Page 68 of I Promise You

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I throw my head back onto the pillow, running my hand through my hair. I squeeze my swollen eyes shut tight when I think about getting a rental until I can get it back from the shop. I’m hoping I don’t have to buy another bike.

Fuck.

It was my favorite motorcycle and now it’s headed to the shop for repairs.

“I can’t wait to get out,” I mumble as the group chat buzzes repeatedly.

Another text chimes in from Meredith.

A small smile spreads across my face, but deep down inside the sick, selfish parts of me, I wish it was my favorite nurse…Ari Alvarez.

I go to her contact name and click on it…tempted.

So fucking tempted to hit the call button, desperate to hear her voice.

I can’t help it. I feel like I’m hitting a new low in my life, searching for the only comfort I fantasize about. Black hair…a girl that loves to play soccer and help heal people, and has the prettiest brown eyes I’ve ever seen. I haven’t been the same since Paul died, the recent deployment from Iraq, and now this?

I just think I need her to be the angel in my life, too.

21

ARI

It’s a slow shift for once. This week has been overflowing with patients of all kinds. Military families that their usual provider dismissed led to our lobby full of misdiagnoses.

Marines and sailors still in their uniforms came in with injuries sustained from training or just from the usual typical work day.

A wrong decision could lead them to a chopped-off finger or broken bones. More cases of PTSD flooded my list of patients, making my heart bleed with empathy.

I will always look at the broken souls with abundant compassion and respect.

Hurt souls that have lost their way didn’t mean they could never be found. It just meant they needed one person to notice they were suffocating, to rescue them from their self-inflicted drowning.

If I could be that one pair of arms and ears, I’d always do it with no hesitation or questions asked.

I see what this career can do to some men and women. I saw what it has done to my Danny, yet he still has stayed strong and, most importantly,alive.

He has so much responsibility on his shoulders it's no wonder his favorite pick of self-loathing and poison would be whiskey.

I’m proud of how much he's changed into a better man forhimself.

The clacking of keyboards and groans deriving from pain from the patients loom into the air as I walk the hallways back to the nurses’ desk.

I hug my jacket closer to my body and wince when I accidentally touch where Nora stabbed me.

I flinch when my fingertips touch the purple scars over my scrubs.

Even though most of it has healed, this wound will forever befreshto the touch—a ghastly eternal reminder of the doom I faced that day.

The day my baby and Idied.

And yet, I’m still here, but my son isn’t.

A dark part of me wishes I hadn't lived. Is it dark, though?

Is it dark to want to be with my baby that I never got to kiss? Never got to watch Danny and I cradle what our love created?

I’m shaken away from those thoughts like a cloud poofing away from the ominous world I throw myself in whenever something triggers that memory.