Page 40 of A Fine Line

“Crew, let me just call-”

“No.” He snapped, dark and serious and with his arm wrapped around his gut, hunched over. “EMT will call my family and it will be a whole…thing. Just please drive me.”

“Your family probably should be called considering I have no clue what I’m doing and what if it’s serious and I don’t know-”

“Winnie.” I looked over at him and our eyes locked, his free hand wrapped around my arm and fingers tight but hazel eyes so soft, so gentle it makes me feel like I’m not even here. Like I’m going to blink and this moment will disappear with any other ones I’d pictured the two of us in.

“Please,” Crews voice is so raw and hoarse and honest that I think I might just cry. “I need you, okay?”

I nodded and sniffed, no tears and definitely not crying but if he kept looking at me like that, like he believed something so wonderful out of just me, I actually might let the flood gates open and smear snot on my favorite Marie Curie shirt.

“Okay.” I nodded.

I all but shoved Crew into my SUV and reared out of his driveway and towards the nearest ER. We’re only ten minutes out when Crew makes this gut-wrenching groan from the back of his throat and grips his hands on the console between us, like ripping it up from the root of the car would solve his pain entirely.

“Oh my God, is this what having a baby is like?” He took pants of breaths in between words.

“I know you’re in pain, but I don’t think I would go that far.”

“I don’t either but- GAH,” his hips lifted out of the seat, hands grabbing the ‘oh-shit’ handle on top of the door to yank him up. “It’s worse. It’s so much worse, Winnie.”

My heart was racing, pedal down the floor, and I felt like I was starring as a racer in Tokyo Drift and not in a fun and sexy Megan Fox way. “You’re gonna be fine, Crew. You’ll be just fine.”

As soon as we rushed into the emergency room, the receptionist took sight of Crew’s pale scrunched up face, and set him in the curtained room next door to get vitals. They sent him to get a CT and I couldn’t possibly imagine him sitting down long enough to let them get accurate scanning. Crew was always moving but even more so when he was in pain, apparently. With me begging all nurses for answers for over an hour, finally an RN stopped to update me that Crew would be rushing into the OR to get emergency surgery on what turned out to be an extremely large kidney stone that was just dancing around in his bladder for the last few weeks. She used more medical terms but my brain pictured a boulder having a rave in his insides and I felt a huge twinge of guilt. Not sure why, not like I grew the thing in there but still, I felt almost like it was my fault. Maybe because I never questioned it before. Or forced him to go to the doctor, but it never felt like my place and now I was wondering who did Crew have in his life to do that kind of thing for him? Did his siblings not notice him hobbling around for weeks? Were they that clueless or was I just that perceptive when it came to him?

By the time Crew was out of surgery, only lasting about thirty minutes, and rolled into a room his phone still had zero missed calls. I did my best to use Siri and say ‘call mom’ or any of his siblings names but nothing came up. At one point I was so convinced his phone was broken that I even tried calling myself but that didn’t work.

Either he had no contacts or his phone was just jacked up, I wasn’t sure which. Still, I felt guilty for not letting his family know the guy had been in surgery.

“Mrs. Wells?”

I kept trying different combinations of password possibilities but I was definitely getting too dangerous territory of disabling his phone entirely.

“Mrs. Wells?” The nurse through the swinging doors shouted into the waiting room full of a broad range of Philly’s finest.

“Wells. Mrs. Wells.” Geez, was no one listening?

“MRS. WELLS!” The tall, cranky, nurse took a step closer to my chair propped up in the corner, the pants of her dark navy scrubs brushing against my bare leg.

“Oh!” I shot up from my slouched position. “Oh, I’m not-”

Clearly she assumed Crew and I were married- something my stomach did a literal cannon ball at- but if I corrected her that we were, friends? I felt like I wouldn’t be allowed back at all. So…

“Yes! Yep, that’s me. Crew is my…” Husband just could not make its way out without me laughing. “Honey.”

“…right. Well, he is resting now you can come back.”

I took slow and steady steps to the room where Crew was leaned forward, right arm slung out with a nurse by his side checking his blood pressure. A monitor above him read off his average vitals and a steady beep, beep, beep played over the room in a strong beat. Crew stared off into space in front of him like there was a vortex about to swallow him whole.

I curved the corner through the door and knocked twice to announce my arrival. “Hey, bud, how we doing?” I squished into the space between the chair and the bed.

Crew’s eyes lifted to mine slowly, like his brain couldn’t keep up with the rest of him. My clear eyes locked his glassy ones and above him the monitor picked up pace, faster and louder. BEEP,BEEP,BEEP.

A smile creeped over that lazy face. His voice was as slow as his movements, slurred and blurry and a tad perfect. “Ahhh, there she is.” He nudged his elbow towards the nurse, but it hit the rails of the bedframe in his way. “The one I told you about. I’m gonna keep her.”

His eyes turned back to me and with his heart rate booming louder and higher. And he winked at me, with both eyes so I supposed he actually just blinked at me.

“I’m gonna keep you, Winnie girl.”

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