in the middle of the road, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t know what to do to help someone. Ryan came crawling out from under the back of your truck looking like he’d seen the devil himself. He was so pale I thought he was going to pass out, covered in mud, probably shit, and your blood.”
She continues playing with my fingertips and I welcome the connection. It makes me feel alive, and I need that right now. I need her warmth and the vibrancy of life she carries with her on a daily basis.
“We waited for the jaws to cut you out, and then they told us we could go over. I’ve never seen you like that before, and hand to God, the way you looked was in the top five of bad patients I’ve ever seen. I fought like hell to keep you alive until we got to the air evac.”
So I’d been helicoptered to Birmingham. It’s all kind of starting to click. My receptors are coming back online after being off for so long.
“Logan drove me, and I haven’t left. Your sister brought me some clothes and we’ve talked every time she’s come in here. She loves you a lot and she’s one tough chick,” her words are strained, and I can hear her trying to keep the tears in check. It’s killing her, it’s killing me.
“Whitney is badass. How’s the baby?”
“She’s had some contractions, but the doctor said it’s not unusual with the shock you gave all of us.”
We’re quiet for a minute. I can’t take my eyes off her, can’t stop trying to map the contours of her face. I watch her breaking in front of me. See her chin trembling, her teeth holding on tightly to that bottom lip to keep the seam of her frown together, and the spot between her eyes pulled tight to keep the tears from falling.
Then there’s a kink in the armor as one tear slides down her cheek. Her shoulders jerk with the effort she’s exerting to hold it all in. I do the only thing I can.
“Blaze, help me sit this bed up and crawl in here with me. I don’t care if it hurts; I have to have you beside me, right where you fucking belong.”
She reaches over, tears dropping onto my skin as she moves the bed so that I’m elevated.
“Lower the railing and climb in next to me, I need to feel you against me. I can’t take away what you saw and erase it from your memory, but I can be here.”
Doing what I ask her to, I allow her to cuddle up next to me, and it’s the best medicine in the world even if it does hurt like hell. Somehow I manage to reach over with my IV hand and curl it around the nape of her neck, letting her bury her head against my shoulder. Gingerly and biting back a groan, I lean down, kissing her hair.
“Let it out and let it go, because I’m gonna need you babe, more than I’ve ever needed you before. If you’re serious about us being together, then I’m going to want you with me every step of the goddamn way, and there’s gonna be a lot of steps. A lot of long days. If you’re in this for the long haul, I need you to be all in.”
She sobs against me nodding as I talk to her, holding my hospital gown tightly between her fingers, and when my voice breaks too much I can’t speak anymore. I let the tears fall too, because damn if I haven’t realized just how close I’ve come to dying.
And I haven’t done half the shit I want to do yet. It’s most definitely not my time, and I’ll never waste another second of what I do have with this redhead lying next to me.