“Tanner! Tanner!”
Voices shout from every direction, hands touch me and minister to my injuries and wave in front of my eyes. Sarge and Rosco and a soldier. A medic, I think. But I don’t know anything for certain because my focus wanes, fades to black momentarily before coming back, a little fuzzier, a lot more confused.
I don’t know much, can’t make anything I see stay still, but I do know one thing: There are people around me, trying to help me – everyone but the one I want to see there the most.
Bubbles. I close my eyes, my head feeling adrift like the bubbles we were blowing last night. Was it last night? I can’t pinpoint anything because I’m fading. Slowly. I welcome it because when it pulls me under, the pain stops momentarily.
“He’s in shock!” someone I can’t focus on shouts over the deafening ring in my ears.
Well, no shit. The observation is so odd that I want to laugh, want to tell them to stop looking at me and get to Beaux. She was closer. She was closer.
I couldn’t get to her.
I couldn’t save her.
Beaux.
My world spins, blackness seeping into the fringes of my consciousness and bleeding from the edges in, closer and closer, darker and darker.
Until there is nothing left.
Beaux.
You promised you’d always come back to me.
Chapter 21
I
struggle to swim above the water. I claw my way to just beneath the surface with lungs burning, the sky in sight, only to be yanked back down. And I struggle against it less and less because when I’m swallowed by the darkness again, I can go back to the rooftop with Beaux, blowing bubbles, making love. It’s so much easier to be here in the warmth of the hot sun and the sweet taste of her kiss than to endure the ache in my head when I try to open my eyes.
I can’t keep track of how many times I resurface, but the penlight in my eyes and the cool burn of something like ice being injected into the top of my hand are annoying enough that I promise next time I’ll wake up.
Next time.
But then the minute I’m firmly ensconced back in the depths of my subconscious, the look on Beaux’s face as she realized what was happening flashes before me.
I never told her I loved her. It’s on constant refrain in my mind when I come to and the only thing I know for sure before the darkness steals my thoughts from me once again.
The void of sound and pain is so soothing that when I reach the surface the next time, the beeping that’s muffled in my ears confuses me for a moment. The bright light that hits my eyes as I break free from the weight of the water holding me down causes me to squint and then blink rapidly as I try to focus on the room around me.
“Tanner? Can you hear me, Tanner?”
I feel like I’m on the wrong end of a megaphone, sound siphoned through a pinhole, but at least the roaring pain in my head has dulled to a nagging ache behind my eyes and at the base of my skull. My eyelids are heavy, wanting to droop back down, but between my name being called again and my sudden awareness of everything, I force my eyes open as confusion gives way to worry.
And dread.
“Beaux. Where’s…?” My voice breaks as I try to make the question sound as urgent as it is in my head, but I know at best I sound groggy.
Patient brown eyes assess me as I look around and place myself in the military combat hospital on the forward operating base. “Tanner, do you know where you are?” I start to nod and stop immediately as the pain radiates through my head. “Don’t move. The pain will ebb slowly. You took a pretty big hit to the head. Have a slight concussion. So much better than we’d expect with the blow we were told you took,” he says as he writes something down on the chart in his hand. “You’re a lucky man. We gave you some sedatives to allow your brain to rest for a bit, so it may feel like you’re having a hard time waking up.”
I don’t care about me, I want to yell. How is Beaux? Where is she? Tell me she’s okay!
“You’ve been here a little over a day with a concussion and some minor scrapes and stitches. You’re likely to be sore with how close you were to the blast zone, but you’re lucky those are your only injuries.”
I try to process that I’ve been here over a day. At least twenty-four hours. A lot can happen in twenty-four hours. And while his words are delivered in a soothing Southern accent, they make me even more upset because if I’m lucky and I was that close to the epicenter, what the fuck does that mean for Beaux? Emotions riot through me, so many of them that I can’t pinpoint one to grab and hold on to other than my need to know that she’s all right.
