Page 50 of Scars of Anatomy

Whole

The light from the TV casts shadows along the hotel room walls as I mindlessly flip through the channels, hardly paying attention to what’s on the screen. I’m sitting on the bed, propped up against the headboard with a wrap around my chest and a cast on my leg.

After two days in the hospital, they released me.

I don’t remember much from the accident, but the driver who hit me ran the red light at the last second and smashed right into me as I was going through the intersection.

I was in and out of it for a while, only recalling bits and pieces of the ambulance ride, and by the time I was fully conscious they already had me bandaged up and Olivia was at my bedside, scared out of her mind.

The doctors claim I’m lucky to have come out of it with only a couple of broken ribs, a broken leg, a shit ton of bruises, and some road rash.

The bathroom door clicks open and Olivia quietly pads into the room, her vanilla body wash wafting in the air. She’s in an oversized sleep shirt and shorts, her hair damp from her shower as she walks over to her suitcase, neatly placing her clothes from today inside.

She glances over at me, finding me awake. Her eyes drift over to the clock hanging on the wall, and I can see her doing the math in her head to calculate how many hours it’s been since the last time I took my pain meds.

Since we got back from the hospital a few hours ago she’s been taking her role as my nurse very seriously.

It’s like every ten minutes she’s asking me if I’m okay or if I need something, and while I know she’s being helpful, I can’t help but find it extremely frustrating that I can’t do anything myself. It’s aggravating to feel so useless.

Olivia walks over to the desk where she has all my pills neatly lined up next to the papers the hospital provided.

She pops a few of the pill bottles open and shakes out the correct dosages, recapping the bottles after.

Grabbing a water bottle, she walks over to my side of the bed and places it along with the pills on the nightstand.

“Take these,” she urges softly, giving me a small smile before wandering back into the bathroom to brush her teeth and finish getting ready for bed.

I grab the water bottle and uncap it, taking a few swigs before grabbing the pills off the nightstand, one accidentally slipping from my fingers and falling to the floor.

With an aggravated huff, and without thinking, I go to lean over the side of bed to pick it up. Pain rips through my side, and I suck in a sharp breath through my teeth, letting out a curse. “Fuck!”

I hear the faucet turn off in the bathroom and Olivia rushes out, eyes wide, alert. “What’s wrong?”

“Everything!” I snap, all my pent-up emotions bubbling to the surface and boiling over. “Everything is wrong!” I reiterate.

Olivia stares at me, stunned.

After a beat she approaches me slowly, worry and concern flooding her eyes. “Hey,” she coos calmly. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay!” I shout. “My fucking leg is broken!” I gesture to my leg, which is covered in plaster from my foot to midthigh.

“How the hell am I going to play football now? You can’t fully come back from something like this, and no scout is going to want to talk to me when they find out about it! ” I explain, furious.

“You don’t know that,” she says softly, optimistically, making my blood boil further.

In a way—deep down—I wish she’d yell at me, be just as furious. Somehow, I think it would make things easier.

To me, anger is better than pity. I’d rather have someone screaming at me, reminding me of what a fuckup I am, than give me pity.

Pity makes me feel weak, vulnerable, and I hate people seeing me that way.

At least with anger they think I’m strong enough to take it, or that I’m not completely torn down yet.

“Yes, I do! My whole future is down the drain. What the hell am I supposed to do now?” I fight back.

She carefully sits on the edge of the bed, gently placing her hand on my knee. “You’re still getting your degree. You have options.”

I let out a low growl, scrubbing my hands harshly over my face in frustration.

The NFL has been my dream for years; I can’t swallow the fact that it’s all over just yet, and she obviously doesn’t understand that.

She has her whole future ahead of her, all perfectly mapped out and tied up with a fucking decorative bow.

“Hey.” Her thin, cool fingers wrap around my wrists, pulling my hands from my face. “Don’t shut me out. Talk to me,” she begs.

