Into the Tomorrows (Bleeding Hearts Book 1) (10 page)

Jude looked up at me, his face dripping with sweat. His eyes looked pinched, but he said, “I’ll be fine. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re bleeding,” he said, taking a step forward. He pointed a finger to his eyebrow and I lifted a hand to my face.

I felt the sting and pulled my hand away, coming away with more blood than I’d expected. “That’s a lot of blood,” I said, feeling woozy from the adrenaline leaving my body. My legs suddenly seemed to be made of Jell-O.

“It’s a head injury,” Colin said, “they bleed a lot.”

“You must have hit your face pretty hard. Sorry.” Jude actually looked sorry and I shook my head in disbelief.

“You’re sorry? Really?” I squeezed my jaw hard, feeling the tears coming to the surface. “I just fucking slipped over the edge and you dislocated your shoulder pulling me up and you’re sorry?”

I was going to go into hysterics, I knew it. The gravity of what had just happened hit me like a stack of bricks to the chest and I bent over, breathing in deeply to gain my bearings.

When I straightened, I pushed the hair away from my face. Forget my few minor missteps so far on this hike. At the top of my list of hiking failures were two things: slipping over an edge and dislocating the shoulder of my savior.

Way to go, Trista.

Jude didn’t seem oblivious to the turmoil in my head, but just nodded as he kept clenching his fists.

Colin interrupted our silent exchange. “We should hasten our pace out of here, so Jude can get to a doctor.”

“I don’t need a doctor,” Jude argued.

“You do. You probably need a sling too,” Teddy chimed in. “And how many times have you done this now? Four? Time to think seriously about surgery, bro.”

“You’ll need surgery?” I asked, as everyone around us grabbed their packs and readied themselves for the hike out of the ridge.

Jude said nothing, just looked at me with eyes filled with things he wanted to say, but didn’t.

“Oh, he’ll need surgery,” Colin said encouragingly, as if he thought it would console me.

Jude broke our gaze first, grabbing his pack and slinging it over his good arm and getting help from Teddy securing it around his waist.

Way to fucking go, Trista.

W
hen we’d made
it back to Colin and Jude’s apartment, it was dark. The entire ride, I’d heard Jude shift in the back seat, and I had turned and watched as he rolled his shoulder only for his jaw to clench immediately after. He needed to see a doctor, I knew that.

So when we climbed out of the Jeep, I walked over to my car and motioned for Jude to get in.

“What?”

“Get in. I’m taking you to the hospital.”

He laughed and took a step toward me. “I’m going to take a long shower and then I’m going to bed.”

The way he said it, so close to me, made me swallow nervously. “After you go to the hospital.”

He shook his head and opened his lips to say something, but I interrupted him.

“No, you’re going. If nothing other than to ease my guilt.” I gestured for him to get in the passenger seat when Colin came around the Jeep.

“I can take him, Trista, if you want to go inside.”

“No, I caused this, I’ll take him.”

Jude watched me for a moment as he seemed to make a decision. Finally, he turned around and set his pack back inside the Jeep and walked over to me again. “Wouldn’t want guilt to eat you up.”

After he was inside the car and I had shut the door, Colin approached me. “Do you even know where the hospital is?”

The street lamp cast a reflection off of his glossy black curls and I wondered how he’d stayed so clean looking when I was sure you could scrape a film of dirt off of my face with a fingernail. “I’m sure Jude knows.” I wasn’t sure. “I’ll call you if I get lost.” As soon as I said it, I wanted to reel it back into my mouth and keep it firmly inside my brain, because I didn’t know where Colin and I stood after this hike. I knew where I stood, which was on Indecisive Island.

“Yeah, okay,” he said, already walking backward to the Jeep. “Let me know if you need me to pick him up.”

“Sure.” I climbed into my rundown hatchback and shut the door before immediately rolling the window down. I did not need to be trapped with his woodsy scent burying itself in my nostrils.

“This car is a coffin,” Jude said after giving me directions toward the hospital.

I raised an eyebrow as I glanced at him, knees hunched up and seeming entirely too large for the shitty bucket seat. “It’s not made for tall people.”

“It’s not made for people,” he corrected. “If you got into a head-on crash,” he clapped once for effect, “boom—sardines. They’d have to bury you in this car, hence: coffin.”