“Where is she?” I ask, trying to sit up. All I can focus on through the stabbing pain in my head from my sudden movement is that I need to see her.
“Whoa! Lie back down, Tanner,” he says with his hands on my shoulders, pressing me back down as I continue to resist, unable to accept that he’s not answering me. “You need rest.”
“No, I need to know where she is.” It feels like I’m asking for the umpteenth time and this only adds more panic to the fear lying deep down in the darkness I just broke free from. The one I think I intentionally left behind because it can’t be true; she can’t be dead.
And when the actual thought crosses my mind, when I allow myself to think the worst for the first time instead of wrestling against it, all of my fight leaves me. I let the doctor push me back to the pillow as I search the expression on his face and his eyes that won’t meet mine for the answer I most fear.
“Tanner!” Sarge’s voice booms into the empty space, and the relief in his voice and concern in his eyes are a dead giveaway of how serious the situation is. “Doc told me you were coming around, so —”
“Where’s Beaux?” I demand, not caring or wanting to talk about myself. The fact that his steps falter gives me enough of an answer.
“She took a big hit,” he says softly. The man I’ve always known to have a stiff upper lip doesn’t have one right now. That doesn’t sit well with me.
“Where is she?” I grit out, wanting to shake him and tell him to tell me something I don’t already know. I may feel like I’ve been knocked around by a baseball bat to the back of the head, but I’m not stupid, I know stalling when I see it, and I don’t think he gets that internally I’ve been shredded to pieces waiting for an answer.
“She’s on her way to Landstuhl,” he says, voice quiet, tone grave.
I hang my head for a moment and close my eyes as I absorb his answer. The single comment brings me unfathomable relief because God, yes, she’s alive and then uncontrollable fear, because if she’s on her way to the largest military medical center outside of the United States, then she’s most likely critical. The U.S. military doesn’t just fly people there for scrapes and bruises. Let alone nonmilitary personnel.
The air whooshes from my lungs from the elephant-sized amount of pressure sitting on it. I try to process the situation, come to terms with possibilities I don’t want to face again.
“Get me on a plane to Germany.” As I make the demand, I start to rip leads off from under my hospital gown, making the machines around me beep with obnoxious warnings. The doctor whose name I don’t even know yet steps forward and tries to stop me. Despite the pounding in my head and how my muscles feel like I just went a hundred rounds in the gym, I grip his biceps and hold him at arm’s length. By now I’m running on pure adrenaline.
“We need to monitor you, sir. You —”
“I’m alive, right? That’s all you need to know.” I dismiss the doctor without a further thought, loosening my grip on him before I turn my eyes back to Sarge. “How is she?”
He visibly works a swallow down his throat. “You guys are lucky you were wearing armor.”
“That’s not telling me shit, Sarge.” No one can mistake the warning tone in my voice.
“She’s critical. Unconscious. A few broken bones. They were mostly concerned about brain injuries at first, but after a few scary moments, they got
her stabilized here before putting her on a transport to LRMC.”
I hang on to the few positive words I can, hold them close to my vest, and don’t let go. “You said stable.”
“No, I said she was critical but stable,” he says as I stare at him, my jaw clenched and heart racing as I try to figure out what exactly that means.
“We were concerned about the possibility of a traumatic brain injury at first. Her brain was swelling from taking the brunt of the blast. We got her broken arm taken care of, wrapped up her ribs, took some scans of her head, and once we saw the pressure inside was ebbing off, we opted to transport her to Landstuhl where they can give her the treatment she might need since we’re limited in our capacity here.”
I try to wrap my head around the one term that scares the fuck out of me. “Brain injury?” I swear my voice sounds like I’m scraping it from the back of my throat; it’s that difficult to find the words.
“Yes, but that can refer to many things, so let’s hold off on jumping to conclusions. She was responsive to stimuli, which is huge, and the swelling stopped, so that’s the biggest positive. We were just concerned about a few things and thought we’d better be safe than sorry, put in a request to send her off, and got the okay, so we did.”
