Yours: A Standalone Contemporary Romance
Read Yours: A Standalone Contemporary Romance Online
Authors: Jasinda Wilder
Just lost in the sky wondering why
I was a boat stuck in a bottle
Just live for the spin and hope for the win
Going nowhere with no one but me
I was one in a hundred billion
I came to life when I first kissed you
You make me better than I was before
The worst me is just a long gone memory
You put a new heart beat inside of me
I came to life when I first kissed you
The worst me is just a long gone memory
Just lost in the sky wondering why
Everyone else shines out but me
You make me better than I was before
The best me has his arms around you
Yours
By
Jasinda Wilder
Copyright © 2016 by Jasinda Wilder
YOURS
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover art by Sarah Hansen of Okay Creations. Cover art copyright © 2016 Sarah Hansen.
“Yours” copyright © 2015 by Russell Dickerson (BMG Platinum Songs), Parker Welling (Hillbilly Science and Research Publishing, Trailerlily Music), and Casey Brown (Provident Music Group). Lyrics reprinted by permission.
This book is dedicated to nurses the world over: you are the unsung heroes of the medical profession.
Thank you, each of you, for all you do.
Special thanks as well to Russel, Parker, and Casey for writing “Yours”:
I heard a single line in a song— “You put a new heartbeat inside of me” —and felt this story unfold in my mind, cut from whole cloth. Just goes to show the power of good music.
Just lost in the sky wondering why
Pacific Coast Highway, just north of Los Angeles, California
“No—” It comes out as a sob.
“NO.” A denial.
“NO!” A plea.
The sun beats down on me, pounding on the back of my head, burning the back of my neck. Heat radiates in visible, palpable waves from the blacktop and it burns under my shins as I kneel on the side of the highway. Sweat trickles down my temples, slides like a warm, tickling finger between my breasts.
I shake my head. Damp, tangled ringlets of brown hair stick to my cheek and against my lips. I lean forward and shake his inert body.
I pull my hands away. Sticky. Red.
“Ollie. Talk to me. Please. You’re going to be fine. Please.”
I know it’s futile, but still I plead. “Come back to me, Ollie. Don’t leave me.” I beg, but I know only a ghost will hear me.
I look around and see a slow procession of cars inching past us in a slowly moving river of steel and glass, morbid curiosity slowing them. I hear snippets of conversation.
“Mommy, why is that woman crying?”
“Because the man is hurt, sweetie.”
No one stops. No one pulls over. Then I hear sirens, somewhere far away. I collapse onto Ollie, and feel something wet and warm and sticky against my cheek. Oliver’s blood. I taste it in my mouth.
“Ma’am?” A woman’s voice. Small hands on my shoulder, pulling me away. Calm and professional. “Can you sit up, please, ma’am?”
I shake my head and clutch Ollie’s cooling arms.
“I need to take a look at him, ma’am. I need you to come with me, okay?”
“He’s dead. You don’t need to look at him, because he’s dead.” I don’t bother opening my eyes; I just lie on top of Oliver and cling to futility and misery.
Insistent hands, now. Two pairs. Three. Pulling me away forcefully. Something drips from my chin.
“You’re hurt, ma’am. We need to look at your arm.” The same voice, the same woman.
I twist, and look at her. She’s young, blonde, beautiful. Dressed in dark blue paramedic gear, hair in a fishtail braid over her left shoulder. She gently takes hold of my left arm near my elbow and near my wrist. I look down and see that my arm is broken. Very badly, and in more than one place. White bone protrudes from the skin near the middle of my forearm. Her touch reminds me that I am in excruciating agony. I scream.
I scream more for Oliver than because of my own physical pain.
I glance up and see two paramedics placing Oliver in a body bag, closing the zipper, and then lifting him onto the gurney.
“No, no…” I pull away, lurching toward Oliver. “Let me say goodbye, let me—let me say goodbye, please.”
The female paramedic moves with me, somehow anticipating my movements and managing to keep hold of my injured arm with both hands. I use my one good hand to shove her away. I bang my injured arm on the stretcher, but the pain is nothing compared to the ocean of grief, the sea of shock boiling just beneath the surface of my psyche, waiting to yank me under like a riptide.
I know this feeling all too well.
The paramedic lowers the zipper so I can see Ollie’s face. It’s battered, bruised, cut. Part of his face is missing. He was so beautiful, but now…death has made him ugly. But I don’t care. I kiss his forehead, the only part that is strangely untouched.
“I love you, Ollie. I love you. God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” My legs shake and give out, and then I’m on the ground. “I’m so sorry.”
Hands are there to help me up. I breathe deeply, because now my own training kicks in, and I force myself to my feet, force myself to remain upright. I shudder, brushing away a lock of Oliver’s hair, black with strands of premature gray. I used to call him Pep, short for Pepper, joking that when the gray took over completely, I’d start calling him Salty.
So much skill, so much bravery. All of it gone. Snatched in an instant. His life over in milliseconds.
I bend over once more, kissing his forehead. “Goodbye, Oliver.”
The men glance at me, and I nod. Then I watch as they close the body bag once more.
