Riley Mackenzie - Beautifully Awake

CT scan took thirty seconds and was the test of choice for a head injury. “Why the fuck did you send her for a MRI? That takes twenty minutes!”

Gupta stared at me like I had two heads. His mouth needed to start moving with an explanation because if his fucking incompetence wasted one more precious second of my girl’s time he was going to need brain surgery himself. And I sure as fuck wasn’t the one doing it. “As I said, her vitals are stable, as well as her blood count, so I felt it was safer to send her to MRI.”

“What! That makes no fucking sense.”

“I don’t get it! Why is that test safer? What the hell is he talking about, Chase?” Sierra pushed past Sharon and got right in my face. “Would you two mind breaking it down for the rest of us without a medical degree!”

There was no time for medicine 101. My whole life, the reason I woke up in the morning, the reason I breathed easy again—fuck the reason I breathed at all—was lying in a fucking magnet, probably hemorrhaging into her fucking brain. All because of a strung-out junkie who called himself a doctor. That useless piece of shit got caught stealing drugs from his anesthesia cart by his own girlfriend. Behind bars for fucking life was the only safe place for Carl Jennings.

That shit needed to wait. I needed to get a grip and focus if I was going to operate on her. Gupta looked like he was choosing his words carefully. “A CT scan is usually the test of choice, but it would expose Lili to a large amount of radiation and-” he continued, but all I heard was silence. The loneliest, most heartbreaking fucking silence imaginable. The vice around my chest where my heart had been ripped out tightened like a vacuum sucking all the fucking air from the open hallway.

“Doc, are you telling me my babydoll’s pregnant? Chase? You knew this?”

I ignored Jim’s question.

No. He was wrong. This was a fucking cruel mistake. Adam was wasting time with a MRI over a fucking lab error. Blue was not pregnant. She was OCD with taking her birth control pills. Same time, every day without fail. The thought of getting pregnant again scared the living shit out of her. It was her way of taking back control. She cried in my arms that day on the beach and told me next time she got pregnant it needed to be on her terms. Prenatal vitamins, the whole nine.

“It’s a mistake, the lab screwed up. Run it again.” I was surprised at how even toned and rational I was.

“Chase, I’m sorry, there is no mistake. Lili is pregnant. I can’t be the first to tell you that no birth control is one hundred percent, and a lot of things can interfere with the pill. Has she been sick?”

No fucking way. Period. This asshole was not speaking to me like I just walked into day one of medical school.

“Don’t give me that shit. She weighs a buck ten soaking wet and she’s not even on a low dose pill. Run the fucking test again. That ninety-seven percent effective bullshit has more to do with people fucking it up or it being too low of a dose. You know that-”

Sierra stopped me dead in my tracks. “Chase, she was … she was sick.”

“What the hell are you talking about? When was she sick? I would have known if she was.”

“She had a really bad urinary tract infection ... um ... when, when you were away .”

Away? I fought the sensation to vomit in the closest garbage can. I turned and sat in a chair. Fuck no, this was not happening, not now.

She meant the week I walked away. The week I tried to convince myself she was better off without my fucking demons. The week after that piece of shit forced her to relive being violated in court. The week I fucking pounded my fists to shit when I should have been home holding her against my chest. The week I tracked down that son of a bitch responsible for the vulnerable look in Blue’s eyes and informed him that he was never to step foot near her again. The bastard didn’t even deny it, didn’t even pick his hands up to defend himself when I knocked that smug look off his face. The eviction notice was the least of his worries. That week. The week she fucking needed me most.

The deafening beat down taking place in my head was a sharp contrast to the dead silence surrounding me. Jim and Sharon refused to look in my direction. Fuck, I wouldn’t look at me either. Shit. My poor girl was sick, pissing razor blades and I never knew about it. Worse, there was no doubt my insatiable need to bury my mouth and cock deep inside her sweetness every single chance I got caused the fucking UTI. I couldn’t help myself. Her smell, her taste, her tightness, the way our bare skin fit together were two pieces of a jacked puzzle that only made sense intertwined. She was my heaven. And with my sins, she was the only heaven I’d ever know.

I choked on the burning realization.

Blue was pregnant.

Pregnant with my child.

Our child.

We weren’t near ready yet, not by a longshot, but there was no doubt in my fucking mind that Lili would want this baby. Her miscarriage three years ago almost wrecked her. That bastard violated her and she conceived in the worst way imaginable, but she was still ready to love that kid, ready to be a mama. That’s who she was. Pure Sweet.

Utter devastation rocked my soul. And the only person to fucking blame on every single level was me. She trusted me. She loved me. Damn. I needed her to wake up so I could tell her over and over again how much I loved her. She was my baby.

The pain was indescribable. Cracking my chest open without anesthesia would have hurt less than the pain I was in.

I dug the heel of my hands deeper against my eyelids and stared at black. “The images are up. Want to come and look for yourself?” Adam asked. Was he fucking kidding?

“Of course I want to look at them.” I stood and the sick, empty pit in my stomach churned. It didn’t stop me from storming down the hall to the small dark cave housing the radiologist.

“Chase, I’m so sorry to hear about what happened to Lili. She’s a great girl, sweet and friendly.” Did he think I wanted to bullshit about how fucking friendly he found my girl?

“Let me see the images,” I hissed.

He looked like he was twenty-two. No chance in hell he was deciding the fate of my Blue.

He clicked the mouse and the two huge computer monitors filled with dozens of black, white and grey images. At least the cocky ass was smart enough to step back. I sat in his chair and scrolled through, image after image. You had to be fucking blind to miss the fracture in her skull. A fucking basilar skull fracture and enough diffuse cerebral edema to make her a wait-and-fucking-see case.

“FUUCK. Not again.” A stream of hot bile slid up my esophagus and scorched the back of my throat. Kimi lay in that bed for three fucking years, waiting and seeing , until I finally inherited my trust and flew in every fucking specialist with a pulse. The final consensus was a basilar artery hemorrhage that left her in a total locked in state. People thought being a vegetable was the worst possible fate. They were wrong. Take that nightmare and multiply it by a thousand and that was what my sister suffered through. She was wide awake and aware of everything, yes, fucking everything. But every voluntary muscle in her body, including her goddamn eyes were paralyzed. And none of us had a damn clue, for three fucking years.

My eyes darted back and forth, permanently burning every detail on the two screens into my memory. No matter how many ways I flipped Lili’s images, the diagnosis was the same, the reality was the same. “Fuck.” There was nothing to operate on, no quick fix. “Cancel the OR.” I pushed away from the desk before I put my fist through the screen. Eighteen years later and I was still left waiting and seeing. I stormed out of the dark room squinting against the blinding hallway fluorescents. How the hell radiologists functioned in the dark was beyond me.