Once I had finally decided on going to Cornell to become a neurologist, I once again became an important staple in the Gallagher household. The golden child, with a four-point o grade point average and a bright future. I was finally the son who could do them proud, carrying on the family lineage and keeping us at the height of rich well into their retirement years. Except for one tiny little hiccup… Gwen, in their opinion, was never going to be good enough to be a part of that life. For a long while, I had argued against them, being her white knight and championing against them for her honor. But the more I did, the more pissed off they got, and the more they started going out again. I didn’t want to go back to being alone in that house. Even though Gwen and her family had gladly opened their hearts and doors, it was not the same to me. I wanted to be loved by my own family. In hindsight, I was an immense idiot. During midterms, her father had been diagnosed with stage four liver cancer, the monstrous ailment spreading quickly, rapidly laying waste to the strong and hardworking man Alphonso once was. No one, not even the doctor, had any time to suggest any treatments or chemo. The man hadn’t missed a day of work a day in his life, so no one-not even his doting wife- knew he had been feeling ill. I was a stupid young idiot, full of hormones and my parents yapping into my ear, demanding I break it off with Gwen- she was friend material but not wife material. I was headed for bigger and greater things, and for the first time in years my parents were taking an interest in me. I wanted to be a big-time neurologist, and they didn’t want her and her dreams of being a vet to outweigh my own. Even though she too planned on going to Cornell, they claimed I was spending too much time with her, that I would flunk out and miss my chance at an Ivy League school- a chance that Gwen would supposedly never have due to her family’s lack of class. She could get all the scholarships in the world, they had said, but she would never be more than small community college material. The day she had gotten the news of her dad’s diagnosis, we had been sitting in her junky little station wagon after arriving at school, talking about life and the future- and that’s when their words just hit me all at once. Before she had even got a chance to tell me about her father, I broke up with her, right in the school parking lot, their words echoing through my gaping maw. I was just as surprised as she was as the words came flowing, like the ultimate form of word vomit, and there was no taking it back after I had spilled it. Outraged, screaming at me that I was a horrible user and crying about her father, she demanded I get out of her car. She left me there, spinning her tires out and left the parking lot, not even going in for the school day. I had stood there, the stupid, confused teenager that I was, wondering what her father had to do with our breakup.
Then the news started to trickle through the school. Her father dying. There was no hope, treatment or cure for him. Only a single possible outcome that was rapidly approaching. Poof, just like that, the loving man that had opened his home to me was practically dead.
I was horrified, going through the rest of the school day like a zombie. I had done something so monumentally stupid, but I felt like I didn’t know which way was up. Later that night, I had tried calling and apologizing, but her mother- the ever graceful and forgiving woman she was- slammed the phone in my ear. I was even so far as barred from entering the funeral, Gwen’s cousins making sure I wasn’t allowed to enter to church or funeral home, like I was some villain in a fairy tale.
At first, I was selfishly angry at her, entitled and flabbergasted by their complete removal of me from their lives after me being such a big part for so long. How dare she do this to me?! He was like my dad too! He had taught me to fish and the meaning of a hard day’s work, to cook for myself and shave! My snooty pedigree ways re-rooting themselves, weaving their way in like vines and caging my once freed heart.
But as I grew older, I had seen the folly of my ways. I had let the poison of my money hungry parents trickle down into my own jowls, and I had drunk it all up, all in the hopes that they would love me like Gwen’s parents loved her. Ruining the only good thing I had ever had in my life and hurting someone I truly cared about from the bottom of my heart. But even after all the years passed, the pain of realizing what I had done, even in my shitty youth, haunted me. It was supposed to be me and Gwen against the world, and I had abandoned her when she needed me most.
But looking at her as she fought through an exercise made me wonder if she was all alone again. I didn’t like to think about what brought her to the hospital, about what had made her my Wednesday ritual, but the knowledge was burned into my mind.