“That’s a little morbid, and a lot dramatic.” I took the exit Jude pointed to. “We could have taken your car.”

“Don’t have one. I bike everywhere.”

“Of course you do.” It fit him, and I chanced a glance at him, left arm braced on the center console. My eyes traveled the length of his arm, from the tattoos that began at his wrist and moved up his arm. “What’s that around your arm?” I asked, my eyes gliding back from biceps and triceps and whatever other ‘ceps he had down to rest at his wrist.

I turned back to the road but saw him attempt to rotate his arm in my periphery though he winced. “It’s a forest wrapped around my wrist.”

“You like trees.” How very profound, Trista.

“My home.”

He stared out the window, the lights from buildings and occasional streetlights casting a glow over his face. His lips opened as if he had words for me, but he closed them and turned to me, offering a weak smile.

“Are you in pain?”

He shook his head. “No.”

I pulled into the parking lot of the emergency room and he was out of the car before I could help him.

“It’s a waste of time.”

I gave him a look of impatience as we walked through the automatic doors, but said nothing. I flipped through the magazine selection as he checked in, and then we waited in silence for twenty minutes before a nurse called his name.

He stood up and I paused, not sure of what to do myself. “Are you coming with me?” he asked, hand extended and eyes half-closed.

I debated it for a moment before putting my magazine down and standing. I didn’t grab his hand, because the last time I had, I’d fallen off a cliff—causing the injury that brought us here.

Also, I avoided his hand because touching him made me prickly, hyper-aware of the fact that he was a man and I was a woman and he was attractive and I had a boyfriend who I was supposed to be thinking about.

We followed the nurse to a curtained room and she took his vitals and made little clucking sounds in the back of her throat. As she undid the Velcro of the blood pressure cuff and folded it up, the noise made me shift in my seat, remembering when I’d last been in a hospital for an emergency.

The nurse asked him about the reason for his visit, asked him to rate his pain on a scale of one to ten. When the nurse asked him about his medical history, I reached into my purse and grabbed a few dollar bills, waving them at Jude, hoping he’d read my mind and know I was going to the vending machine.

Once I was in the hallway, I inhaled quickly. Three times, in and out, clutching to the sides of the chips and candy vending machine. I smelled plastic and disinfectant and I was immediately transported to the Colorado hospital Ellie had been airlifted to.

A
doctor
with heavy bags under her eyes tucked her hands into her coat pockets as she approached Ellie’s parents, who were clinging to one another like they were all they had in the world. With a sickening lurch of my stomach, I realized that was true.

“Hyponatremia,” they said to Ellie’s mother, in a muted gray hallway under dim lights. “It’s likely that she felt ill from the drug she took and tried to make herself feel better by drinking water, which caused an imbalance in her sodium levels.”

I listened as they explained why their daughter was now in a vegetative state, her brain swollen and unresponsive. I zoned out as they explained options. I was huddled across the hall and down a few doors, just steps from the waiting room where I’d been sequestered while they’d worked on her.

“Come on,” Colin said, placing his hands on my shoulders. “They need time.”

I let him lead me away, to sit in a wooden chair that made me feel cold. And then I said what I hadn’t realized until that moment. “Where were you?” I’d intended to speak it loud, but my voice was ragged from screams and it came out in a tortured whisper.

“What?” he asked. He’d removed his hands once I’d sat, and now I was even more alone in my grief.

“When I was in the bathroom with her. When I wandered around the house.” I stared at my hands, wringing them together, watching the whites and reds color my skin from the pressure I was applying. I raised my head, met his eyes. “Where were you?”

His eyes darted right and he said nothing. My jaw hurt from the grinding of my teeth and I remembered how he’d been high. He sighed, ran a hand over his jaw. His eyes were clear, his face tanned, healthy. And I resented him so much in that moment, for choosing to get high over choosing to help me and Ellie. For being alive while she was nearly dead.

Thirty minutes. That’s all it had taken from the moment I’d started looking for him to help us. Thirty minutes spent in and outside the house while Ellie lay on the kitchen floor, unconscious. It was hours ago, but it felt like decades ago. My memory repeated over and over, a blurry, discombobulated loop. I’d been so focused on Ellie that I hadn’t realized until now that Colin wasn’t even there until the end. If you asked me the color of the bathroom or the kitchen, I couldn’t tell you—such was my focus on Ellie at the time.

