As it happens, though. I don’t get the chance. I take a breath to say who the hell knows what, but a nurse ghosting through the door cuts me off. “Jack? You can see Sol now.”
You can see him now.
They say it like it’s nothing. As if the hours and hours I’ve waited to truly believe Sol’s alive haven’t stretched my soul thin over my bones.
He’s in HDU.
“Stable,” the nurse tells me. “CT was clear. He was sleeping when I left.”
Sleeping.
I nod and follow her down a corridor and up a flight of stairs quicker than waiting for the lift, and I don’t take much notice of my surroundings. Hospitals are familiar to me. The smell. The low hums and beeps of monitors and machines. Sights and sounds engrained on me deeper than actual memories. That I’m running toward someone I love more than away from myself seems incidental. Maybe I’ll think about it later.
Maybe I won’t.
I slip into the high dependency ward. Where the patients are poorly enough to need close monitoring but not full life support. The nurse points to the last bed in the corner and tells me to keep going.
As if I need telling.
I approach the bed. The curtain is half drawn back, and there he is, and I’m not ready for the lurch in my chest. For the rush of emotion threatening to fell me.
Fuck, Sol. What happened to you?
He’s so still.
So pale.
A hospital gown covers his tattooed skin, but doesn’t hide the bruises and scrapes on his face, neck, and collarbones.
I take in the cannulas taped to his hands. The oxygen looped under his nose. The room tilts and I grip the bed rail, grounding myself in the cool metal as I clock everything I can in one sweep.
Assess.
Repeat.
Accept.
He’s here.
Sol is alive. And…he looks uncomfortable. Even unconscious—not sleeping—I see it in his tight jaw. In the crease of his brow and the way his shoulder hitches every time he takes a precious breath.
I release the bed rail and allow my hand to go where it wants. To his bruised face and tangled hair. “Hey.”
It’s a murmur. I don’t know what else to do with my voice. And he doesn’t respond. But I’m not worried about it. If he’s in pain, I don’t want him awake for it. And yet…I know what it’s like to be trapped in a black hole with nothing but agony for company, and I can’t live with that either.
The bed is too flat. I raise it a fraction at the head, easing the pressure on Sol’s neck and shoulders. Then I check the lines in his hands for kinks. Free his ear from the oxygen tubing there. Rescue his arm from the odd and subtle angle it’s bent at. Small mercies I remember him and Skylar gifting me when beds like this were all I knew for weeks and months at a time.
I remember being cold. And even though I know rewarming Sol was a priority from the moment rescuers scooped him from the ocean, it bothers me thinking they might not have done enough. I pull the weighted blanket tighter around him. Rub my own warmth into his hands and deal with the answering flare in my skull. A warning I’m letting too much emotion in at once.
Then I sit and lean forward, lowering the bed rail so I can rest my elbows on the bed, as close as I can be without lying there with him. “I love you.”
His lips twitch and I wonder if he hears me.
So I say it again, like I’ll keep saying it long after he wakes up and this nightmare is over.
Which isn’t happening anytime soon. Time ticks by and Sol doesn’t wake up. Instead he flinches in his sleep, cringing in pain, fighting it, and watching him suffer is the harshest reality I’ve ever lived through.
“I’m here,” I tell him over and over. “You’re safe. Stop fighting and rest.”