A few years ago, a Jane Doe in a car accident had been pulled from the mangled corpse of a teal blue Honda civic barely clinging to life. The driver, Theresa May Feirnays, dead on impact. A drunken driver had smashed into them, sending them flying across the highway, spinning into the side of a tractor trailer, sending the truck teetering on its side and skidding along the highway. The accident had been absolutely horrific, so horrific in fact that the scene photos and footage were pulled from the news. The truck driver was okay, surprisingly, with some minor injuries. However, the drunk driver had been smushed to a pulp themselves. I had been the attending neurologist the day of the accident, seeing it on the news and hearing her mother’s name, I knew it could have only been one person. Gwen. I could still remember the pang in my heart, my jaw almost hitting the floor, my legs carrying me instinctively like a fleeting gazelle down to the emergency room as a team of people crowded around her bedside. IVs stuck into her arm, her neck braced tightly, blood spatter all over her ripped up clothing. As I watched tearfully from the outside of the room, my lungs almost screaming in panic for air, I told the head nurse for the day who she was. She had looked as shocked as I was, my normally cold and clinical demeanor had been replaced by a wounded, panic stricken man- tears streaming down my pale cheeks and falling to my lab coat. I remember sitting there, sliding down the counter of the nurse station and sitting on the floor, the head nurse next to me, watching them work on her. We were both helpless to do anything but watch and wait. She coded twice, and each time I swore my heart stopped with hers. As time went on, she got better little by little, spending almost six months in the hospital in the ICU, unable to walk and the damage to some of her internal organs severe. Both legs had shattered, her right eye and ear damaged beyond much repair, scars all the way down her body. She had a punctured lung, bruised spleen, lesions on her liver amongst other things. Attached to her chart were pictures from the wreck and it was no wonder they hadn’t shown it on television- Theresa was basically a bloody spatter of red mist and brain matter and the wreck itself…I couldn’t explain how Gwen had even survived it. As I stood here, lurking like a peeping tom in his crush’s window, I couldn’t help but be proud of her accomplishments. Being a top neurologist in the hospital, I had access to her appointment times and dates, even her medical charts. It had been tempting to look them all over in detail, but I managed to resist. That would be invading her privacy in a pretty shitty way. They had asked me to be her neurologist, and at first, I had gone to accept but then decided against it. I couldn’t be impartial. I had loved her, still did- but it wouldn’t change the major fuck up I had made when we were younger. Nothing I could say or do could ever make up for what I had done.
But all of that didn’t stop me from noticing her last name and first initial on Vicker’s dry erase board in his office when he was writing out his PT schedule for the week. Yet another violation of Gwen’s privacy, but at least it wasn’t intentional.
For some reason that mattered to me.
My guilt hitting me hard, I turned to leave, walking quickly away from my perch at the door when suddenly I was pulled back. Heavy sobs echoed through the door, reverberating up my spine. Returning to my spy-spot, I saw the physical therapist was nowhere to be seen but Gwen was stuck on the floor.
My heart fell as I instantly sussed out what happened. Gwen couldn’t get back up and Vickers had already taken her leave, Gwen her last patient of the day. She had likely told the p
hysical therapist she was fine, pride getting the best of her- she had always been stubborn that way.
She gasped in pain as she tried to scoot herself to her feet off the table she had been on, a screech of agony thundering through the room and out into the hallway. I cringed as I realized quickly that there was no time for me to go find her therapist, she could fall in her stubbornness and set herself back. People didn’t realize how badly a simple tumble could throw off a long healing process. I had watched her come so far from the shadows, there was no way I could allow that to happen.
I couldn’t let her get hurt again.
I set my anxiety aside and burst through the door, running towards her as she started to teeter, distracted by the loss of balance. She pushed her cane into the floor and tried to steady herself, but it wasn’t enough, and her legs started to collapse out from underneath her as she panted, valiantly attempting to stay up. I grabbed her around her waist and put her back on the table, her cheeks reddened and forehead sweaty as I made sure she was secure on its padded surface.
She squinted at me from her horizontal position, but I could tell that she couldn’t quite make out my face. I stepped closer, a butterfly leaping from my stomach into my throat as I towered over her, my almost seven-foot-tall, thin frame leaning down so she could get a better look. And as the light started to switch on, her damaged eyes better able to focus on my face, the only thing I could think of to say as she scowled was:
“Hey! Are you okay?”