“She was sick,” he said, as if that excused his absence. “I gave you space.”

I dropped my head. “I needed you,” I whispered.

“I’m sorry.”

It took an hour for me to realize he had left the hospital.

I
came
from the memory with acid on my tongue. My fingers curled into a fist and I banged it lightly, in slow-motion, on the vending machine.

I didn’t indulge in memories of the night she died for good reason. Everything was so blurred now, years later, that the only thing I remembered was Colin’s fucking absence.

And there I was, three years after Colin had abandoned me, abandoned us, in Colorado.

For him.

I sighed, my chest deflating. And then, with fingers that shook, I tried to jam a dollar bill into the machine. “Take my fucking money,” I growled under my breath. When it finally did, I pounded in the code for the bag of Cheetos and then moved onto the water bottle machine.

When I returned to Jude’s room and handed him the water bottle, I noticed a dozen wires snaking out of the hospital gown he now wore as he lay in the bed.

“You okay?” I asked, uncapping his bottle.

He took a deep pull from the bottle and made one of those little “ahh” sounds after swallowing. “Yeah, this is routine.” He gestured to the wires and let his head fall back to the pillow. “Thanks for the water.”

“Well, thanks for saving my life.” I nervously twisted the lid of my own bottle. “Kinda forgot to say that until now, which makes me an asshole.”

He pursed his lips and his eyes traced my face. I wondered if he saw my mini mental breakdown written across my forehead. “Yeah, you kind of are. Pretty inconsiderate of you to fall off that cliff.”

The laugh bubbled from my throat and my eyes stung. “You shouldn’t be making me laugh,” I managed between laughing. “I should be making you laugh.”

He gestured to the wires sticking out of him. “Then this shit would go haywire and I’d be here even longer. And considering you were rude enough to force me here in the first place … that would make you a
giant
asshole.”

I couldn’t help it, I made eye contact with him again after doing my best to avoid it entirely. His eyes were half open, rimmed by those thick dark lashes. And the wrinkles at the corners told me he was trying not to laugh himself. His face was kind, and he was kind and he stared back at me with a question on his face.

I broke eye contact to stare at the wall. I couldn’t keep admiring him like this. It wasn’t until I had been at the vending machines that I realized why it was so easy for me to forget about having a boyfriend. Because I’d forgotten about him as I’d been on the kitchen floor with Ellie. Because for three years after that moment, I’d been perfectly happy being alone in Wyoming. Colin had been my boyfriend, sure, but its significance had boiled down to our Facebook relationship statuses, because we hadn’t been together, together.

But I was a terrible person, I knew. Because I couldn’t help it; my eyes traveled over Jude’s body again, down the arm with the tattoos and further. From the waist down, he was covered in a waffle-knit white hospital blanket.

“This isn’t my color, is it?”

I snapped my gaze up to his, a wry smile on his lips as he tugged on the hospital gown covering his chest.

“Not really.”

His smile spread a fraction wider, his full lips smooth. “You’re repulsed by me.”

I couldn’t help but return his smile. “Definitely,” I said,
not
, I added to myself.
I should be
.

Needing to distract myself, I stood and walked to the machine that was printing out squiggly lines across metered paper. Short lines jutted up and down before a larger one spiked upwards and abruptly came down again. I picked up some of the paper that had printed and held it, looking over the spikes and dips.

“That’s my heart,” Jude said. My fingers grazed the taller spikes and I turned to him.

I looked back down at the paper. “It’s amazing,” I said. Because it was. It was a heartbeat, translated onto paper. “I don’t know what to say,” I swallowed. “But seeing it is surreal. The pattern; it’s beautiful.”

He was looking at me, but I didn’t turn—because it felt too intimate. I’d called his heartbeat beautiful.

When the nurse came back into the room with the physician, they brought him up to a sitting position. As they pulled the hospital gown down his front, my eyes followed the many inches of skin that were revealed, taking in all kinds of ink splattered across well-defined muscles.

Jude lifted his head, caught me watching, and it was several seconds later before I excused myself into the hall, to give them privacy.