Enjoy Your Stay (12 page)

I want to scream. I strain my wrists against their bindings, and the tears become an all-out torrent. “I have to see him.”

“You can’t, Hols.”

The nurse comes in, and chastises Ana for upsetting me, but I only hear half of what she says because my heart hurts so much. I squeeze my eyes shut and pray like hell to wake up, but when I open them again I’m still in the hospital, and the baby monitor strapped to my stomach is still whooshing away. Elijah stands beside me. He wraps his big hand over my struggling one, and says, “Alright, you crazy, ranga midget, you need to calm your cranky arse down. There’s nothing you can do for him right now, but focus on not losing that kid. Jack would string my balls up like Christmas lights if he knew I didn’t try to talk some sense into you. You gotta do this for him, Hols. For him, and that kid.”

“I need to see him.” I plead, but Elijah shakes his head.

“No, darlin’, you need to do what the doctor orders and stay in bed, and then we’ll take you to see him when you’re feeling better.”

“He’s gonna make it, right?”

“Come on, Hols, you know he wouldn’t miss out on an opportunity to keep pissing you off. He’s gonna be fine. You just make sure you and this kid are, too.”

“Okay.” I sniff, and let the nurse check my vitals. She unbuckles the restraints with a warning that they won’t hesitate to restrain me again if I move for anything more than getting up to go to the bathroom.

Once my hands are free and the bitch nurse is gone, I rub at my wrists, and shift on the bed. I don’t know how long I’m going to have to sit on my hands while Jackson is somewhere else in this hospital, lying in a coma, because of me. If I hadn’t yelled at him, or said all those horrible things, he wouldn’t have had to go off alone. He wouldn’t have been bitten, I wouldn’t have had to drive him to the hospital, and I wouldn’t have crashed his car. If I’d just talked to him this morning, instead of rimming him out for showing me how he really felt, maybe none of this would have happened.

Ana and Elijah stay until visiting hours are done, and then the room is quiet, save for the sound of the EFM machine, and the noisy beeping of the IV in my arm. I ease onto my side, gently hug my belly, and cry myself to sleep.

I
T’S A
whole four hours before I’m allowed to leave my hospital room, and even then it’s only to shift me to another suite on the maternity ward because they need the birthing suite. Two hours later, and I’m driving the bitch nurse—Sharon, who is actually hilarious, shares my love of all things Wonder Woman, and whom I discovered is really very nice, once she’s not trying to strap me to a bed—crazy with questions.

She caught me sneaking out of my room, rocking my Smurfette hospital gown with my arse hanging out, and she begged me to give it a day before going out and trolling the halls looking for Jackson. I’ve been going nuts in that room, and no amount of television or magazines can distract me from the fact that Jack’s lying alone in his hospital bed with a machine breathing for him. He’s just a floor away, and yet he’s further from me than he’s ever been.

The baby seems to be doing fine, but I’ve already put the little guy through enough so I listened to the bitch nurse, even though my heart was breaking in half. I climbed back into bed, and there I stayed. Until today. Until
now
.

Ana brought me some clothes from home earlier, but I still feel underdressed for the occasion. It’s stupid. Jackson has seen me loafing around the house in my trackies. He’s seen me with bedhead, and toothpaste covering my zits, and he’s seen me completely naked—a number of times. Thanks to the coma he’s in, he won’t be seeing me at all, but I still want to look nice for him.

Sharon helps me dress, and tame my crazy-arse hair back into a ponytail, and then she wheels me down to intensive care. I gasp when I see him, and throw my hand out against the doorframe to keep her from pushing me further into the room. I pestered the poor woman for a day and a half to let me visit him, and now that I’m here, I no longer want to be. Seeing Jack this way: so still, so lifeless … it’s wrong.

A lump forms in my throat. Slowly I let go of the doorjamb and allow her to wheel me closer to the bed. Once I’m settled, Sharon steps back and quietly chats to the nurse sitting in the corner of Jack’s room. I sit there in shock, listening to the shrill beep of the ECG machine, and the whoosh of the ventilator that’s keeping him alive.

He’s so pale. Ordinarily his hair shines like spun gold thread, but now it hangs limp over his forehead, a dull honey-wheat colour. His beard is thicker today, but oddly, it suits him. I want so badly to see the beautiful summer-sky blue of his eyes, or the flash of white teeth as he grins at me. Instead, he just lies there, inert. It’s so un-Jackson of him that I expect at any minute he’ll sit up, and poke fun of me for crying like a little girl.

He has tubes taped in both his mouth and nose, and there are cords and wires everywhere. It’s hard to believe he’s the same guy who argued with me—who made love to me—in our tent yesterday. “Can I touch him?”

“Yes,” the nurse says. “Just be careful not to move any of the lines.”

The bite on his arm hasn’t been covered. I lean forward and trace my fingers over the two tiny holes that started this whole thing. I sniff, and swipe at my tears with the back of my hand. Taking a minute to make sure I wasn’t going to pull out any of the myriad wires running from his body, I wheel my chair as close as it will go, and carefully lean over the bed.

For a good long while I cry, and then I dry my eyes and decide that the only way to get him to wake up is to annoy the shit out of him. After all, it’s what he would do for me.

