No Love Allowed

Twenty-Two

Sehun gasped awake, then groaned as pain exploded in his ribs. He grabbed his left side and rolled into the pulsing beneath his palm. Right about the same time, a dull throb began behind his eyes. He shut them again. His body felt like he had bounced off a brick wall after running full speed into it. In the distance, in between the pounding beats in his head, he heard someone call for the doctor.

It might have been a minute or several hours later when sure hands rolled him onto his back again. His breathing went from shallow and fast to deep and easy after a needle shot in his arm. The tight muscles of his face eased with the dulling of the nerves sending protests to his brain.

"Sehun," someone said. "Can you hear me?"

He nodded once. With less pain came more tiredness. All he wanted was to go back to sleep. What the heck had happened that had him feeling like crap?

The numbness allowed for memories to flood in. His birthday party. The argument with his father. The crazy drive down the mountainside. The crash.

Eyes popping open, he sat up without thinking. Just as fast, hands grabbed his shoulders and applied pressure. He looked around at the unfamiliar faces. Two women in sky blue scrubs and a man in a white coat.

"Where am I? Where's Suzy?"

"Sehun," the man said in a calm but firm tone. "You are in the hospital. Do you remember the car crash?"

Losing patience he didn't have to begin with, he pushed back against the nurses holding him down. "That's why I'm asking about Suzy." He gritted his teeth as the doctor ran a penlight over his eyes. "There was a girl with me." He reached for her full name before it slipped away. "Sooji Bae. Is she all right?"

"Sehun, I'm going to need you to calm down while I finished my examination," the doctor continued as if his rising panic wasn't about to rip his heart out of his chest.

He grabbed the lapels of the doctor's white coat. "Then tell me what happened to Suzy!"

"Sehun, chill!"

It was Chanyeol's voice that allowed him to let go of the doctor. One of the nurses already had a needle out, no doubt filled with a sedative. Taking deep breaths that ended with a slight twinge of pain, he tried his best not to run out of the private room. The doctor adjusted his coat and returned the penlight to his chest pockets while the nurse put away the needle.

Sehun turned to where Chanyeol sat in a corner of the room. He still wore his tux, but the bow tie and jacket were gone and the sleeves of his dress shirt were rolled up. Based on the light slanting in form between the blinds at the window beside Chanyeol, it wasn't his birthday anymore.

With a frown firmly in place, Chanyeol said, "Why don't you listen to the good doctor before we start talking about Suzy? A couple of minutes. Can you do that?"

Of course he couldn't! He needed to know if Suzy was all right. But instead of voicing protestations that would have gotten him the doctor. The nurses had left to give them privacy.

The doctor nodded his thanks to Chanyeol, then studied Sehun. "Besides a couple of bruised ribs and a mild concussion, I can't find anything else accident related. No internal bleeding or broken bones commonly associated with driving into a tree. Consider yourself lucky."

"I'll consider myself lucky when I get the news about Suzy," he muttered under his breath, his impatience coming back.

The doctor lifted the chart at the end of the end and started writing. "I'm prescribing you a week's worth of pain medicines to help ease your breathing. Your ribs will remain sore for a while. I'm also recommending that you stay overnight for additional tests and observation. If nothing comes up, you'll be able to go home tomorrow morning at the earliest."