There’s an iota of relief from the constant worry that floods me, but it does nothing to abate my need to see her, hold her hand, breathe in the same air as her. “Thank you,” I whisper with an acknowledging nod, “and I’m sorry about…” The doctor waves his hand in a never-mind gesture in regard to my apology for how I struggled against him.
When I eye Sarge again, the look on his face says he already knows I’m not going to back down. “Tell me you’ve got some way to get me to her or else give me a goddamn phone so that I can manage it.”
A war of wills happens between us before his eyes flicker over toward the doctor and then back toward me. “I’ll see what I can do, but I’m not doing shit until the doc clears you to leave.” Then Sarge and the doc meet each other’s eyes in a silent agreement. They’d better not be fucking with me right now or I’ll walk out of this sterile prison on my own accord and get to her any way I can. I have to see her. It’s the only way I think I’ll be able to stop this ache in my chest that has nothing to do with the blast.
“You’ve got twenty-four hours to get me there,” I demand even though I know I don’t have a single leg to stand on. I’m not military personnel. He is under no obligation to get me to Germany to see her, and yet I feel so fucking helpless right now that I do the only thing I can: boss him around with the hope that it will work.
“You need to rest now,” the doctor says as he looks up from his clipboard, the stern warning reinforced by the look in his eyes. Shit, now that I know Sarge is going to work on getting me to Beaux, that she’s currently stable, I realize just how fucking much my head is pounding.
So I let my head fall back against the pillow and inhale a deep breath as I close my eyes. I instantly feel better without the bright light of the room, but my mind still wanders.
Still worries.
Still relives that look on her face as she ran toward me, knowing I wasn’t going to make it to save her in time.
Chapter 22
T
here’s a lot of time to think on a seven-hour flight.
A lot of time to look at the same five photographs of Beaux from the morning of our embed mission over and over. Her silhouette against the sky, her cautious smile, and the selfie we took together that shows two people in love.
Except only one of them knows it.
I try to sleep to escape the pain in my body and the more prevalent ache in my heart, but the deep rumble of the C-17 Globemaster III transport vibrates through my chest in a way that prevents me from getting any real rest. I feel like I’ve been in the center of a tornado, both mind and body battered and bruised and heart put through a wringer. Thank God that Sarge was able to pull some strings so I could hitch a ride on a plane of medical evacuees heading to the Ramstein Air Base in Germany just beyond my twenty-four-hour time frame.
From my tiny little jump seat at the front of the plane so that I’m out of the way of the critical care team taking care of wounded soldiers, I can overhear the medics relaying to one another they need to buckle up for landing.
I owe Sarge big-time. I’m sure he’s breaking every rule in the military handbook to get me on this flight, but I think he blames himself a bit for what happened. And he shouldn’t. It’s not his job to watch Beaux or me on an embed. It’s not his responsibility to know Beaux has a soft spot for dogs and that she was going to see a wounded animal and want to help.
No. That’s my job. And once again I failed – and I have berated myself over it left and right in the past thirty hours. I’ve gone over the entire chain of events and blame myself for getting caught up in my conversation with Rosco without looking around more, not that that would have solved anything. Beaux made it clear on more occasions than I care to count that she’s stubborn and has a mind of her own.
I just have to hope she uses that obstinacy right now to fight like hell to overcome her injuries.
The frustrating part is that I don’t even have enough energy to be mad at Beaux for not following the rules, because all I want is to see her. The measly bits of information I’ve gotten haven’t told me shit.
Sarge got me on the transport but hadn’t been able to get me any other information beyond that she was stable. And stable doesn’t mean shit to me. Stable could have so many variations that my mind has gone over and rejected every single one of them while the minutes have crawled by without any updates on her condition.
When the wheels touch down, the jolt makes me wince as my head gets jarred from side to side and my sore muscles ache as they tense up. My knee jogs in anticipation from the fact that I’m minutes away from Beaux now, and the pressure in my chest has intensified now that I’m here.
