The Sun and the Moon [Wattys 2015 winner]

Chapter 26: Heartbeat

Hours later

"Amelia," Ryan rasped, as he opened his groggy green eyes.

I had spent hours at the hospital with Jennifer, waiting for news about Ryan's condition. I called into work to beg off due to an emergency, then checked my messages so many times that my phone died. I had forgotten the phone charger and ended up staring at the posters on the walls, flipping through magazines, and jumping with a start anytime anyone opened the door. I was wired from caffeine from too much coffee. Bad coffee, not like Ryan's amazeballs coffee. Ugh.

My Sun God touched every part of my life.

During the hours that we waited, Jennifer and I talked a little bit, not awkwardly, but there were long periods of silence since we were both nervously waiting for news. I found out that she had come home a week early from college because she had arranged her classes so that she had a long break. She told me that she wanted to teach kindergarten and was working on getting her teaching credential. She had stayed up late last night talking with Ryan and they had lost track of the time. Then he went out surfing this morning, early, at the south jetty of the Ventura Harbor, hoping to get in a session before work at Southwinds.

I knew where the harbor was, an area with shops and restaurants on one side, but several rocky jetties on the other side to protect the boats moored in the harbor. Apparently the area had amazing surf, but it was very dangerous. Even if you knew the area well, you could still get hurt. Jennifer told me that the area is really shallow and has hollow waves, which made it attractive to surfers, but you could get slammed on the shore. A really famous surfer got his neck broken there recently.

I didn't want to think about that.

After a long, long time, we were told that Ryan was out of surgery and they were moving him to another room.

Then we waited a long, long time and we were told that we could visit him.

We went into the room together, instinctively holding hands. Ryan was lying in a bed, asleep, with machines beeping around him. There were wires and and IV and things around him. I had no idea what most of it was. But I realized that one of the machines broadcast the steady beat of his heart, and this soothed me.

It had been my experience in hospitals that people normally looked smaller, diminished, when they were lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by medical equipment. Not Ryan. He was so tall and muscular, with his broad chest and defined biceps that he took up the whole bed, and he looked beautiful. And while he was asleep and was bandaged up, he still looked strong.

He had a bandage on his temple, some cuts and bruising on his face, his arm in a cast, cuts on his other arm and hands, and apparently some broken ribs that I could not see under the blanket. While he was pretty beat up, and was unconscious when they took him to the hospital, the doctor told us that the prognosis was good.

Hope.

I needed something to hold on to.

I decided to hold on to his hand.

I waited for him, by his bed, gently stroking his hand and looking at his handsome sleeping face.

Jennifer stayed with me the whole time. It was heartbreaking to realize that she had no one else to call for him, except me, and perhaps, Yoda. They had no parents. And Ryan told me that he was estranged from his aunt after battling her for custody of his sister. I didn't know if there were any other family members. After a while, when she was falling asleep in the chair, I sent her home and told her that I would stay there until she came back.

I didn't know how much later it was when he finally opened his eyes. While I normally lost any sense of time with him, this was something entirely different. It was like I was willing him to get better, willing him to recover, willing him to be my Ryan again.