Page 79 of Fighting Jacob

Although the nurse agrees to my request, I'm still torn about leaving. Noah is in a coma, and his girl is passed out on a hospital bed. Today couldn't get any more shit for me. After a final squeeze to Emily’s hand, I bolt back to the ICU. It’s lucky I’m fit. All the running I’ve done today while hungover would put an average man on his ass.

I’ve barely blasted through the double swinging doors when Ryan spans the distance between us. “Where the hell did you go? One minute you were on your phone; the next minute you were gone.”

His anger takes a back seat when I reply, “Emily fainted; I just left her in the ER.”

“Is she okay?”

“Yeah, she’s... ah.” I nearly say “pregnant” until I realize it isn’t my place to say. If Noah is aware and keeping it secret, it’s for a reason. “Have you seen Noah?”

Ryan shakes his head. “No, they said only immediate family are allowed to see him.”

“Immediate family?”

When Ryan nods, I turn on my heels and stride to the ICU doors to hit the intercom button. Ryan shadows me but remains quiet. Not long later, a gray-haired nurse pushes open the door. She has a clipboard in her hands and two pencils holding together her messy bun.

“I’m here to see Noah Taylor.”

The nurse checks a list of names on her clipboard before raising her eyes to me. “Your name?”

“Chris Taylor, Noah’s brother.”

I hear Ryan's Adam's apple bob up and down, but not even the badge on his hip has him stepping in to recant my statement. After checking her list for the second time, the nurse steps to the side, unblocking the doorway from her plump frame. “Okay, come in.”

I glance back at Ryan, shocked my ruse worked. He smiles before giving me the thumbs up, knowing I would have worn a dress and pretended to be Noah’s mother if it guaranteed I’d see him.

The nurse makes me wash my hands before guiding me to the bedside of a man I don’t recognize. When I read the nameplate above the bed, my fists clench into tight balls. Now I understand why Ryan dragged Emily away from Noah at the accident scene. He has significant head injuries that make him barely recognizable.

A bandage covers a majority of his head and one of his eyes. A ventilator tube inserted into his mouth and his chest is rising and falling in rhythm with the machine on the right side of his bed. His left leg is covered in plaster and held up in a brace, and his rocker clothing has been replaced with a light blue hospital gown.

“How is he?”

The nurse gives me a sympathetic smirk. “We stopped the internal bleeding by removing part of his spleen, but he had a cerebral edema to his brain. We drained the hematoma, but he’s not out of the woods just yet. The bleed to his brain caused it to swell. Although we released the pressure, we won’t know the extent of the damage until we conduct further tests.”

“When will they be done?”

She takes a moment to deliberate by shrugging. “We can conduct tests while he’s in a coma, but we won’t know the full extent of his injuries until he wakes.” She rubs my arm in a comforting manner. “Talk to him; you’d be surprised what coma patients hear.”

I swallow harshly before jerking up my chin. After running her hand down my arm for the second time, she moves toward the nurses' station in the middle of the room. As I walk to Noah's beside, my heart beats in a similar rhythm as the machines keeping him alive. It's an annoying, thud, thud, thud I’d rather hear without the beep of a life support machine.

With words eluding me, I curl my fingers around his hand instead. Just as my index finger circles his wrist, something sharp jabs it.

What the hell?

When I flip his hand, I notice many scratches and grazes on his wrist, but I don’t see anything that would cause a jabbing sensation. With my curiosity high, I run my fingertips over his cuts. I’m not meaning to hurt him, but something is off. My lips quirk when I feel something sharp nick my skin for the second time.

“Excuse me.” A nurse walking by stops what she’s doing to peer at me. “Can you feel this?”

When she stops next to me, I run her fingers over Noah’s wrist in the same manner I just did. I can tell the exact moment she feels what I did when her brows scrunch.

“Doctor Matthew, can you please come here?”

When an elderly male doctor arrives in Noah’s cubicle, the nurse does the same routine to him as I did to her.

“Hmm, interesting.”

I watch the doctor in silence when he moves around the cubicle, gathering equipment from little nooks throughout the sterile smelling space. Once he has everything in order, he places a blue dressing sheet over Noah’s arm, then slices open his wrist with a scalpel.

“What the fuck! Why aren’t you taking him to surgery?”

---