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Before I could protest, before I could tell him that I wanted to spend a few more moments in the darkness with him, he had pressed the call bell, and the door was opening to let light flood from the hallway into my room. A figure stood there in scrubs.
“She’s awake,” Adrian said, and his voice was still quiet with happy disbelief, his eyes shining with hope and joy.
The light was flicked on in the room and itburned. I winced and slammed my eyes shut. I hadn’t had them open and exposed to light in God knows how long, and it felt like the dim luminescence was burning into my pupils.
“Ugh,” I moaned.
That was apparently all the confirmation the nurse needed that I was, in fact, awake and responsive, and she stuck her head into the hallway, telling someone else to call the doctor. She came back into the room, a smile on her face, and I wondered why everyone was smiling so much when it hurt so damn bad to do so.
Adrian shuffled away from me to let the nurse through to my monitors and pulled out his phone. He dialed someone’s number and held the small device up to his ear, grinning all the while.
“Jodie? She’s awake.”
* * *
The next few months were the hardest I’d ever experienced.
I wanted to be left to heal in peace, but the physical therapy team wasn’t having it, which meant Adrian wasn’t having it.
“You can do it,” he beamed at me from the end of the bars. “Just a few more steps!”
“It’s more than a few and you know it,” I growled at him, but forced my leg to lift and move forward anyway.
I couldn’t express how much he motivated me. Walking towards Adrian was a much bigger incentive than the physical therapist with her chirpy voice and words of encouragement.
I wanted to tell him how much I loved him but that wouldn’t be fair to him.
Every day, those three little words sprang to the tip of my tongue, and every time he did something as small as throw a smile my way, I grew weaker in my resolve. But I didn’t want a broken girl telling him, I wanted to be whole, to have my feet under me, and to be my own person again.
I remembered his words reaching me in my coma, remembered the “I love you’s” and the “please wake up’s”, but he didn’t offer any of that to me once I was conscious. It was like he had only had those feelings for the person I once was; a young, sparky doctor, who was quick on her feet and able to walk without the use of crutches.
Maybe he had fallen out of love, watching me be rebuilt from the ground up. My legs were one of my biggest problems, but there was also a lingering fear that I wouldn’t be able to practice surgery. I strengthened my hands every day, and every day I noticed improvement, but what would I do without surgery, especially if I was losing Adrian like I suspected?
Of course, I was weak. Every ounce of attention or affection he gave me, I ate up like a starving woman. I let myself fall into his arms when I reached the bars at the end of physio. I held his hands in the cafeteria. I let myself feel the strength in him, and rely on him, and it feltgood. I could imagine doing it every day, the two of us falling farther in love, and letting him be the one I went home to after every shift that was too long and too hard, and just generally too much.
I held myself back from those words though, the ones that could make it all happen if he felt the same way. Iknewhe’d said it when I was out, I wassure, but I wasn’t going to say it first. Last time I’d said it first, I’d ended up in a coma. I didn’t blame him, of course, only my own brash stupidity.
I stumbled towards him, almost falling, and there were those arms. They wrapped around me, holding me close and tight and safe.
“Are you okay?” Adrian asked.
I just nodded silently, looking away. I was okay as long as I was in his arms.
* * *
Of course, I made improvements.
I was stubborn, and there wasn’t as much nerve damage as had been feared originally. I was discharged and sent home, with my mother in tow, telling me I wasn’t going to get away with laziness on her watch. I practiced the therapies I was given every day, and as soon as my wounds were healed up, I began participating in the hospital’s hydrotherapy program.
It was about that time Adrian started disappearing. Where he had been by my side almost every day from the moment I’d woken up, he suddenly went silent for days at a time. It was like he was ghosting me, but I wasn’t sure how he could do that when we were often in the same place. It was disconcerting, to say the least, but I didn’t dare ask him about it, too afraid of the answer.
My mother was my saving grace. She was full of the kind of tough love that she’d raised me with and made sure I didn’t go completely crazy while spending all day at home. She had me video-chat my brothers and their father, encouraged me to keep up with research in various surgical fields, and even coaxed Jack into taking me out for dinner a couple of nights a week.
Jack wasn’t ignoring me or anything—he looked at me like I was one part fascinating science project and two parts very fragile. It made him uneasy around me, but I was glad to have my friend in such trying—and boring—times.
All I needed was to know I was equally secure with Adrian.
It weighed on me, day in and day out, when I would do nothing but stare into space for hours, trying to imagine going back to my life as it had been, without the man I was still desperately in love with.
