Page 114 of As Long As You'll Have Me
This is the first I’ve heard about the two of them being on the outs. Sure, they get on one another’s nerves, but it never went so far as to be called a ‘fight.’
“It doesn’t matter anymore, it’s done. It was stupid,” she muffles out. She pulls away from me and wipes her eyes with her hands. “I’m sorry for what I said earlier.”
I shake my head at her and kiss the top of her head. “You don’t have to apologize. We’re good, Willow.”
“You sure?” she asks, her voice still wobbly from crying.
“I’m sure,” I repeat, pulling her back into a hug. She frees her arms and wraps them around me, squeezing me tight.
“I love you, Miles.”
“I love you, too, Willow.”
Sunday rollsby one machine beep at a time. Carter is in and out of tests for the majority of the day and they’re pumping him full of medication to keep him sleeping to give his lungs time to heal and recover. At one point, the doctors told us he’d be in procedures for several hours so I took that as my chance to head home to shower and change. Hanna drove me since I didn’t have my truck and together, we got in a fresh shower after stopping by her place for a change of clothes for her to wear. I wanted to get back to the hospital as quickly as I could but when Willow texted me he was still in procedures, I gave in to Hanna’s insistence that I try to get some sleep. She laid next to me, running her fingers through my freshly washed hair and it wasn’t long until sleep finally overtook me. When I opened my eyes again, she was still lying next to me, smiling as she watched me sleep. A little after dinnertime, Ivy called to tell me Carter was back in his room and off the intubator. Not only that, he was awake and asking to see me. Knowing I need to do this alone, Hanna offers to drive Ivy home so she can get some rest while I sit with him.
Willow shows me how to properly put on the gown, gloves, and mask, before letting me go into his room. He’s in the burn unit now while they wait for him to be stable enough to do surgery to place some skin grafts. Steppinginside, I see all the machines they have him hooked up to, the most jarring one being a massive oxygen mask they have strapped over his face. Bandages wrap around the upper half of his leg that sustained the most damage. They’re deformed and uneven, telling me that he’s now missing a large piece of flesh on the upper half of his leg.
“Do I look that bad?” he wheezes. My eyes dart to him and I see that he’s looking back at me. Through the fog of his mask, I see his quintessential goofy grin shining through the thick plastic.
“I’d never lie to you, brother. So yeah, you look like shit.” I chuckle, grabbing onto the footboard of his bed.
He chuckles along with me until it becomes too much and he has to stop to catch his breath. His breathing is strained and sounds like he’s using all of his energy to take in a single breath. I take a couple of steps around his bed and sit in the chair next to him. An uncomfortable silence lingers between us as we wait for the other to speak first.
“You have every right to be mad at me,” he says just above a whisper. I can only imagine how raw his throat feels every time he speaks.
I lean over my knees and drop my head, nodding towards the floor. “Oh, I’m mad at you.”
“What I did was stupid?—”
“Stupid? Carter, stupid doesn’t even begin to describe it. How about reckless? Or selfish?”
He doesn’t say anything. After a beat I lift my eyes to look at him.
“You almost died, Carter. What if I hadn’t gotten to you in time? If Brooks hadn’t found me and helped me save you from under that beam? What were you thinking?”
He takes a few deep breaths and removes the oxygenmask from his face, turning his head to look at me. His cheeks and the skin around his face is bright red like he has a really bad sunburn. The heat of the fire that almost killed him still touches him hours later.
“I wasn’t. I wasn’t thinking. I just heard that woman screaming and took off. I’m sorry.”
His eyes lock on mine and flicker with remorse. Clenching my jaw, I take his hand into mine.
“You can’t just take off when you’re upset about something.” His eyebrows narrow on me. “You’ve been pissed about something for weeks now; don’t act like you couldn’t tell that I noticed. You have a family, Carter. People who love you. Ivy, me, Coop, and Willow.”
He looks away from me again, setting his eyes on the old TV that’s hanging in the corner of the room.
“Willow told me you two were fighting,” I continue. “Is that why you’ve been so out of it?”
He shakes his head. “No, not entirely.”
“You gonna tell me what’s been bothering you or are you going to make me guess?”
He pulls the mask over his face again, taking deep inhales of fresh oxygen. He pulls it down again but doesn’t turn to look at me.
“My dad died.”
My eyebrows met in the center of my face. I didn’t think Carter had any contact with his parents. After he came to live with Ivy and I, we never really talked about his biological family. Maybe a few times here or there in the middle of the night when we should have been sleeping, but never in great detail.
“I got a call from his lawyer that he left me money. A lot of money. Stupid bastard,” he scoffs. Tears threaten his eyelids and he tries his best to blink them back.When one goes rogue and falls down his face, he uses his hand hooked up to an IV to wipe it away.
