by Katia Rose
I’m also trying very hard to focus on friendship. I might want to grab her and kiss her like we’re teenagers again every damn time I lock eyes with her, but we aren’t teenagers. She might be even more stunning now than she was then, but what I really need is to be near her, to talk to her, to find out why I can’t seem to let her go.
“Hello, Earth to Youssef. I asked how you know Chanly.”
“Oh.” I glance at the guys in the back. “Right. Yeah. I—”
“Ah, merde,” our driver curses as we turn onto a street lined with upscale restaurants that’s currently blocked by some sort of accident.
I can see a red car stopped diagonally in the middle of the road up ahead. All its lights are still on, and the driver’s side door is thrown open. There’s a small crowd hunched around something in front of it, and the sidewalks hold even more people looking on with grim faces.
“Shit.” Matt leans forward between me and the driver. “That must have just happened. There are no cops or anything yet. It looks like someone got hit.”
An eerie tension fills our car. I feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as I stare at the group huddled in the street.
“Do you think they need help?” JP asks, his voice low.
We all come to the decision that there are plenty of people on the scene already and not much we could do to help, so the driver starts navigating his way around the accident with a handful of other cars trying to do the same thing.
Our route takes us right past what happened. It’s impossible not to look at the somber tableau, and I feel my stomach roll with dread as I take in the sight of a woman crying and shouting something I can’t make out while two other women hold her up. They’re standing just at the edge of the ring of people crouched in the middle of the street. As we pass, a man stands up to speak into a cell phone, and I get a glimpse of what they’re all surrounding.
“Stop.”
Our driver looks at me but keeps going.
“STOP!”
I have my seatbelt off and my door open before the car has even stopped moving. I don’t think. I just move as I sprint around the back of the car and over to the accident.
I hear the guys calling my name, but it sounds like it’s coming from miles away. Everything feels distant and slow, like I’ve slipped beyond time and gravity as I charge toward the circle of people and start shoving them out of my way.
“PAIGE!”
Even my own voice seems oddly detached from my body. I sound frantic, deranged, but I still don’t feel anything.
Not until I sink to my knees in front of her and she looks up at me.
Then my whole body floods with a relief so intense I have to brace a hand against the pavement and gulp a huge breath of air down into my lungs to keep myself from passing out.
Her head is resting in some woman’s lap, and there’s a cut leaking blood from her temple, but her eyes are open, and she’s okay. She has to be.
Is she okay?
“She’s all right.”
I look up at the woman cradling Paige’s head and realize I spoke out loud.
“The ambulance is on the way. I’m pretty sure her shoulder is dislocated, and her hand might need surgery, but from what I can tell, she didn’t hit her head very hard.” She flashes me a grim smile when all I do is blink at her. “I’m a nurse. I saw her get hit.”
“Hit?” I manage to croak after a moment.
Her eyes narrow in confusion, her crow’s feet deepening. She’s about fifty, with short silver hair.
“She got hit by that car a few minutes ago. I thought you must have been waiting for her to get the cab.”
“Cab?”
All I can do is echo her as I swivel my head to take in the scene around me. Matt and JP are standing a few feet away, and the woman I saw earlier is still crying nearby.
I can hear what she’s saying now, over and over: “I didn’t see her. I swear to God I just didn’t see her!”
My stomach rolls again, and I look back down at Paige. She’s blinking up at me, her eyebrows creased like she’s working on a really difficult puzzle.
The inexplicable urge to tip my head back and laugh so hard I can’t breathe takes hold of me, but it’s gone the instant she opens her mouth.
“Youssef?” My name is more of a wheeze. “What are you...? How...?”
I go to reach for her hand on impulse, but then I get a look at her right arm where it’s laying at her side next to me. The back of her hand is scraped and oozing blood, two of the fingers twisted in a direction fingers shouldn’t be able to go. It’s hard to tell given how huge her hoodie is, but something about her whole arm looks off.
I snap my attention back to her face. She winces and bites down on her bottom lip as she takes a few sharp, shallow breaths. Her eyes squeeze shut, her whole face pinching with pain.
“Shhh.” The woman holding her strokes her hair. “It’s okay. Help is coming. Just hold on a little more.”
After a few more agonizing seconds of watching her in pain, she opens her eyes again. The corners are pricked with tears. She looks straight at me.
“I’m scared.” I’ve never heard her sound so small. “It really hurts.”
My heart is splitting my chest open. I want to break something. I want to fight someone. I want to get up and run a thousand miles for her. I want to do anything besides sitting here feeling utterly helpless.
She’s hurt, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ve never felt like this before: like all I want to do is scream and snap someone in half.
“Paige.” I take a shaking breath and swallow down all the rage boiling in me. I place my hand on her knee, since her legs seem to be fine, and brush my thumb over the fabric of her black jeans. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”
None of this makes any sense. Half my brain is still back in the Uber, and it’s very possible I’m going to throw up from the vertigo of ricocheting between emotional extremes every few seconds, but I mean what I say.
I’ve got her.
