I need to leave, know I need to go, but can’t bring myself to walk away from her just yet. “Is she going to be okay?” My voice doesn’t even sound like mine, but I need to know the answer before I walk away and sort the shit out in my head that’s throbbing like a motherfucker right now. It’s rivaled only by the ache in my heart.
“Not your business, now is it?” John says as I turn to face him. The doctor stands between us in the small space at the same time security arrives in the room. “He needs to leave,” he tells the guards as the doctor takes my arm. I shrug out of his grip, my only show of resistance.
For a moment when I start to walk from the room, John and I are shoulder to shoulder, emotions raw and tempers escalating on both sides. I pause to contemplate their relationship for a second. Shit, I didn’t even know there was a relationship, but I speak the one thing I know deep down for certain. “You don’t deserve her.”
I may not have thrown a punch, and I may be one hundred percent in the wrong since I’m the one sleeping with his wife, but fuck me, I know he doesn’t deserve her. The Beaux I know would cheat on her husband only if the situation was bad, if she had reasons.
And now I just need to wait until she’s recovered and stronger to find out what those reasons are.
Chapter 23
“C
an I get you anything?”
I look up at the sound of the voice, surprised to find the petite nurse from the ICU station peeking her head into the waiting room. Glancing around, I notice there is no one else in here and realize she’s speaking to me. “Not unless you can tell me how she’s doing,” I murmur. The clock on the wall tells me that I’ve been sitting here for six hours without a single person talking to me except for my family via cell phone. I’m the pariah, the asshole who slept with a married man’s woman, and now I’m banned from the third floor with no hope of getting another glimpse of Beaux.
Without returning my eyes to the nurse, I sink back in my seat because every other person I’ve asked this question has left and never come back. I lean my head against the wall and scrub a hand over my jaw, surprised when I hear the chair next to me scrape across the floor as she moves it. I snap my head forward, my hope building that I might get some kind of answer here.
She stares in silence with sympathetic eyes that flicker toward the door every few seconds before she starts. “I could get in a lot of trouble if anyone found out I’m giving you this information,” she says, emphasizing how much she’s risking by being here. All I can do is nod. “Ms. Croslyn is stable. She had some swelling of her brain due to her proximity and the force of the blast. After the medical team successfully stopped the swelling, they were able to determine that she has what is called a diffuse axonal brain injury.” She pauses momentarily because yes, I knew coming here that Beaux had a head injury, but hearing the technical term scares the crap out of me, and without my computer open so that I can Google it and see all of the details, I need more.
“What does that mean?” I plead for more information even when she’s giving me more than anyone has thus far.
“Once she arrived here, the neurologists were able to do some more intensive testing and believe she’s incurred a stage one injury, which is the least worrisome of them —”
My audible exhale cuts her off, the pressure in my chest abates some, so that I lean forward, elbows on my knees and head in my hands as I try to rein in the rush of emotion that thunders through me like a freight train. And the nurse hasn’t even explained what an axonal whatever it is called means, but that it’s stage one is enough for me to hold on to until I can look it up myself.
“Now please remember that it’s still a brain injury. Until she wakes up, we won’t know the extent or if there will be any long-term damage, but compared to some of the injuries that we see here from the same scenario, I’d say luck seems to be on her side.”