“I don’t need or want to fucking talk, Olivia,” I snap, pulling my hands from her grasp. “Talking isn’t going to fix anything,” I insist.

Hurt flashes across her face. “You’re mad at the world right now. I get it. But—”

I bark out a laugh, cutting her off. “How could you possibly get it?” I argue. “Olivia, you have the perfect fucking life! You have amazing parents and you’re so fucking smart that you’re going to become a cardiac surgeon. You literally have a white picket fence! So don’t tell me you get it .”

Her lips press into a thin line, pain written all over her face at my harsh words. I instantly regret them.

Fucking hell .

I know I’m being a dick, and the tactless words tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop them.

I feared this would happen. That I’d lash out at her and make her my emotional punching bag. Anger always seems to be my default setting. I use it to mask my weakness and not show what I’m really feeling. It makes me feel strong, powerful. In control when I actually feel anything but.

“Fuck, baby.” I grab her wrist as she stands from the bed, ready to walk away. “I’m sorry.”

Reluctantly, she sits back down, refusing to meet my gaze.

“I’m sorry,” I repeat sincerely. I exhale a harsh breath. “It’s just that after all that’s happened between the other day and today, I feel like everything is crashing down around me. I feel like everything I’ve worked so hard for is gone in the blink of an eye. And being here of all places . . .

“As a kid, I always promised myself I’d be something. I wanted to prove everyone wrong. Myself wrong. With football, I thought for once that I was going to be something. Make something of myself. All of my childhood, I felt so unhappy, unstable. I just wanted a life I could finally be proud of.”

Her honey-colored eyes finally meet mine, full of sadness. “I understand,” she says softly, and I bite my tongue about how she’ll never understand.

Sensing my restraint, she stands from the bed once more, and I’m certain she’s about to walk away. I wouldn’t blame her. She should have walked away from me a long time ago, because she deserves better. Not a miserable son of a bitch who can’t do anything right.

Instead of walking away, she places both of her knees on the bed, carefully swinging one of her legs over me, straddling my lap. Instinctively, I place my hands on her hips and urge her to sit down, but she hardly puts any weight on me, scared she’ll hurt me.

She takes my face in her hands, her thumbs lightly stroking my cheeks. “I know you don’t think I understand,” she says, staring deep into my eyes. “But I do. I understand what it feels like to be scared, alone, broken .”

I furrow my brows, wondering when she could have ever felt that way; her life seems perfect.

She nervously chews at her bottom lip, looking contemplative, unsure.

Eventually, she comes to a conclusion. As she sits back, her hands fall from my face to reach for the hem of her shirt. Taking a deep breath, she hesitantly lifts the fabric up and over her head, the oversized T-shirt landing beside us on the mattress.

My heart stops.

Not only are her bare breasts on full display a few inches away from my face, but so is the large scar between them.

Down the center of her chest, running from her collarbones to just below her breasts, is a long, pale pink scar that looks to be a number of years old.

Leaning forward, I press my lips to the center of the scar, dragging my lips down to the end of the line before kissing the path up to the top. I look up at her through my lashes, my eyes asking a million questions.

She grabs my face, planting a soft kiss on my lips.

My hands on her hips travel up her waist, to her ribs, and round her shoulders before gently resting on her neck. “Baby,” I breathe, throat tight as a tornado of thoughts swirl around in my head.

She looks at me, eyes vulnerable. “When I was born,” she starts off shakily, her eyes drifting down to the pad of her finger that’s tracing my collarbone to distract herself.

“I had a heart complication. The first few weeks of my life, I had multiple surgeries on my heart to get it working properly. I was fine for a while, my problems were manageable, but when I turned ten my heart became unrepairable.”

Tears pool in her eyes and she tips her head back to keep them at bay. She grabs her shirt, next to us on the bed, and uses the sleeve to wipe her eyes before draping the fabric over her bare chest, hugging it to her.

“At ten years old I had to have a heart transplant,” she continues.