I keep saying it over and over as we wait for help. I keep saying it when the paramedics show up and load her onto a gurney. I keep saying it while I follow her into the ambulance and give a distracted nod when they ask me if I’m her boyfriend.
I sit next to her while we drive and hold her undamaged hand while they do something to her other arm that makes her shriek and dig her nails into my knuckles.
I stay with her all the way until they’re pushing her through a set of doors in the hospital someone tells me I can’t go past.
Then I call out that I’ll be waiting for her, and as I stand there in the bright white hallway, the only person not moving amidst a flurry of doctors and nurses who all surge around me, it finally hits so hard I can’t ignore it or pretend I don’t know the truth:
I’ve always been waiting for her.
I always will be.
It’s nearly dawn by the time I’m allowed to see her again. I’ve spent all night sitting in the packed waiting room or pacing around outside. Every once in a while, I’d get an update.
She doesn’t have a concussion.
They’re just waiting to do an x-ray.
She won’t need surgery for her hand.
Last I heard, they were doing some sort of bone setting thing they had to sedate her for. I went along with the idea that I’m her boyfriend since I didn’t want to risk them pulling the ‘immediate family only’ line. The woman who helped Paige right after the accident noticed her wallet on the ground and handed it to me before the ambulance left, so I at least had her address to write down on some of the forms they gave me.
“She is a bit, um, how do you say...” The nurse who came out to announce that I could finally see her leads me down a series of hallways, chatting away in a heavy Québécois accent. “Loopy? It will go away soon.”
It’s hard to focus on what she’s saying. I can make out the beep of all the machines we pass and the sound of a radio station playing somewhere, but
once again, there’s a disconnect between me and my body, like I’m watching this all happen to someone else from far away.
“She is right in here.” The nurse ushers me into the room with a smug grin. “She keeps asking for you.”
The overhead lights are off, but a small lamp above the bed closest to me is switched on, where a little kid is sitting up reading a book. His mom sits in a chair next to him, fast asleep. He looks up at me for a second and then back down at his lap as I pass. I head toward the curtain drawn between them and the far half of the room.
I round the edge of the curtain, and there she is. The lamp above her bed is on too, making her dark hair shine where it’s fanned out on her pillow. Her eyes are closed, and as I stop at the foot of the bed to take in all the damage, it’s like weathering punch after punch to my gut.
There’s a dark purple bruise blooming on her cheekbone, and the cut on her temple has been covered with gauze. They took her hoodie off, and her tank top reveals more scrapes and the beginnings of bruises along her arms. One of them is crossed over her chest in a sling, and I can see the edge of some sort of splint wrapped around her hand.
“Paige,” I murmur. I don’t mean to wake her up. I just need to say it.
Her eyes open just a slit, and then a grin stretches her bruised face.
“Heyyyy, hot stuff!”
I almost choke.
“I told you she was loopy.” The nurse who brought me here appears at my side, making me jump. She pats me on the shoulder and heads over to start doing something to the IV hooked up to Paige’s left arm. “You see, chérie? Youssef is here. I told you he was waiting.”
Paige is still smiling at me, and I can see the glassiness in her eyes now. “Isn’t he sexy?”
The nurse clucks her tongue and looks over her shoulder to smirk at me. “Very sexy, ma belle.”
This is officially the strangest moment of my life.
“Did you tell him they didn’t have to put pins in my hand?” Paige asks, getting hyper serious all of a sudden like a little kid who’s just remembered something important.
“Yes, I did tell him that.”
“Okay, good.”
The nurse brushes Paige’s hair off her forehead. “Why don’t you talk to him yourself, pretty girl? He’s right there.”
Paige pulls her face into an exaggerated grimace. “Don’t call me pretty girl. Also I don’t think I can talk to him. He’s too sexy.”
I hear the kid on the other side of the curtain start to snicker. I’m still too weirded out by how bizarre this is to find it funny yet.
“I will give you two some privacy,” the nurse whispers as she walks by. “The doctor will be here in a few minutes.”
I stand there at the foot of the bed and watch Paige vapidly grin at me for a few moments before grabbing one of the folding chairs against the wall and taking a seat.
“Uh, hi, Paige. How are you feeling?”
Her forehead creases. “It hurts a lot.”
I feel a twinge in my chest. “I know.”
She tilts her head to get a better look at me. “I got hit by a car.”
I nod. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?” She scrunches her nose up in a way I’ve never seen her do before. It’s fucking adorable. “You weren’t driving the car.”
I finally find it in myself to chuckle. “That’s a fair point.”
“But you were there after.” Her eyes get wide, her voice hushed like she’s having some huge revelation. “I remember. You were there. You...You held my hand.”
There’s something hot burning behind my eyes.
“Yeah, I did.”
I know it’s just the painkillers messing with her emotions, but when she starts crying, I can’t stop the tears that blur my vision too.
“W-would you d-do it again?” she stammers, and I’m out of my chair in a heartbeat, reaching for her good hand and cradling it in both of mine.
I look at the translucent bandage covering the needle sticking into her vein, and I start to think I’m really going to break down and lose it. I’m going to end up sobbing next to this hospital bed like I haven’t sobbed since I was a kid. It’s all catching up with me now: the terror and panic back at the accident, the hours and hours of anxiety clawing at my chest while I waited for news from the nurses.