And for some reason as I sit in this beast of a plane as we taxi across the tarmac, I begin to question myself. Am I making more of my feelings for Beaux because of everything that happened to Stella? Am I overly attached to her, considering how long we’ve known each other? Has the coincidence of what’s happened made me marry the feelings for both women together?
What in the fuck am I thinking? I swear to God it has to be nerves along with the hit I took to the head that’s making me think crap like this. Because I know how I feel about Beaux without a doubt. I go to scrub a hand through my hair and stop when I remember how sore my scalp is, settling for running my hand gently over my stubbled and scratched-up jaw to try and knock some sense into myself.
I knew how I felt about her on our rooftop date when we blew bubbles together. I knew how I felt about her as we walked side by side into the destruction of the village bomb site. It’s never been more clear to me than right now, even with the anxiety over her condition and doubt trying to weasel through the cracks all of my fears have left in my psyche.
What I feel for Beaux isn’t that lust-to-love crash course feeling that Stella used to tease me about. Fuck no. This is so completely different, and yet I can’t even explain it to myself. When I think of Beaux, there’s an ache in my chest, a warmth in my gut, and a fear in my heart kind of feeling like someone used Super Glue and it just won’t let the hell go. It’s like even if I wanted to rid myself of her, I don’t think I could.
Love. It’s an incredibly euphoric and unbelievably scary feeling all at once. I think the only thing that could make me feel more vulnerable is if I’d told her I loved her and she didn’t say it back.
Like I did to her on our last date.
Holy shit. How fucking stupid was I? Trying to be cool and play by old-school rules when I knew all along that things were different with Beaux. The never-say-I-love-you-back-or-it-doesn’t-mean-the-same-thing philosophy didn’t apply to her. Damn it to hell, if I say it, I mean it, so why did I ever hesitate? Is it because I thought that it was too quick to feel this strongly about some
one? Well, I do.
Now she’s lying in a bed somewhere, not knowing how much I care about her. There’s nothing that’s going to stop me from telling her I love her now.
Nothing.
The ride to the medical facility feels like it takes the same amount of time as the flight: forever. The minute I step foot in the lobby of Landstuhl, I forget all of my aches and pains from the blast, the stitches in my shoulder, and the gash up the back of my calf – all of it – because my body is running on pure adrenaline from the thought that she’s here.
After the rigmarole of the front desk, checking in, getting a visitor’s clearance sticker, it takes everything I have not to scream at the lady behind the desk who I’m sure is sweeter than sugar to just hurry the fuck up because I have a woman upstairs I need to see.
And time is of the essence.
Impatient, I can’t wait any longer as she turns around to call and inform the intensive care unit that Beaux has a visitor. Time is wasting. I ignore the dull throbbing in my head and jog toward the elevators, knowing that I get to see her in mere moments is the only thing I can focus on, each moment overshadowed by the anticipation of the next.
The ding of the elevator as I reach the third floor causes my heart to skip a beat and lodge in my throat as I all but run off the car and toward the nurses’ station in the center of the hallway. As I rush to the desk, my heart thunders in my ears, and my eyes dart all over as the sounds and sights of the ICU ward assault my senses: the sterile smell, the steady beeps from the monitors in the rooms around us on a constant barrage are an immediate reminder of the gravity of the situation.
Yes, I’m going to tell her I love her, tell her I’m sorry, tell her I’m not going to leave her side until she’s discharged, but for the first time, the thought hits me that she might not ever hear it. And then that blinding panic I felt when I was trying to get to her and again when I woke up two days ago hits me with blunt force. My eyes dart furiously around the unit, but the room numbers are obscured by all of the medical carts and paraphernalia. All I want is to see her to clear up all of this unsettled bullshit. Once I can touch her and be reassured by the sight of her chest moving up and down telling me that she’s breathing, then I can ease all of the discord I feel within and deal with concretes.