3
Gwen
“You sure you don’t need me to help you out to the lobby?” Meghan Vickers, my physical therapist questioned as I hid a grimace of pain with forced smile. I had a habit of being stubborn, and the day’s session had hurt like a bastard, but in classic Feirnays style I waved her off. I was definitely my father’s child. He had once broken his leg and insisted that he could keep working.
Of course, in his line of work, there was no way they could let him out on the road. But they had found a way for him to work a clerical position in the meantime. And then at home, against his doctor’s orders, he was building a damn deck on the back of the house wearing a cast. He was a tough bastard and one of a kind. My mother was also a firecracker, and she would work herself to the bone. So, to say it was a hereditary trait was pure fact. “I’ll be fine, I just need a moment to stretch a little and get up. I’m just tired.” My forked tongue weaving a white lie, so lacey and perfect that it worked. Meghan, though an amazing physical therapist, was admittedly a bit of an airhead. She nodded and put her hand on my arm, walking away from me and out the side door to the hall.
Pretty much immediately, I was filled with regret, my body feeling like a category five hurricane had ripped through my muscles. I tried to sit up, my abs demolished by the day’s exercises, probably due to lack of eating real food or sleeping the night before. I had been too nervous to do either with today’s prior meeting with my grandparents at hand. I waited a minute and took a deep breath, pushing myself up with my tired arms, almost slipping back to the table. I just couldn’t get the momentum to get up and it was just so damn frustrating!
I was a grown woman! I should have been able to get off of a damn table and get my legs solidly on the ground. But the effort was so monumental, my whole body wailing in protest. I let out a cry, sobbing as I tried to pull myself off the table to the floor, grabbing my cane to use to steady myself. I felt myself wobble, my balance a complete clusterfuck, my legs collapsing under the weight of my body.
In a quick, sweeping motion, a man nearing seven-foot-tall with blonde hair blurred towards me like white and yellow lightning. He caught me as I fell, scooping me up with ease and laying me back on the table. I tried to make out his face as I laid there, but couldn’t, though I could tell his eyes were an elvish green. He seemed to notice my squinting and got closer, bending towards my face, his Listerine tinted breath filling my nostrils. His strawberry blonde hair was shaved on the sides, leaving a classic Americana type floof on the top, almost causing me to laugh. His eyes closer to me now, familiar…very familiar…above those peach lips.“Hey! Are you okay?” He asked, his voice full of concern for me. A voice that I hadn’t heard since sophomore year, gone but never really forgotten. A painful tune I had kept locked away deep in the back of my mind. The man standing before me, the white knight who had flew across the room to my rescue, was none other than Lincoln Gallagher.“Fuck…” I muttered to myself, putting an arm over my eyes and face. Not only did I not want to see his highness ever again, especially after leaving me the way he did, I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing me like this- especially after the venomous tirade I had spewed at him back then. He would probably find this comical, as cold as he was, the pedigree pup that had ran back to mommy and daddy after all we had done for him. I wasn’t good enough for them, a classless poor girl, and that would never branch into a proper future. I wasn’t smart, pretty or well off enough for their elitist standards- though they themselves had never worked a day in their pathetic and hollow lives, contributing nothing to society other than running their mouths. Link had left me all alone, leaving me to deal with my father’s suffering and eventual death by myself. Frannie had of course been there, but Link had been my heart, and he had crushed it to dust when he dumped me. The morning I went to tell him about my dad’s diagnosis, I had driven him to school- hell we had even fed him breakfast, and then he told me I was just holding him back. That he needed to focus on school. That he didn’t see a real future with someone like me, especially someone who couldn’t afford a good college and get on his level. He was going to go to Cornell and be successful and he couldn’t have anything get in the way of his success. All these things, I knew, were regurgitated bullshit from his shitty parents- but it didn’t make it hurt any less.He had tried to come back and apologize at the funeral, my cousins Roberto and Dionysus promptly throwing him out of the parlor, right on his ass into the torrential downpour that had rained down upon that day. He had been my best friend, my boyfriend and my lover… and he had chosen two neglectful twits over me. Two yahoos who never believed in him, they just wanted security in their old age, so they could continue to drown themselves in meaningless possessions and