I still can’t even fully believe she’s all right.
“Bonsoir, Paige. How are we—”
A man in a lab coat steps around the curtain and freezes before clearing his throat.
“Excusez-moi. Should I—”
“It’s fine,” I interrupt, swiping at my eyes as I keep my grip on Paige’s hand. “All good. Are you her doctor?”
“Yes. And you are the boyfriend?”
“Uh...” I feel Paige tugging on my hand, but I don’t look at her. “Yes. Yes, that would be me.”
“And will you be caring for her when she goes home?”
Paige starts yanking on my hand so hard my whole arm shakes, but I just nod. I’m not going to say anything that will risk them taking me away from her.
“Okay, let me get you up to speed, then.”
I force myself to pay attention as he explains everything they’ve done to Paige. The woman in the Old Port was right; her shoulder was dislocated, so they fixed that up and also did something called a reduction to move the two broken bones in her hand back into place. My skin crawls when the doctor describes it, and I’m glad she was full of drugs at the time. Apparently she was lucky; her hand is on track to heal fully without any surgery, and since her arm took most of the impact from the fall, she avoided what could have been a life-threatening hit to the head.
“We don’t see any signs of concussion, but you’ll still need to keep an eye on her. The nurse will go over all that with you. Her bruising is going to get a lot worse than it is now, and she’ll be very sore for the first few days, but it’s my opinion that she’ll make a full recovery in about six weeks.”
Full recovery.
She’s going to be okay.
I repeat it to myself, latching onto the words like a lifeline even as images of her lying splayed on the sidewalk keep playing over and over again like some sick version of a highlights reel in the back of my head.
I don’t know if you can ever stop seeing something like that.
The next couple hours go by in a blur of nurse visits, prescriptions, and information pamphlets. I’m shocked when I find out they don’t want to keep her here for another night. I even try arguing with the nurse about it, but she explains that since Paige didn’t go under general anesthesia and isn’t showing any signs of complications, there’s no need to keep her, and she’d be more comfortable at home.
I glance down at the stack of papers and pamphlets in my hands and start to wonder if I’m in over my head.
“Youssef,” she murmurs from the bed. She’s been dozing on and off for a while now. Some of her logic has come back now that the sedative is wearing off, but the more lucid she gets, the more grumpy she’s become. “Listen to the lady. I want to go home.”
The nurse shoots me an ‘I told you so’ look and gets started on taking out the IV.
Dawn has broken and slipped into morning by the time we’re outside waiting for an Uber. The hospital is perched partway up Mont Royal, giving me a clear view of the sunlight turning the city a brilliant gold as it wakes up for the day. There’s a crisp chill in the air, and I can hear birds singing not too far off.
I just lived a night from hell, but the morning is blissfully unaware.
An orderly is gripping the handles of the wheelchair they put Paige in to take her outside. Her head keeps lolling forward as she fights to stay awake. Just watching her try to get out of the hospital bed was exhausting. Her body is completely sapped of strength.
“You’ll be home soon,” I tell her, and she mumbles something I can’t make out.
I managed to get her to unlock her phone for me back in the hospital and found that
the home address on her Uber app matched the one on her driver’s license, so that’s where we’re going. I also convinced her to give me her keys back when she was still ‘loopy’ enough to ask if I was trying to seduce her.
All she’s done is shake her head and say she’s fine every time I’ve asked if there’s someone I should call, which seems pretty on par for Paige, drugged up or not. The orderly helps me get her into the front seat of the car when it arrives and then asks if we’ll be okay.
I shrug and give him an honest answer. “I guess we’ll find out.”
The drive takes us over to the Plateau neighbourhood. I sit in the back and watch the brightly painted walk-ups and street art murals this area is known for go by outside the window. The streets are filling up with people heading to work now. Cafe windows are opening and restaurant staff are putting signs advertising their brunch menus out on the sidewalk.
Paige’s building is a few blocks down from Avenue Mont-Royal, one of the neighbourhood’s main strips. It’s a plain brick low-rise that’s on the sketchy side of retro. I have to mess around with the front door key for almost a whole minute while the driver keeps Paige in the car.
She groans and tries to cling to the seat when the two of us start guiding her out. I give the driver an apologetic smile and remind myself to tip him extra well, but he just laughs and says it’s not the first time.
He offers to help me get Paige into the apartment, but I tell him I’m good once we’re in the lobby—if you can even call it a lobby. It’s a cramped little landing area at the bottom of the stairs with just enough room for a wall of mailboxes and a spindly little table with a display of potpourri that looks like it hasn’t been changed since the eighties.
“Okay, Paige.” I throw some fake cheer into my voice as I guide her to the staircase, one arm wrapped around her waist to keep her standing. “Which floor are you on?”
I know I should be ignoring the smell of her hair and the curves of her body where they press against mine. I don’t know how she still smells so good after a night at the hospital, but it’s all I can do not to stop her right here and bury my face in her neck. I want to trail my lips over her skin.
“Mmm-mm. Nope. I’m fine.”