“I can’t.” Panic raced through my veins, leaving fire in its wake.
“Why not? I wasn’t crazy about the idea in the beginning, but it’s clear you two are good for each other. You get one another in a way I’m not sure anyone else does.”
Bile surged up my throat, and I swallowed it down. “I can’t care about her and lose her. I can’t.”
Nash stilled. “Caden…”
“I’ve been down that road. It broke something in me. I don’t know that I’m built to let someone in like that ever again.” Especially someone who was already at risk like Grae. Her diabetes meant any one of a million different factors could send her over the edge.
Nash stared at me, breathing hard. “I can’t imagine what you went through losing Clara—”
“Don’t,” I clipped.
“You have to talk about this. About her. This, the shit with your family, it’s destroying you. And if you’re not careful, it’ll ruin the best thing to ever happen to you.”
That invisible vise tightened around my rib cage again. I felt trapped. I couldn’t let myself go there with Grae, but I couldn’t lethergo either. No matter what direction I moved in, petrifying fear awaited.
My lungs burned as black spots danced in front of my vision.
The ambulance sirens blared as we took each turn as quickly as possible, but my ears had grown numb to it over the past twenty minutes. My body had lost all feeling as I sat contorted in my seat in the front of the rig.
I couldn’t risk taking my eyes off Grae. As if my gaze not faltering was somehow keeping her alive. Breathing. But barely.
She’d turned a color that almost matched her name, and all I could think about was how Clara had looked as she passed. The way her hand had gone limp in mine when she ceased to be.
I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood. Grae couldn’t die. The Universe wouldn’t be that cruel.
“Heart rate’s dropping,” the EMT in the back yelled.
“What does that mean?” I asked, panic gripping my voice in a stranglehold.
The EMT next to me pressed his foot down on the accelerator. “That we have to move.”
My breath caught in my lungs as a series of beeps sounded, and the EMT in the back cursed as she pulled things out of drawers.
“Almost there,” the guy next to me said.
Tires screeched as he turned into the hospital parking lot. He gunned it to the emergency room, skidding to a stop.
An alert sounded from the back.
“She’s coding,” the woman shouted.
The back doors of the ambulance flew open to people with scrubs. “Get her to trauma three.”
The EMT climbed right on top of the gurney as they rolled it out and began chest compressions as a doctor covered Grae’s mouth with something.
I stumbled out of the ambulance, running after them. A woman stepped in front of me as we reached a set of double doors. “You can’t go back there. I’m sorry.”
“I’m with her. She’s my—” I couldn’t finish that sentence. My what? My friend? That didn’t come close to cutting it. Grae was my whole world.
The dark skin around the woman’s eyes crinkled in empathy. “The doctors need to work on her.”
“Please.” My voice cracked, tears filling my eyes. “I need to know she’s okay.”
The woman squeezed my shoulder. “Let me try to get an update for you. Wait here.”
I stepped to the side of the wide hallway as she disappeared. The chaos of the emergency room was just background noise. The only thing I heard was the pounding of my heart and the roaring of blood in my ears.
