Page 89 of Emmett
“Yes.” It may not be the truth, but it isn’t a lie, either. “I’m his husband.”
After what feels to me like another hour of typing and fuckingwaiting, I’m pointed toward an elevator, which I follow up a few floors. Another desk waits for me as I exit, the nurse behind this one directing me to an area nearby laid out with a series of uncomfortable-looking, plastic-upholstered chairs. Only a handful of people sit in the chairs, each seemingly here for someone different, as none of them are waiting together.
I take an empty seat, surrounded on either side by three others, and I drop my head into my hands while I wait to hear something.Anything.
In my peripheral, I see Fowler jogging down the hall, looking disheveled as if he’d just crawled out of bed. The Texan follows closely with a hand on Fowler’s shoulder, looking as if he’d left a party before coming here. Both of them look panicked. Neither of them speak, neither of them look anywhere but to the room directly ahead of them.
I want to follow them into that room; I want to see him with my own eyes, but I’m terrified of what I’ll find. My feet anchor themselves to the ground beneath me and don’t allow me to move. My lungs barely allow me to breathe. My mind struggles to sort through thousands of racing thoughts.
A blue light shines over Emmett’s door, pulsing with a steady beat as a bell chimes both from the room itself and from the nurses’ station that I passed as I entered. The worldslows almost to a stop as I sit immobilized, watching a team of people take off toward that room at arun.
As one of them pushes a large red rolling cart into the room, the Texan pushes Fowler out of it. His arms wrap around his friend’s body and he uses his own to pin Fowler against the wall behind them, as if that embrace is the only thing keeping him standing.
Emmett is dying.
The only person that I care aboutat allin this miserable world is dying; and I can’t do anything. My head drops into my hands once again with a heavy sob.
I led him to this; I pushed him too far, too hard. I should have fought for him when I felt him pulling away from me; I knew how I felt about him weeks before that night, and I should have told him that. Three simple words that I was afraid to give him simply because I was afraid that he would run from them, butIfucking ran fromhiminstead. Just three words and he might have been fine.
‘The Devil has touched you,’my mother cried to me as she packed my bags,‘he wants to make you one of his demons.’
If I’m a demon, Emmett is my angel. He, and he alone, is my salvation.
I’ll do whatever you want,I silently plead with my eyes squeezed closed.I’ll go back to church. I’ll go to confession and vomit up all of my sins. Punish me if you have to, but I’m begging you not to take him.
Agonizing minutes pass before the chaos behind Emmett’s door seems to quiet and almost all of the people who had run inside exit. A few of them look exhausted. One of them looks on the verge of tears. The blue light above thedoor dims and my chest squeezes so tightly that I think my own heart might give out.
Finally, my body allows me to stand, and I hurtle toward one of the nurses as he passes the waiting area that I’ve been trapped in. “The man in that room,” I ask with my hands on his shoulders, “is he okay?”
“You’re the husband?”
“Yes.” I’ve only said it twice, but I’m even starting to believe it myself.
“His condition is serious,” he tells me. “He arrested, but we were able to resuscitate him, and a pump is being placed now to help flush some of the alcohol and opioids from his body.”
“Opioids?”
“Yes sir,” he nods.
“He doesn’t even takeaspirin.”
Pretty boy, what have you done?
I drift toward his room in a stupor, barely absorbing the image coming into view. Emmett lies on his back with one tube extending from his throat as another is placed into his nose. Grey wires extend in several directions that lead to a series of machines behind him, and a pair of IV lines run into his arm. My heart cracks straight down the middle at the sight of him, and everything good he’d given me feels as though it’s seeping out.
My steps falter as a hand pushes hard against my chest and the Texan leans in to my ear, speaking in harsh growl. “Fuck off unless you wanna be on a vent, too.”
“Do whatever you have to do to me,” I tell him. “I’m not leaving.”
“Yeah,” he says with a nod, “ya fuckin’ are, before Colt sees you here. ‘Cause if he figures out what I just figured out,I’m the least of your problems.” His fist balls at his side as he nods to a nearby orderly. “My buddy here needs help finding his way to the parking lot, darlin’, think you can help him out with that?”
“Of course,” she answers. “Right this way.”
“Texan…”
“Three seconds until I lose it, man,” he warns.
I move my gaze to Emmett and the machines which are, for all intents and purposes, keeping him alive. My eyes scan over Colt Fowler as he speaks to someone in a white coat at the entrance of his son’s room. I’ve known the man for more than a decade. I’ve seen him agitated, I’ve seen him laugh, I’ve even seen him enraged; but I’ve never seen him like this. The expression on his face – on his entire being – is that of a profound sadness.