booze. He had been becoming exactly the snooty bastard they wanted him to be since the day I met him, and I loathed him with a fire intensity for everything he had done. There were too many skeletons in that closet to just hide away. “It’s none of your goddamn business, Link!” I huffed, using my arms to once again pull myself up to a sitting position. Triumphantly, I pushed my feet to the floor and tried standing up, swatting Link’s hands away as he attempted to help. “Don’t you fuckin’ touch m-” It was then I was overcome by a cluster of twinkling stars in my vision, fading everything around me to a pitch black, my heart booming in my ears like the bass in a shitty car stereo. “Gwen!” I heard him cry out, muffled in my dizziness and the whoosh in my ears as I slumped against him. Nausea swept over me as he picked me back up and laid me on the table, my vision and hearing slowly returning back to normal. He was standing over me, using his stethoscope that hung around his neck to check my breathing, his thumb and middle fingers grasping my wrist to check my heart rate. I ripped my arm out of his hand, tears welling in my eyes, not wanting him to touch me. “Don’t touch me, Link.” I snarled slurring my words a bit, waving him off as I had Meghan, trying again to get up but not able to support my own weight on my jello legs. “There’s no way you can drive,” He scoffed, crossing his arms and standing in my way. “You are incapable of doing so. You can’t even get up, Gwen. Let me help you!”“Move!” I cried out, tears traveling down my cheeks. I pushed against him, hardly budging him, breathless and tired. I laid back down, the dizziness starting to rear its ugly head again.“Should I take you to the ER?” He questioned, looking me over. “Your vitals are fi-”“No!” I managed to get out, the pain in my legs was searing, nigh unbearable, but I couldn’t stand spending another night wasted in the ER…especially it being the one where
I had died before. “I’ll call Frannie...” I managed to get out through ripples of muting pain. “Frannie, as in the head nurse?” “Yeah, she can come get me and take me home.” I pulled my phone from my pocket and went to dial, but Link stopped me abruptly, putting his hand on mine and shaking his head. “She got called in as she was trying to leave, I saw it after she dropped you off. She was passing off her kid to what I assume was his grandparents,” He frowned, noticing he was still touching me and pulling his hand away. I sat there, feeling helpless. Here I was a damsel in distress, and the only one I had left to help me was the villain in my story. It was like some twisted, unfair fate. I asked him for water, trying to collect my thoughts, the wind taken completely out of my sails figuratively and literally. I blubbered like a baby as he handed me the cold cup of water, putting it to my forehead first before taking a drink.“Listen, Gwen…” He started, sitting next to me on the table, “I know that we ended on a sour note-”“That is the understatement of the fucking century, Link.” I took a few deep breaths and resigned myself to the fact that Link was my only hope. I couldn’t call my grandparents, I had no other family, and the only person I could call was here and working. I refused to look at him, though I could tell he was gawking at me, a concerned look still plastered across his stupid face. From what I had seen earlier, he looked different, but also much the same blonde and handsome guy he was when we had dated. He looked older of course, but time had been very kind to him, only strengthening his handsome features. The last time I had seen him face to face was when I had bumped into him after his graduation. I had just finished playing in the assembly band’s lackluster rendition of “Pomp and Circumstance” when I tripped on the thick doorstop of the auditorium. Of course, he had been right there, and of course the impact knocked his graduation cap to the ground. I had held my tongue, stepping on it as I went by, leaving a footprint on its silky blue surface. His boyish charm was now replaced with a cold, yet friendly face. His pointy nose was set between his emerald eyes, below that his small peach mouth. His chin was kind of pointy, but not comically so, rounded a little at the end. I had always felt his face very elvish like, and almost laughed at the thought of him with pointed ears. “I’ll just call an uber…” I went to pick up the phone again and he shook his head in disapproval once more. “Just, let me take you home,” he pleaded with me, leaning forward and hopping off the table, staring me face to face. “The Uber driver isn’t going to help you into the house. It isn’t going to be someone you know either. They could be some creep!” I was too tired to argue but upset at the same time. How embarrassing was it going to be that I lived at a hotel? That I had lost the house when mom died? I just wanted to rest, and it was apparent that no matter what I did, he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I weakly nodded my head and his eyes lit up like a Christmas tree.
Pretend Boyfriend (Be My Boyfriend Book 4) Page 3