I floated in and out of consciousness for days.
That's what they told me, anyway. I don't remember much about it, but the little I did had worked just like it did in the movies.
Black screen. Heatbeats, thump, thump. Blurry lens slowly coming into focus. Peyton's face, Jake's face, both hovering over my hospital bed. Furrowed brows, tension marring their features, they talked at me, but it was warped and unintelligible, a bunch of Charlie Brown's Wah, Wah, Wahs. Beep beep beeping machines, fade to black.
Other people came too. Daniel and Faith prayed. Beth wrung her hands. Alice was wheeled in, looking pretty tore up, her leg in a cast. Mrs. Bishop cried a lot. Miguel and Miranda, weird. Buck came often, made a lot of noise and shuffled about, stuck his face right into mine and yelled my name, telling me to wake up. His beer and cigarette breath was rank in my face, but it didn't matter, I was happy to see him. Maybe mom came too, but I must've missed her.
But no matter who came, and who left, Peyton and Jake were constants, two of my favorite faces in the entire world, always there. I felt them night and day, and to see them, all I had to do was open my eyes.
Sometimes they'd be asleep, side by side on the couch or one on each side of my bed. Sometimes they'd just sit and stare at me. Sometimes they'd whisper to each other, their heads bent close, and sometimes, they'd argue quietly.
Then one time, the world came into focus and stayed that way.
Peyton was at my bedside, his eyes closed, his head drooping into his chest. And damn, he was looking scruffy- I never realized he grew that much facial hair.
"Peyton."
His head snapped up and he stood so fast that his chair went clattering to the floor. "Layla! Can you see me?"
"Of course I can see you. What the hell?"
Still, his eyes were disbelieving. "Layla, blink."
I did.
"Blink twice."
I blinked twice, but he still stood there, gawking. I shifted my body. "Never mind the blinking, can you help me up? My back is killing me."
All the color returned to Peyton's face in one big rush. He rushed toward me as if he was coming in for a hug, but he pulled himself back. "No, don't move. Not yet. Let me call the doctor."
The doctor came and asked me a lot of stupid questions. My name, the current year, the number of fingers he was holding up... Then he flashed lights in my eyes and poked and prodded at my body. Beside him, a nurse took notes.
Once he was satisfied, he looked down at me with a serious expression and went on and on about the Glascow Coma Scale, hemorrhaging, and
sub-something hema-whatevers until I tuned him out.
It wasn't like I was going to understand what he was talking about anyway. But Peyton would, and if it was important, he'd tell me. So instead, I surveyed my surroundings. The hospital room was standard, painted in blues and tans, with a window looking out to the parking lot. Nothing special.
My arms were full of half bleeding holes with tubes coming out of them, but both were there and more or less intact. I lifted the blanket. Both legs accounted for, but the left one was bandaged up from ankle to thigh, some blood seeping through the gauze.
But wait, what's this?
A tube snaked out from between my legs and lead to a bag tied to the side of the bed. It was full of yellow fluid.
When the doctor finally left, I spoke to Peyton. "Is that a bag of my pee?"
Peyton glanced down. "Yeah. Catheter."
Color flooded my cheeks. "Well, don't look at it!"
"It's just pee," he said.
"Stop looking at it! And why am I so hungry? Haven't they been feeding me? What's wrong with my leg?"
"No you haven't eaten, and your leg's not the issue, they're just superficial injuries."
Later I'd find out that my shin barely had any skin left on it, but I guess that was superficial compared to the skull fracture I was nursing.
Skull. Fracture. Can you imagine? Apparently I'd bled out of my ears. But Peyton pooh-pooh'd the skull fracture too. Turns out they'd been worried about brain damage, and if I hadn't woken up, exploratory brain surgery was being thrown around as an option.
Brain. Surgery.
Exploratory.
I had to get the hell out of there, and fast. "Take me home, Peyton, I want to leave. I feel fine. No! More than fine, I feel great. Well, come on, don't just stand there, help me!"
"Not yet. It's good that you're up, but the next 24 hours are important. They'll want to do more tests too."
"I told you. I feel fine."
"Only because you're pumped full of morphine."
As if on cue, a nurse pushed a steel gurney full of crap into the room. Chit chatting, she changed out my pee bag and used a syringe to push some more liquid into my IV bag. Almost immediately, I started to feel drowsy again.
"Don't let them cut me open, Peyton."
He smiled with the sweetest sadness in his eyes and sat back down at my bedside. "I promise."
As I dozed off, I thought I saw tears in his eyes.
***
The next time, I woke up to a pair of bright green eyes, right in my face. Jake sat with his chin resting on the bed, and trailed his fingertip over the bridge of my nose, back and forth, back and forth.
I wrinkled it. "Why are you touching my nose?"
His gaze roved all over my face. "Everything else looks like it hurts," he mumbled.
Crap, I'd forgotten about my face. "Is it really bad?"
He shrugged. "It's not good."
"Give me your phone."
"Maybe tomorrow," he said.
"No, I want to see it now."
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and hesitated. "Wait, let me tell you first."
I braced myself.
"So first of all, the whites of your eyes? They're not white anymore, they're red. All of it. But don't worry, you can't really see that because your eyes are pretty much swollen shut. Pressure from the spinal fluid building up in your brain or something."
My jaw dropped.
