Total pages in book: 64
Estimated words: 64352 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 257(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64352 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 257(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
He didn’t reply.
“You obviously got your curly black hair from her, though,” I told him. “She’s gorgeous. You probably would be, too, if you didn’t have all that gauze covering half your face.”
He still didn’t reply.
I kind of wished he would.
As the entire morning wore on into afternoon, and I dozed away at his bedside, I sort of hoped that the mother would never show.
Chapter 6
The beach is going to get whatever body I give it, and that’s that.
-T-shirt
Henley
And she didn’t. Not for a whole two weeks.
Two weeks in which I learned about the man that I was getting to know way more than I ever thought I would.
Or at least he got to know me.
I had actually spoken to his sister three times when she’d called on the room phone, and I’d even come in on my normal days off and spent time with him.
Why I couldn’t tell you.
Maybe it was just a sense of duty.
Maybe it was because something about him called to me.
Maybe it was because I felt sorry for him.
But by the time I walked onto the ICU floor Friday, two weeks later, I wasn’t expecting to find anyone at Rhys Rivera’s bedside.
Especially not a buxom brunette with obviously fake titties crying over her son. A son in which she hadn’t come to see in two whole weeks while he’d been lying there.
“Goodbye, my love!” the woman cried out. “I’ll miss you so much!”
She said that so loud that I could hear it all the way from the doorway.
My body was frozen in the doorframe as I stared at the show she was putting on.
And that was when I noticed that all the machines were gone.
All of them. He didn’t have a single one around his bedside. Not even an IV pump.
My stomach plummeted as I whirled on my heels and started running toward the nurses’ station.
“Bradley!” I cried out, thankful to find him there. “Is he okay?”
Had he woken up? Was he able to breathe on his own now, and they took him off life support?
Bradley looked up at me and frowned.
He knew exactly who I was talking about. Apparently, I was starting to get an irrational attachment to a man in a coma.
Who knew?
“The family said he has a DNR, and the sister’s having the mother deliver the papers. Sister’s on strict bedrest and couldn’t make it down here herself. She also explained that we should prepare to be offended by the mother. She apparently is very eccentric. Doesn’t believe in hospitals, and actually would rather take him to a field outside her house and let the sun and moon heal him.”
My stomach sank.
He was off life support.
Off. Life. Support.
The only thing that had been helping him breathe the last two weeks.
Off.
Life.
Support.
Life saving measures were simple. If anything like CPR or the vent was needed to stay alive, then per the DNR—or do not resuscitate—order, they (the hospital staff) couldn’t perform them. That meant that this big man was shit out of luck. He’d die…and shortly.
No.
“They’re what?!” I screeched.
“They’re taking him off life support. Took him off life support. That happened about an hour ago.”
I blinked.
“They can’t!” I burst out.
Bradley smiled at me sadly. “They can.”
“But, Bradley,” I said, whispering this time. “They can’t.”
Bradley was one of my best friends. He was a brain surgeon. And one of the best people that I’ve ever met in my entire life.
“They did,” he repeated himself.
A commotion across the hall—heels on tile—had me turning to see what I was hearing, and that was when I saw the woman walking out.
She was wearing a halter top, a mini-skirt that wouldn’t even look good on a sixteen-year-old, let alone someone of her age, and hooker heels.
She looked like a ho. Fo’ sho’.
She didn’t look like the woman I remembered seeing in my favorite 90s porn.
Yes, I was a 90s porn fanatic. I first started my venture into porn when I was fifteen, when I first saw my sister’s porn collection in the garage. She’d been eighteen at the time, and she’d fished it out of a dumpster right outside of a Hasting’s video shop that had closed down only days before.
In that dumpster had been the motherload of porn, and in some of those porn movies, this woman was the star.
Now, though? Well, she didn’t look much like her old videos.
Now she looked like a used-up hooker that’d been ridden hard and put up wet.
She walked up to us, paused with a toe pointed outward for dramatic effect, and waved her hand in the air.
“The other men on his baseball team are supposed to be coming. Please allow them in to say their final goodbyes.”
Then, just like that, she left as if she hadn’t just said goodbye to her son for the final time.
But her words, they stuck with me.