“I was put on the waiting list, and just when I thought I was never going to get a heart in time, one showed up at the last minute that was a match. The heart they brought in was Cora’s daughter’s.

Her daughter was walking home from school that day and got struck by a car. ”

Tears pour down her cheeks and my chest grows uncomfortably tight.

“They brought her to the hospital and pronounced her brain dead. Cora was absolutely devastated, as any parent would be, but as a nurse she knew she had to act fast and make the toughest decision of her life. She knew her daughter wasn’t going to come back, so she decided to donate her organs to other dying kids who could be saved, and give them a fighting chance.

She didn’t want any kid to go through what her daughter went through, or any parent to go through what she went through. ”

Her tone changes halfway through her last sentence, sounding hard, cynical.

“When I woke up from surgery”—she swallows thickly—“the only person by my bedside was Cora. My parents, they were gone.”

I jerk my head back, utterly confused. “What?”

She wipes away more tears falling from her eyes.

“Stan and Monica, they’re not my real parents.

They’re my adoptive parents,” she confesses, throwing me for a loop.

“My real parents split during the transplant. They claimed it was too much and that they would never be able to afford all my hospital bills.”

Anger bubbles inside my chest. “They can’t do that,” I argue, not knowing how any parent could just up and leave a kid who just came off of the operating table.

A small, bitter laugh escapes the back of her throat.

“They did. After I recovered from surgery I was placed in foster care, but no one wanted a kid with my medical history. Cora wanted to adopt me herself, but she knew she didn’t have the funds or the time with her job to take care of me like someone else could.

But she always stuck by my side, her daughter a piece of me, and finally I found Stan and Monica.

As transplant recipients themselves, they understood and accepted me with open arms.”

A genuine but sad smile makes its way onto her lips. “They adopted me when I was thirteen, and I moved to Georgia with them. Cora came along with me,” she explains. “She feels like her daughter is a large piece of me that she can’t let go of quite yet.”

Oh this girl. My sweet, strong, beautiful girl. I don’t know how I didn’t figure it out sooner. Never in a million years would I have guessed she’d grown up the way she did. That our stories could ever compare.

I grab her face in my hands, bringing her lips to mine in a desperate kiss. I kiss her fervently, conveying just how much I adore her.

“You are so, so strong,” I praise her, placing stray kisses along her neck and shoulders. “I don’t know how you did it,” I confess. Not once has she ever given the slightest hint about her shocking past. Despite all the misfortune, she came out on top, seemingly unaffected.

Now it’s her turn to grab my face, looking me in the eyes. “I didn’t become a prisoner to my past,” she says, voice packed with meaning, her message directed to me. “An unfortunate past isn’t a life sentence.”

I feel as though she just punched me in the gut, knocking some sense into me.

I never looked at it that way. I was always so focused on being such a miserable, angry kid because my mother was such a shitty parent that I never cared to give anyone else a chance.

I was so consumed by my past that I forgot to enjoy the present half of the time.

So completely in awe and mesmerized by her, I reclaim her lips with mine, kissing her with everything I have. I trail my hands all over her body, not missing a single beautiful inch.

If I could, I would flip her over right now and worship every inch of her body, not leaving a single part of her untouched. I want her to feel beautiful, desired, loved. Whole . Because she is so far from broken.

I won’t make love to her right now, though. I’m not sure if I’d even be able to properly with all my injuries, but that doesn’t mean I can’t hold her close and profess my unyielding love for her.

Tenderly, I grab the shirt draped over her chest and remove it, throwing it to the side and exposing her to me once again. I admire her for a moment before leaning back in and pressing my lips to her damaged skin, my hands running up and down her back, sending a shiver down her spine.

She threads her hands through my hair, letting out a small sigh of appreciation.

“So damn beautiful,” I murmur against her skin, kissing every available inch. “I love you,” I breathe against her lips.

She smiles into the kiss. “I love you too.”