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The most concerning thing is the thick tube coming out of his mouth attached to a machine beside him. It’s large and white and makes a strange sound like a great inhalation of air followed by a strange hiss every few seconds. Vaughn’s chest rises and falls with the same rhythm.
This machine is breathing for him.
His eyes are closed, not even a flutter in the pale lids that have tiny veins running through them that seem too brightly blue in the florescent lighting. He could be asleep or he could be braindead, it’s impossible to tell the difference from where I’m standing.
“I know it looks bad, but judging from the look on your face, it isn’t as bad as you think.” The nurse comes up behind me, obviously done with her hastily eaten dinner. “It’s a great sign that he hasn’t been transferred to another hospital. That always happens with the really serious cases.”
“Uh…great.” I don’t really want to think about what could be worse than what I’m already seeing. “Is he going to…wake up?”
She actually laughs. “He would be awake now, but we’re keeping him asleep.”
I’m not sure if that should relieve or concern me. “Why?”
“Your friend really did a number on himself with that accident. He broke some ribs and one of them punctured his lung. He went into surgery as soon as he got here to fix it and that went well, but he needs to stay on the ventilator for a few days while he recovers. Considering what could have happened, he got lucky. Especially since he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.”
If Vaughn wasn’t already unconscious and battered to hell, I might be tempted to slap some sense into him myself. I’ve gotten onto him before about not wearing a seatbelt and he always blows me off like it’s no big deal. Sure, I ride a motorcycle. But no one would ever catch me speeding down the highway without wearing a helmet.
Vaughn has always been reckless. He has always acted first without thinking through the potential consequences.
We’ve always been nearly perfect opposites in that way.
“He’s been fighting the ventilator a bit more today, despite the sedation. That’s a good sign. The team will probably be able to take him off of it in a day or two.”
Her words are mostly gibberish, but I focus on the part that has my friend getting the tube out of his throat soon.
I turn back to the nurse, sizing her up. She looks like she knows what she’s talking about, but I can’t be sure. “You really think he’s going to be okay?”
“Your friend is stable.” She pushes her hands into the pockets of her scrub top with a shrug. “Things can always go bad unexpectedly, but there isn’t any reason to think at this point that he won’t recover.”
“Thank you.”
She glances at the clock before backing out of the glass-walled room. “You’re only supposed to get five more minutes, but we can make it ten if you’re quiet. And don’t feel weird about talking to him. Even like this, patients can still sometimes tell what’s going on around them. It might be nice for him to know that someone is here at his bedside.”
I turn back to Vaughn as she leaves, anxiety draining out of me as it sinks in that he might actually be okay.
My relief carries with it a wave of annoyance. Vaughn needs to wake the fuck up so he can tell me himself what he was doing driving on a country road in the middle of the night with Evangeline Pratt in the passenger seat. If he figured out who she was, I don’t understand why he wouldn’t immediately come to me with that information.
The only answer is that he has been hiding things from me this entire time.
I take a nearby chair and slide it to the head of the bed before sitting down. This close, it looks like somebody went at Vaughn’s face with a baseball bat. Those bruises are going to turn some pretty sick colors over the next few weeks before they fade away, and he’s going to have more than his share of scars.
“What the hell have you done?” I whisper, barely loud enough to be heard over the hiss and sighs of the ventilator. “As soon as they wake your ass up, you’re telling me everything.”
Vaughn doesn’t respond, not that I expect him to. One glance at the IV bag hanging next to his bed confirms that they’re giving him the good stuff. He is out for the count.
He is the only person at St. Bart’s that I completely trust. Or at least he was. I didn’t think we kept secrets from each other.
But he never told me about Olivia, not last year when they apparently dated and not later after she got hurt.
The only explanation that makes sense is that he’s guilty of something.
Vaughn’s father is cut from the same pattern as mine, only worse. Vaughn spent most of his formative years at rigid boarding schools that cared more about grooming the next generation of sociopathic social climbers than anything else. But he is the only other person I’ve met here who seems to see through all the nonsense in the same way I do.
I don’t want to believe that he was the one who attacked Olivia. Things might get rowdy at Havoc House, but Vaughn has never done anything like that. He doesn’t treat women with the cavalier disregard of guys like Nolan, or even Cole. And he only seems committed to all the Havoc House bullshit because of the weight of family tradition.
I didn’t think he took any of it all that seriously, outside of pleasing his family.
But now…I don’t know what to think.
