Dirty Desires

by Michelle Love

  But I wasn’t the only one rushing out to check on someone they cared about on the outside of that building. It took no time at all for the elevator to be filled with people, all trying to get to the ground floor.

  The doorway became jammed as everyone tried to get out at the same time. “Everyone, just calm down,” some man called out. “One at a time, people.”

  Panic had set in, and everyone was out for their own self. Finally, I made it out and moved in the direction I knew Nina had gone. Then everyone froze when the sound of a gunshot rang out.

  I climbed up on a pole to see what I could. The police were moving fast toward the armored truck. Then I saw an officer waving, and more came in. An ambulance pulled up, and the officers took the person, who had obviously shot himself, to the back of it.

  It was only then that I saw the people lying on the sidewalk. I couldn’t make any one of them out. I looked around at the people around me in the crowd, searching desperately for Nina’s face.

  When I didn’t find it, I got off the pole and tried my best to get to that truck. Praying the whole time that she was safe inside the store, I pushed my way through the mass of people.

  When I got close to where I wanted to go, a strong arm stopped me. “No one can go any further than this.” An office had stopped me.

  “My wife is down here. I need to find her,” I implored him.

  “There are lots of wives and husbands down here, mister. You’ll have to wait, just like everyone else.” He gave me a slight push to get back, and it only made me mad.

  “Listen to me,” I said through gritted teeth.

  The sound of more ambulances made me look up. Three stopped, and the paramedics got out. They swarmed through the people who were standing around. “Clear this entire area,” one of them said. “We’ve got to be able to see to the wounded.”

  My heart stopped when someone called out, “We’ve got an unresponsive civilian over here.”

  Another called out, “No pulse here.”

  “Get them on the trucks,” someone else shouted.

  I watched as people were placed on stretchers, strapped down then taken to the backs of the waiting ambulances. Those three drove away, and three more came in right behind them.

  The same thing followed. The paramedics searched, found, and took away. But this time I saw dark blonde hair falling across the top of the stretcher. “Hey, wait!”

  The cop turned to give me a frown. “I thought I told you ...”

  “I think that’s her.” I pointed at the moving stretcher that was about to be put into the ambulance. “Please just let me see if it’s her.”

  He moved his arm then jerked his head. “Hurry up.”

  I ran toward the stretcher and every step I took made my blood drop a degree colder. When I got all the way to them, I finally saw her face. Blood ran in tiny rivers from her forehead and nose. “Oh, God!” I felt my knees buckle.

  “Do you know her?” one of the paramedics asked.

  “She’s my wife.” I knew that they wouldn’t let me see her if I told them anything else—I had learned that the hard way once before.

  “Come on,” the man said as he and the other paramedic put her inside the ambulance.

  I climbed in to sit on the other side of her as one of them went to work putting in an IV, and the other closed the doors and rushed to the driver’s seat to take us to a hospital.

  “Is she ...” I couldn’t make myself say the word.

  The paramedic knew what I wanted to hear. “Her heart is beating, and she is breathing on her own. So, yes, she’s alive. For now, anyway.” He moved his hand in a circle over her stomach. That’s when I noticed that blood was seeping onto the blanket that covered her. “She’s going to need to go straight into surgery. She has wounds on her stomach, and from the bloating, I would guess internal hemorrhaging as well.”

  “That truck hit her?” I asked.

  He nodded. “She seems to be the last person he hit before he stopped. She made it out better than some. A few are still trapped under the vehicle and won’t be helped until they can get it moved. With the crowd, it slows everything down.”

  “Fucking New York,” I muttered. “I’m getting her the hell out of here.”

  The way he looked down had me worried. I stared at him until he looked at me. “I hope you get that chance.” He looked at the ring I had just put on her finger. “Look, she’ll be going straight into surgery. You should take her ring, so it doesn’t get lost or something. What’s her name, by the way?”

  He pulled the engagement ring off her finger and dropped it into my palm. “It’s Nina Kramer.”

