Page 65 of Someone Like You

I lifted my head from Brody’s neck as he said, “No, we’re okay.” To me, a little quieter, he said, “You good to get up?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Brody helped me up and kept an arm around my shoulder as we spoke with one of the officers. I had my own arm wrapped around his waist, my fingers gripping his shirt. Now that the shock of what happened had dissipated a bit, I was exhausted. I couldn’t get my mind around someone wanting to hurt another person for no reason.

Wait, no, I guess Gavin had his reasons. They just weren’t good or logical. They made sense only in his fucked up mind, and Christ…what would he have done to me if Brody hadn’t been there to stop him?

“Isaac?”

“Hmm?” I tilted my head up to find Brody staring down at me, a tenderness in his gaze that was slicing my heart to ribbons.

Brody laid his palm against my cheek and brushed his thumb beneath my eye. The warmth of him had me closing my eyes, but I opened them again when he told me, “The officer said they’ll be in touch if anything else comes up. You look tired. Let me take you home.”

I wrapped my fingers around the hand that was pressed against my face. “Yeah. Brody…”

He stepped closer, palming my lower back. “Yeah?”

“I…”I fucking love you and want to spend the rest of my life loving you, if you’ll let me.“I—um…”

Before I could say anything else, Brody grunted and fell to his knees, sending pins and needles of panic shooting down my spine as his eyes rolled back. “Wh?—”

He started falling sideways, and my only thought in that panicked moment was to protect his head because there was no way I could hold the entire weight of him.

“Brody!” I cried, his name breaking in the middle as I went down with him, catching his head against my chest. “No, no, no, help! Someone help!” I slapped at his cheeks and rasped, “Wake up, wake up!” What happened? Was it his heart? “Hey, baby, wake up, please wake up,” I cried, every inch of me buzzing with fear. “Someone call an ambulance!”

There was a commotion around me, but the entirety of my focus was on Brody.

“Brody,” I whispered, gently grabbing his head, lifting it to rest in my lap, and stroking his hair back. Why was this happening? It had to be his heart. It had to be. He’d only fainted and would be fine. He would be fine.

“Brody, wake up. Wake up, baby,” I said, over and over and over again, brushing his hair and trying to see through my tears. There were other people kneeling beside him now, touching him, talking to each other, asking what happened, trying to talk to me, but all I could do was hold Brody’s head in my lap and beg him to wake up. My entire world was right here, on the ground, and he wouldn’t wake up. He had to. Hehadto.

The sound of sirens had people backing away, murmuring amongst themselves, and then the paramedics were here, grabbing Brody and placing him on a stretcher. “He has a heart condition,” I told them. “He has a mitral valve complication.” One of the paramedics was speaking with someone next to me, an older man—maybe a teacher, and the one strapping him in glanced at me and said, “Okay.” To his partner he said, “Get him on oxygen when he’s in there.”

“What happened here?” The other paramedic asked me.

When I just shook my head, someone else—the older man that had been speaking with the other paramedic—said,“Another student attacked him. I think this guy was just trying to defend him,” he said, nodding his head toward me. “Maybe he got knocked in the head, I don’t know.”

“All right. Let’s load him up,” the paramedic said. “You coming?” he asked me. “You need attention?”

“No,” I told him. I grabbed onto Brody’s limp hand while they wheeled him to the ambulance and they let me. I kept holding his hand once we were inside, kept begging him to wake up as they looked him over. They strapped an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth, and the sight of him like that made me break down. I sobbed uncontrollably, letting my head fall into the crook of his neck until one of the paramedics gently pulled me off him.

By the time we got to the hospital, I was beyond hysterical because, despite me pleading with them, they separated us. They made me stay in the waiting area while Brody went god knew where. The only thing I felt was a despair so vast it was slowly swallowing me whole, and I cried into my arms until there was nothing left inside me.

I didn’t care about anything except seeing Brody. I wanted to be there when he opened his eyes. I needed to be there. I needed him to wake up.

An hour later, the last person I expected to see walked into the waiting area. I was so elated to see Brody’s sister that I flew out of the chair and wrapped my arms around her.

“Oh my god, no,” she said, trying to shove me off her.

“Where is he? What’s going on? Did he wake up?” I pulled back enough to look her in the eyes—eyes that were exactly like her brother’s. Tears welled anew, and Bri looked so uncomfortable that a small laugh bubbled out of me.

“He’s in surgery,” she said softly, and those tears spilled down my cheeks. Brody wasn’t here to wipe them away, which only made me cry harder.

“What?!” I practically shouted. “Oh my god…why?Why? What happened?”

“He was going into heart failure,” she said. “They said that he’d been getting worse and worse over time, and the stress that the assault placed on his heart was the last straw. Isaac, what the fuck happened? There’s a police officer here who said someone pushed you and then Brody got in a fight with him. Who would do that?”

Dizziness overwhelmed me, and I sat down hard in the chair. “What?” I whispered. Brody was in surgery? His heart was failing? I felt like I was gonna throw up. Or have a heart attack. Or both.

---