Orange cones, strobing lights, sirens, flares. Police officers direct traffic, a fire truck and an EMS rig park at angles around the accident scene to block it off from rubber-neckers and gawkers. A few feet away is what remains of our car, overturned, smoking, totalled. Further down the freeway is the tipped-over semi that slammed into us. I see other cars, more ambulances and police cruisers, more flares and cones, another team of medics is tending to someone else.
The scene is a mess, a fucking mess.
I’m led to the back of an ambulance, helped up and in, and I sit on the bench. The blonde EMS woman is examining my arm. “Can you tell me your name?”
“Niall Emory James.” Here comes the shock. I feel it rolling through me, but I don’t fight it.
“How old are you, Niall?”
“Thirty-two. My husband’s name is Oliver Michael James—was…was Oliver Michael James. He is—he was a surgeon with Doctors Without Borders. And I’m in shock, I believe.”
“That’s understandable. Does anything else hurt besides your arm?” She’s very good, this medic. Keeping me talking while she works on my arm. Immobilizing it until we get to the hospital. It’s too badly broken to be set here.
“No. Just my arm.” I speak, but it feels like my lips are thick and frozen, as if the words are tumbling out of my mouth unbidden.
Her voice is distant. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“A semi. Somebody cut us off, clipped our front end, and I overcorrected. I was driving. I wasn’t paying attention. We were arguing. Something stupid. Not a real argument, just…one of those tiffs you get into when you’re both stressed, you know? He wanted the radio on The Highway, I wanted it on Hits One.
So stupid.
I wasn’t paying attention. The semi smashed into us, and we just went—flying. Hit another car. That one up there.” I point, and my finger shakes. “I don’t know. We rolled. When we stopped, we were both conscious. I tried to get him out. I knew I shouldn’t move him, but he was bleeding and I had to save him, I had to—I tried to—I had to save him, and I couldn’t. His femoral artery was nicked, and he had severe cranial trauma, and—and internal bleeding too, I think. I tried. I tried…But I couldn’t save him.”
I look down at my hands. They’re red. Coated in crimson. There is a layer of thick dark red under my fingernails. Crusted blood has dried red around my cuticles. The wrinkles on my wrist are white creases in the layer of effluvia. I touch my face, tracing the tacky gore on my cheek, and in the strands of my hair.
“You couldn’t have saved him, Niall. I saw him. Okay? There was nothing you could have done. There’s nothing anyone could have done. Even if you’d had him in a hospital, I don’t think he would have made it.” She’s done with my arm for the moment, and now she has a towel and she’s wiping my face. Cleaning away the worst of Oliver’s blood.
“Emily—you guys ready?” The gruff male voice of the paramedic looking in through the open back doors of the rig.
“Yeah, take us out.”
I know I’ll cry rivers of tears. But right now, I can’t. I can only sit and feel the sting of tears behind my eyes waiting to be released, and feel the raging inferno of pain that’s still distant somehow.
It’s not real. It’s still not real. I know it will become real eventually, but right now Oliver is just somewhere else. I’ll be waiting for him to come home, but he won’t. He’s not dead, yet. Not in my head.
“Oliver, he’s…he’s a donor. An organ donor.”
“Saving lives even when he’s gone,” she says.
She understands.
“He had the most beautiful soul. His heart…he lived to help other people. Every beat of his heart was…for someone else. I hope his heart goes to someone good.”
I was a boat stuck in a bottle
The British Virgin Islands
I shouldn’t do this. I
really
should not be doing this. My doctors, an army of lawyers, shit, even Leanne would tell me not to fucking do this.
Which, of course, is why I’m going to do it anyway.
I’ve been standing on this rock cliff for the past ten minutes, timing the swell, watching the angry, roiling, spraying surf gush and rise and fill the tidal pool below, watch it drain back out, revealing a keyhole archway leading out of the pool and into the open ocean beyond. It’s goddamned suicide, this jump. The surf is going to be mad, the undertow murder. The open archway is
maybe
six or seven feet across, with unscalable walls of vicious rock on every side. If I mistime the jump, I’ll get churned into toothpaste. If I can’t hold my breath long enough, I’ll get churned into toothpaste. If I can’t swim hard enough to get through the keyhole, I’ll get sucked under and churned into toothpaste. It’s no fucking wonder I shouldn’t be doing this.
My nerves are jangling.
My heart is thumping dangerously hard.
I watch the swell rise and fall twice more. Then I take three deep breaths, hold the fourth, and jump as the swell reaches its apex. I kick as hard as I can, straining my arms with everything I’ve got, diving deeper so I don’t crack my skull on the arch. I feel the undertow pulling me forward, through the opening. I feel the water churning all around; I hear the muffled echoing thunder of the surf crashing above me. The water is white, nearly opaque, and I can’t see more than a few feet in any direction.
I’m swimming for all I’m worth, feeling my heartbeat ratcheting to dangerously high levels. I have to surface. I have to breathe. The longer I go without oxygen, the harder my heart has to work, and making my heart work any harder than necessary is complete foolishness.
Or, at least, that’s what the lab coats tell me.
But fuck ’em.
I keep swimming until the churning fades, until the crashing thunder of the surf quietens, until the undertow is lessened. I let myself drift upward, let my head break the surface and then blink the brine out of my eyes. I twist, tread water, and look back.