  He wrote that down on the paper he had on a clipboard. “You should call her family. They should be here.”

  I knew it was serious, but I had no idea it was that serious. “I will. I’ll call them.” I took her hand as it fell out from under the blanket. “Nina, you have to pull through this for me. You know you’ve got to do it, baby. You can’t leave me here. Please don’t leave me here. I can’t be alone again. I can’t.” I broke down then. I couldn’t hold it in. I begged her and begged her to stay with me.

  When we got to the hospital, I walked as far as they would let me, holding her hand and telling her not to leave me, all the way down the long hall.

  When we got to the double doors, where family could no longer go, I fell to my knees. Turning my head up to God, I prayed for him to please not take her yet. Please, let her stay with me.

  Someone put his hands on my shoulders. “Come on. Let’s get you to a waiting room.”

  Some big man wearing white scrubs picked up me and let me lean on him as he took me to a quiet, empty room. He helped me sit down, then handed me a box of tissues. “Thank you.” I pulled one out and blew my nose.

  “Hey, I’ve been there.” He patted me on the shoulder.

  “This is my second time being here.” I wiped my eyes, but I had no idea why I’d done that. It wasn’t like the tears had stopped flowing.

  “Second time?” he asked with concern. “Man, that’s rough. All you can do is pray now, mister. Pray hard, and don’t stop until she’s better. You hear me?”

  I nodded. “Pray until she’s better. I hear you.” The only thing he didn’t know was that I had done that before too. It hadn’t worked then. Why should it work now?

  When my cell rang, I didn’t even jump, that’s how numb I was. I saw it was Artimus. “She’s hurt,” I answered his call, cutting off his immediate question about the attack and whether we’d been home when it happened.

  “Shit,” came his quick reply. “We’ll come to you, Ashton. I’ll get Julia to call her family.”

  “Thank you.” I gasped to catch my breath. “I’m losing it. I really am. I’ve never felt so helpless and lost. Not ever. This is worse than last time. I can’t do it alone. I can’t.”

  “You don’t have to. We’re on our way. Just hang tight. We’ve got you, buddy.” He ended the call, and I fell back in the chair.

  My life was falling apart once again. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. How I could possibly go on if she left me.

  I put her ring on my pinky finger. It only fit partially. Holding it to my lips, I kissed it as I prayed, “Please don’t take her too, God. I’ll do anything if you just don’t take her away from me.”

  It felt as if an eternity had passed before anyone I knew showed up. Duke and Lila rushed to me. Lila got to me first, hugging me tightly. “She’s going to be okay, Ashton. Don’t worry.”

  I pushed her back, hoping like hell she’d been able to talk to someone who had told her that. “Did you get to talk to someone about how she’s doing in surgery?”

  Her blue eyes went blank. “She’s in surgery?”

  “You didn’t know?” I asked in surprise.

  She shook her head then Duke got to us. “What the hell happened, Ashton?”

  “There was some kind of attack. This armored truck hit her. She’s got internal injuries, they said, and
her head was bleeding too.” I gulped as I sat back down. “They took her straight into surgery as soon as she got here.”

  “Was she talking?” Lila asked.

  “No.” I shook my head. “She was knocked out.”

  “By the drugs they gave her to help with the pain?” Duke asked hopefully.

  “No.” I tried to put logical words together but found it was hard to do. “Unconscious. That’s how they found her.”

  Lila put her hand on mine as she sat on one side of me and Duke sat on the other. “Was she breathing?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.” My hands moved over my face. “Blood was running like this over her face. Her nose was bleeding.” My hand went to my stomach. “There was blood on the blanket around her stomach.”

  The color ran out of Lila’s face. “I see.”

  Duke ran his arm behind me to put it on Lila’s shoulder. “We’ve got to have faith here, you guys. We can’t lose hope now. She’s a fighter. She was breathing when she came in. That’s better than nothing.”

