A Sweet Disaster

Chapter 14

Bright lights, white lights.

Surgeon masks and metal tools.

The beeping of machinery.

Words like “hemorrhage” and “bleeding”.

Katherine asks, sounding so far away, “Is he going to be okay?”

The doctors give each other looks. One of them reply, “We don’t know.”

Wheeled into the operating room. More lights, more pain. The sharp, metal objects remind him so sharply of the knives Johnson used.

Stephanie. Is she going to be okay?

Gabriel didn’t know when he slipped under. But when he did, he was glad for it.

Steph awoke on a hospital bed.

Unlike those characters in novels, where they wake up from an accident and it all takes some time coming back, the whole incident was etched freshly in her mind. The pain, the screaming. Gabriel bursting in like her hero except that he wasn’t supposed to get hurt.

The morphine they’d given her was lingering in her veins, bringing on a sense of lethargy. Well, it was a million times better than when she’d been fully under it. Trapped, paralyzed, in a woven web of nightmarish dreams that made her want her to curl up into a ball and hide.

Trying to sit up, Steph gave a gasp of pain before realizing that there were controls at the side of the bed for that. A pale puckered finger pressed the button for her, and with some degree of shock Steph realized those fingers were hers.

It couldn’t have been that long. She couldn’t have been out cold for that long. The date on the calendar said that it was the seventeenth of June, just three days before her eighteenth birthday. It’d been the fourteenth when she’d lain down on that floor with Gabriel, convinced she was about to die.

The door opened and Katherine stepped in. The moment she saw that Steph was awake, she gave a small scream and rushed over, peppering her with kisses.

“Oh my god!” she all but shouted. “You’re awake!” Katherine, who was usually so composed and in control, was hysterical.

“Where’s Gabriel?” Steph croaked hoarsely. By the way Katherine bit her lip and avoided her eyes, Steph knew something was wrong.

She swallowed the dread in her throat and changed the subject because she couldn’t face it either.

“You look bad.” It was true. Katherine had dark circles under her eyes, and her hair was all fluffed up and messy, not at all its usual glossy curtain.

A blinding light caught her in the eye and wincing, Steph peered down the window. There was a huge crowd gathered below, mostly the press, clicking away with their cameras and screaming and shouting. Flinching, Steph turned away.

“I haven’t been getting much sleep,” Katherine admitted, sitting down at the foot of Steph’s bed. “I’ve been so worried about you and Gabriel, and…”

“Our relationship.”

“Yes.” Katherine didn’t bother hiding it.

“I’m really sorry about that, by the way. It just… happened.”

“We’ll talk about it once the press is gone,” Katherine promised.

“So… how is Gabriel? Can I see him?”

“He’s in the ICU. No visitors are permitted yet, but… but…” Katherine burst into tears and Steph realized how much harder it had to be for her, since he was her son. “The doctors said he might lose his memory,” she said, crying. “He might not remember me, or you, or anyone of us for that matter.”