Limitless

Chapter 39

 I sat quietly in the echoey hallway of the courthouse by myself, listening to muffled sounds coming from the courtroom behind me.  I chewed on my nails and ran my hands up and down the bandages that still covered my arms.  When the nurse pulled them off three days ago, I was horrified to see my tan and what I always thought seemed perfect skin oozing and pink. There were freckles that I had memorized the location of that I knew I would probably never see again. I had the hardest time touching the ugly injury and could hardly bring myself to put ointment of any kind on it or even dab it a little bit with a dry cloth.  I felt as though I hadn’t showered in days simply because when I got in the shower, I struggled to wash my hair without getting shampoo on my forearms, so I hardly scrubbed at all.

Thankfully, due to Liam’s unusually caring nature, I could already see that the burns were getting better.  He would help me take the used bandages off at night and would even put on gloves and help me get some ointment on the wounds before bandaging them up again with a fresh cotton cloth.  Charlie gave me plenty of time off of work.  Louis helped me drive around, and Niall offered to help bathe me.  Even though I politely declined his offer mid-laugh, I was still touched that Niall wanted to help.

We had all gone to see Harry a few times in the hospital, but each time we went to see him he was asleep from the heavy pain medications that they were putting into his system.  I could see the pain etched into his face even when he was completely knocked out, and it killed me that I couldn’t at least keep him company by talking to him or read him a story to get his mind off of the pain.  According to the nurse, he had gotten up and crutched slowly back and forth down the hallway at one point.  ”He asked for one of you guys, but I can’t remember which one it was,” she explained as she watched me sit next to him and place a light kiss on his cheek. 

"Did he ask for a Lou?" Louis asked. 

The nurse frowned.  ”I think so… That sounds about right.” 

"Was it Lou the girl or Lou the boy?" 

The nurse shook her head. “I don’t know to be honest.” 

Louis and I exchanged looks of distress. She was no help. I wanted to grab Harry by the shoulders and shake him awake, yell until he opened his eyes, force him to stare into my face, and wait until he said my name. We waited the whole two hours of visitation for him to move at all or even open his eyes to look at us, but he didn’t any of the days that we were there.

When the ambulance initially picked me up from the fire, they used the information in my wallet to contact my father.  He picked me up from the hospital the day after and took me home to my apartment but got a hotel close by for himself.  He really didn’t come around unless I needed him, so for a while I didn’t understand why he was staying in town - that was, until the courthouse called him.

It amazed me how quickly the law enforcement was about looking up who was at the party and picking me, of all people, out of that list.  I know that me being in the hospital didn’t help me escape the attention, but I was still amazed.  I was upset that today I had to be in the courthouse instead of at the hospital for visitation, but Louis said he would call me immediately if anything happened. I wiped the screen of my phone with my thumb and pushed the home button to look for any notifications.  Nothing. 

It was 12:15 though.  He had been there for 15 minutes and, apparently, nothing happened yet.  My knees began to bounce and I chewed on the inside of my cheek. My whole body tensed up as the door next to me flew open. 

"Louisa, you can come in now," the bailiff said, holding the door for me.  I slowly stood up and walked into the room.  It looked so much larger than usual just because the only people in there were Lucille and my father.  My father looked weary and stressed.  His gaze slowly met mine, but he didn’t smile or anything to comfort me.