  It was barely better than nothing. But he was right. It was something. Natalia hadn’t fared so well after the accident. Nina wasn’t as bad off as she’d been.

  I closed my eyes and begged God to give Nina a chance. I knew I couldn’t go on without her. I had no idea what would happen to me if she didn’t make it.

  I looked at Duke. He was a great friend to me. And the only one I knew who could stand up to Artimus. Artimus wouldn’t let me go, but Duke might. “Duke, if she dies, just let me go, okay?”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Nina

  “He’s not going to make it,” I heard a woman whispering.

  My eyes fluttered open as I heard a very slow, beeping sound. Only a dim light filled the small room I was in. One wall was entirely made out of glass, and I could see a woman in pale pink scrubs standing across the hallway.

  She looked on as a couple of other people, also wearing scrubs, stood inside the other room. That’s where the slow, beeping sound was coming from.

  The door to the room I was in stood wide open, and it was made of glass too. I moved my arm. Or I tried to, anyway. I stopped trying to move it when I felt something tugging at it.

  My head turned slowly, and I found I was hooked up to some clear lines. It seemed I was in the hospital, and apparently in bad shape. But I couldn’t recall just why that was.

  When the beeping sound went from slow to one constant beep, I knew the person in the other room had died. My brain was in a fog, but even with the haze around it, I wondered if Ashton had been with me when I was hurt.

  And then I wondered if that was him in the room across the hallway. Wondered if it was him whose heart had stopped beating.

  “Help,” I croaked out. But no one heard me.

  “Call the time,” one of the women in scrubs said.

  “Two-fifteen a.m. is the official time of death,” another woman said from inside the room. I couldn’t see her as she stood behind the curtain, which had been pulled across the majority of the glass wall.

  I could see the foot of the hospital bed, though. In that bed, some person had just died, and I lay there, helpless to find out if it was Ashton or not.

  Closing my eyes, I tried not to think that it was him. I couldn’t take it if it was him. If I lost him, I had no idea what I would do. I had never loved anyone as much as I loved him, and I knew I would never love anyone else that way ever again.

  I was sure my heart would give out too if it was Ashton who now lay lifeless in the bed across the hall.

  “You can call the nursing home to let them know Mr. Sandstone won’t be coming back,” someone said with a hushed voice.

  Mr. Sandstone?

  My eyes flew back open.

  It’s not Ashton!

  I was elated to hear the lady say a name that I didn’t know at all. And then I felt terrible for being so happy when a person had just died. And one so close to me.

  Well, I didn’t actually know Mr. Sandstone. We weren’t mentally close, but physically, we were only a few feet away from each other. I needed to show more reverence, I thought.

  Hell, he was probably floating away, looking back at us all and thinking that I was a pretty heartless bitch to be looking so happy and smiling so big when he’d just passed away.

  “Sorry, Mr. Sandstone. Rest in peace,” I offered.

  The nurses began to leave the room as some men came in to deal with the dead body. And one of them spotted me looking at them. “Hi there, Nina.” She waved to get another person’s attention. “Look whose woken up.”

  Three of the nurses came into my room. One went to check the machines, as the other two gave me wide smiles. I could see their last names were on the tags they had on their shirts.

  The woman closest to me had Gonzales on her tag. “Nurse Gonzales, my throat hurts, it’s so dry. Can I have something to drink?”

  The other nurse ran off. “I’ll get her some water.”

  “Everything’s looking good here,” the last nurse said.

  Nurse Gonzales leaned over me, flashing a small light in my eyes. “Normal pupil dilation. Well, normal for being on morphine.” She put her hand on my shoulder as she held up two fingers. “Can you tell me how many fingers I’m holding up?”

  “Two,” I answered. “Now, can anyone tell me what the heck has happened to me?”

  Nurse Gonzales took the lead, as the other nurse excused herself to go check on the others. Whoever the others were. “Someone drove their car into a crowded sidewalk. You were hit by a pretty big truck.”

  “Damn.” I was glad to see the other nurse coming back to my room with a little pink cup in her hand.