But Jake was Jake. "Everything else on your face is either blue, black or red and your entire face is about twice its normal size. And they stapled some skin shut. Right here," he touched the side of his own face where right by the hairline.
I whimpered.
He slipped the phone back into his pocket. "We'll look some other time. Don't worry about it though, it's kind of sexy in a Vampire-zombie kind of way."
We laughed a little bit, then he put his chin back on the bed and touched my hair.
"What happened?" I asked.
The last thing I remembered was jumping the saddle. Jake told me the rest.
I'd managed to tackle Alice, but I'd missed the small gap between the barn and the shed that I'd been aiming for. My miscalculation sent us slamming into the side of the barn, and that was probably where I'd hit my head.
Luckily, Alice realized what I'd been trying to do and had dragged the both of us in, but her leg had been trampled in the process.
I listened quietly. After he finished explaining, Jake fell silent too.
"She meant to kill Alice," I said finally.
Jake said nothing.
If you make excuses for her right now...
He wouldn't look at me when he spoke next. "I know."
"What's gonna happen to Charlotte?"
"Dunno yet." Then he looked at me and changed the subject. "I thought you were going to die. Don't do that to me again."
"Would you have been sad if I died?"
He frowned, his beautiful features twisting ugly. "What the fuck kind of question is that?"
"A stupid one," I sighed. It was. Me, breaking out the passive aggression again.
He opened his mouth as if to snap at me, then shut it again. "Okay, I don't know how to do this boyfriend-girlfriend stuff. What am I not doing right? Tell me and I'll fix it."
Well, I didn't want to tell him to do anything, and I didn't want him to have to fix anything. I wanted him to do things (by things, I meant exactly what I wanted him to do and when) because he knew me and wanted to do it, out of his heart. I also knew that was absolutely ridiculous. Relationship-ing was hard.
I took a deep breath. "For starters, you don't trust me."
"Trust you with what? Why are we even having this conversation right now? You're hospitalized. You're pissing into a bag."
We both tried not to giggle, but potty humor did us in every time.
"Do you know, I'm not even pissing? It's just being drained out of me or something."
He grinned.
"Anyway," I said, refusing to be distracted from the conversation. "Trust is important."
Because I didn't want to be with him anymore if we couldn't trust each other with everything. I wanted more that having fun and making each other laugh, having sex and hanging out. I wanted everything. Or nothing.
Wait should I be saying this out loud?
His mouth set into a tight line. "Trust you with what?" he asked again.
"Tell me what happened with Electra Beaudry," I whispered.
Jake shut his eyes hard at the mention of her name.
"If you believe that I care about you, you should be able to tell me everything," I whispered.
He opened his eyes, a wry smile playing on his lips. "You know that's not it. The real reason you want to know is because you want to understand him."
When shock prevented me from answering immediately, he smiled. That time, it was a full smile, one of those ones that reached all the way to his eyes. "I know you better than you think I do."
He leaned back into his chair and stretched his arms above his head.
Then, something behind me caught his attention.
I turned around. "Peyton."
He'd cleaned up and stood there, freshly showered and shaved, his hands deep in his pockets. He tried to smile. "Feeling better?"
How much had he heard?
I nodded.
He stepped into the room. "I just talked to the doctor. Tests look good, you can go home tomorrow."
"Tomorrow? But, but... I thought my skull was cracked."
He winced. "It is. Fractured. But there's no brain injury associated with it, so believe it or not, it'll heal itself."
"Just leave it? No cast or anything?"
He shook his head at me then looked at Jake. Neither said anything, but it seemed like an understanding had been reached beforehand because Jake took off. I tried to catch his eye as he left, but he refused me.
Peyton took a seat at the edge of my bed and spoke after a pregnant pause. "I'm leaving."
I frowned. "What? When?"
"Now. I came to say goodbye."
"What do you mean? You can't leave now."
He looked at me in a way that told me he didn't want to go, didn't want to leave me. If he could've, he would've stayed beside me, always. Well, take me with him, more like, just like he always wanted to. "I have to take care of Lottie," he said softly.
"Oh." It was all I could manage.
He hesitated, his eyes downcast. "Roland Huntington wants to press charges for attempted..." He couldn't say the word. "But I'd like to have her committed to a psychiatric institution instead, if that's okay with you."
I took his cold hand in mine. "Whatever you want to do is okay with me, Peyton." I meant it. Locked up was locked up, and I hated to admit it, but if it were entirely up to me, I wouldn't have forced him to do even that. Thank God it wasn't. "Will Alice's daddy give you trouble?"
"That's why I'm leaving now. Old Man Beaudry won't be able to hold off the authorities for much longer. I should've left sooner, but I couldn't go without seeing you wake up. Huntington will be easier to reason with once Lottie's..."
"Shhh... I don't care. Whatever you want to do, Peyton. I only want you to be okay."
He nodded, more to himself, than anything. "I'm-"
"Don't apologize to me. It's not your fault. None of this is!"
I don't know if he believed me, but some of the tension left his shoulders. He stared at me for a while longer looking like he wanted to say more, but he kissed my hand and stood up instead. "I'll call you."
Tears blurring my vision, I nodded and wondered if he really would.
And it tore my heart to shreds to see him turn and walk away, all alone to carry the the world on his shoulders.
On his way out, he stopped and talked to Jake, who'd been waiting in the hallway. "Tell her everything," he'd said.
And when Jake came back in, he did.
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