“Looking hot, Jackarse.” I reach out a hand, and gently scratch at his beard. “No, really, the lumberjack look is really working for you. You should see the bitch nurse checking you out. She’s lucky I haven’t shanked her skanky arse yet.”

One side of his face twitches—don’t get excited, Sharon warned me that shit happens all the time with coma patients—but it still kinda made me feel like maybe somewhere in that big swollen head of his, he was listening. Of course, I wouldn’t put it past him to choose to stay in the bloody coma just to piss me off.

I run my fingers through his messy hair a few times, and then, being careful not to touch any wires, I rest my head on his arm. “You should know the baby’s doing well. I have a placental abruption, so I’ve been told to put my feet up until things calm down. They made me sleep with this annoying belt strapped to my stomach so they could monitor the McNugget all night.

“Apparently not everyone gets their own private suite. It’s a pretty dope set-up you’ve got going here, Jackarse. Wanna trade?” My voice cracks, and then the tears start up again. I should wipe them away so I’m not drowning his bed sheets, but I don’t want to move. I just want him to wake up.
Why isn’t he waking up already?

“The doctors said it could have been a lot worse,” I say, and rub my cheek against his palm. “I saw that superhero move you pulled, by the way. Throwing your injured arm out to protect the baby? That was some swoony shit right there, Jackarse. If I hadn’t been almost pulverised by your suck-tastic Ute, I might have rolled over and raped you right there on the seat, Spiderman.”

I hear a tap on the glass, and I crane my neck around. Sharon and the other nurse stand outside with steaming cups of coffee in their hands. I hadn’t even heard them leave, and I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to not have at least someone in here monitoring him the whole time. But I’m not complaining. Sharon taps at her watch. I hold my hand up for just five more minutes, and then I lay my head on Jack’s arm and watch the steady rise and fall of his chest as the ventilator pumps air into his lungs. I ignore the beep of the monitors, and the ECG machine, and pretend like he’s just sleeping, and that I’m not terrified for him. Then I gently kiss his cheek, ease myself up off the bed, and allow Sharon to wheel me back to my room.

For the past twenty minutes I’ve been relaying all the ridiculously farfetched details of today’s episode of
The Bold and the Beautiful
to Jackson—laugh all you want, but I know he loves that show, or he wouldn’t come sauntering in at 4:30 pm every day just in time to watch—when I decide the stubborn arsehole isn’t going to wake up if I keep updating him on this shit, so I try using a different tactic.

“Hey, Jack?” I whisper as I lay my head on the bed, the way I did earlier today. “Remember that time in your mum’s car? When you drove me home, and you pulled into the empty lot beside the mill? We laid the seats flat, and watched the smog from the chimney drift up into the night sky, and you told me you wanted to be different from your dad. That you didn’t wanna check out early.

“You already are different. You saved my baby’s life. You saved
my
life. But I need you to come back. I need you to come home.”

I don’t know whether it’s the stress, or the fact that the smell of hospital-grade disinfectant makes me high, but I pop my head up, and give my best impersonation of Rose in
Titanic
. “Come back, Jack. Come back.”

Well, I guess we can rule out the fact that he’s just pretending to be in a coma, because ordinarily, me getting my Kate-Winslet on makes him hysterical.

“Doc’s given me the all clear, so Ana’s coming to take me home. Only, it’s not going to feel like home if you aren’t there. I miss you, Jack,” I whisper, and kiss his cheek as the tears stream down over mine.

His eyelashes flutter, then still. His heartbeat is steady. His chest rises and falls with each push of air from the ventilator into the tube taped to his mouth, but there’s no change.

A knock at the door startles me, and I crane my neck around, expecting to see Ana. There’s a smoking-hot blonde in the doorway, alright, but it’s not Ana. Her hair is cut just above her shoulders, and she has a sort of sweet-and-innocent vibe about her.
Sweet and innocent, coming to visit Jackson Rowe?
Thank God he’s comatose, or he’d think all his Christmases had come at once.

“Sorry to interrupt.”

“Can I help you?” I ask.

“I’m here to see Jack.” She walks further into the room, and tears fill her eyes when she sees the state of him. She covers her perfect Cupid’s bow mouth with her manicured hand. She’s tall, and gorgeous, and totally rocking the hell out of the skinny jeans and kitten heels she’s wearing. I glance down at my day-old yoga pants, grandpa cardigan, and Captain America T-shirt, that’s now two sizes too small thanks to the baby bump. I can’t help but feel inferior next to this Amazonian beauty. Disdainfully eyeing the potted plant in her hand, I sit in the chair beside the bed, and wait to find out who this perfect bitch is and why the hell she’s crying all over my Jack.

She catches me staring, and motions her head towards the flowers. “Cymbidium orchids. The pink ones are his favourite.”

“Of course they are.”
They look like a woman’s snatch … wait. How the hell does she know what his favourite flower is? I didn’t even know what his favourite flower is.
“Who are you?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m Chelcie.” She waits a second for that to sink in, and then prompts me with, “Jackson’s fiancé … Or, ex-fiancé, I guess.”

“Right.”

“And you must be Holly?” she says, sticking her hand out for me to shake.
He talked about me? To his fiancé?
That’s … weird, considering he’s never said a word to me about her. I knew about her, of course, I just didn’t know that this is what he’d left behind when he’d left her.