  “Here you are,” Nurse Sloan said as she handed me a drink with a small straw in it. “Now, take little sips. It’s been awhile since you’ve had any liquid down your throat.”

  I sipped it and had to stop myself from chugging it down. My throat was bone-dry. “How long have I been here?” I asked, when I’d drunk my fill.

  “Two weeks,” came Nurse Gonzales’ reply. “The incident happened two weeks ago. You were one of the first ones brought in.”

  I had been out for two weeks and hadn’t even known it. The next thing on my mind had nothing to do with my injuries. “Has anyone been coming to see me?”

  “Your family has,” Nurse Sloan told me. “And your coworkers too.” She smiled at me as she went to the bottom of the bed, picking up one of my feet and massaging it as she lifted it up. “They wanted to fill this room with flowers and balloons and such, but that’s not allowed in ICU. You’re allowed one visitor at a time and for only five minutes. And that’s only once an hour, for a few hours in the morning and a couple in the evening. That’s why no one is here with you. It’s not because no one cares about you; it’s just the policy at our hospital for patients in Intensive Care.”

  “So, I’m in bad shape then,” I surmised from my situation. “But I don’t feel any pain.”

  “You’re on a morphine drip. That’s why you’re not feeling any pain,” Nurse Gonzales filled me in. “But we’re lowering the amount of that morphine hourly. We wanted you to wake up. And by later on today, around noon or so, the morphine will be taken away.”

  The other nurse looked at me with a little frown. “And then you will feel a bit of discomfort.”

  “Great.” I thought about what I’d said and how I’d sounded. “That was whiny. I shouldn’t be like that. I should be happy that I’m going to feel things again. I should be happy that I’m alive.”

  “Yes, you should.” Nurse Gonzales took a seat in the large rocker next to my bed. “You had some pretty bad internal injuries and one to your brain, too. Thank goodness the one to your brain was minor. But your organs took a beating. Your liver had a laceration. Your kidneys were so badly bruised, they shut down for a few days. Your heart just kept on ticking though. You’ve got yourself an amazingly strong heart, honey.”

  And that heart was feeling a little down in the dumps a
s I looked at my left hand to find my engagement ring was gone. From what I could recall, I had just gotten proposed to. Ashton had slid a big diamond ring on my finger. Or had that just been a dream while I was under?

  I had to ask them about him. “Has there been a man who has come to see me?”

  “You’ve had a few come to see you,” Nurse Gonzales said. “Lots of staff members from the network have been stopping by to say quick hellos to you.”

  “But no man in particular has come by to see me more than the rest?” I asked, losing hope fast.

  Ashton might’ve taken off the ring himself. He might have been freaked out by my near-death experience. Hell, he may have flown the coop, for all I knew.

  “Honey, the way you’ve been kept this last couple of weeks, no one has had much access to you,” she told me. “Your momma is about the only one we all know by name. She’s the main one who’s been keeping up with your progress and passing that information on to everyone else who cares about you.”

  “Now that I’m awake, is there any chance that I’ll get to have visitors for longer amounts of time?” I crossed my fingers, hoping she would say yes.

  Her lips quirked up to one side. “Well, not a ton of time, but it will increase to fifteen minutes. The amount of visits per day will stay the same until you’re put into a regular room.”

  “How long will I be here?” I looked up at the ceiling, feeling somewhat desperate.

  “Well, there’s just no telling, Nina.” She looked at me with a vague smile. “You’re getting better, but there are never any certainties with internal or brain injuries. I don’t want to give you any number of days right now. But the doctor who’s taking care of you will come in around seven this morning, and he might be able to give you some more answers.”

  I was already coming up with questions I needed to ask him. But the number one question on my mind was where Ashton was. I knew she didn’t have an answer for that.

  The nurse got up and handed me the remote to the television. “You can watch some TV, if you want to. That button there will call us if you want anything. Don’t hesitate to push it if you there’s anything you need.”