Authors: Chris Van Hakes
An upside down Oliver appeared in front of my face and I said weakly, “Hi.”
“Hi. How are you?” he said in a hushed tone, his forehead wri
nkled with worry.
“They cut off my favorite tights.”
“Yeah, well, those are my favorite legs under them,” he said, his forehead wrinkled with worry, but smiling at me.
I closed my eyes as a tear ran down the side of my face. A blue curtain moved and he left. I heard him tal
king to the other people in the room.
When he came back into view, hovering over me, I opened my eyes again and said, “Oliver, could you leave?”
“Leave?” His voice boomed through the sterile room. “I’m not leaving. I’m helping.”
“I really don’t want you to see me like this.”
“But I want to fix this. I can do this, Laney.”
“Please leave? Please?”
There was more murmuring, and Oliver shuffled past a curtain, or at least I thought he did, since I couldn’t see him from my limited vantage point, and I relaxed as much as I could, unable to move my head or my body. I exhaled in relief.
I was grilling Ursula, who was sitting impatiently in the waiting room, Michael’s arm slung around her. “So, she fell off her bike? And then the car hit her?”
“They said her shoelace got stuck in her chain, and she couldn’t move her foot, and then she toppled over on Sixtieth Street, and that’s when the car hit her.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“I know,” Ursula said miserably. “But it’s just her leg that was broken.”
“Her face looked like she ate gravel,” I said, and Ursula added, “That too. Her whole left side.”
“I can’t believe she wouldn’t let me help her,” I said into my lukewarm coffee.
“Of course she wouldn’t,” Ursula said, and then she smiled and patted my arm. “That’s a good thing. Trust me. That means you’re more to her than a fixer.”
I grimaced. “There was nothing to fix with Laney in the first place.”
“You wanted to,” Ursula said. “I could see it. You were stage directing her life.”
“How?”
I said.
“Her tights?
Her hair? Cliff?”
“Cliff!”
“The point is, she has to fix her own problems. You can’t help.”
“I can help
today.
”
“No.”
“But she was run over! By a car! And wheeled into
my
ER.”
“You hardly own the ER. There were three other doctors in there. What were you going to do b
esides see her naked and vulnerable?”
“Help her. Heal her.”
Ursula shook her head. “Any one of your colleagues could do that.”
“Then what can I possibly do for her?” I said miser
ably.
“Maybe that’s what you have to figure out,” Ursula said, and laid her head on her husband’s shou
lder.
“Are you here to set me free, Dr. Webber?” I said to Oliver, who pushed my wheelchair to the parking lot. I tilted my head back and fluttered my lashes at him, and he said, “I can’t believe they let you leave without an overnight stay.”
“I refused. It’s my right.”
“You look like hell, Lane,” he said as he looked away.
“There goes my modeling career, I suppose,” I said, and then his arms wrapped under me as he helped me into the backseat of M
ichael’s Volvo, since Oliver had walked to work. I winced and tried to claw his hands off of me and tried not to cry all at the same time.
“
God,
you’re a baby. It’s just a little road rash and a broken leg. Jesus,” he said as he shook his head at me.
“Yeah, tell that to the Percocet!” I yelled at him, since he was outside the car again, walking around it to the driver’s seat. “Are you sure you can just leave work like this to help me get home?” I said when he was settled in front.
“I’m sure,” he said. He adjusted the mirror and I saw his admonishment in the rearview before he adjusted it again, and then we were driving home.
“Oh
,
” I said when we got to the Victorian as I stared at the three flights of stairs up. “What am I going to do now?”
“I’m going to carry you up,” Oliver said.
“No. Oh God, no,” I said, and I started to move toward the first step when his arm wrapped around my back and he said, “You’re not walking up those stairs with a broken leg.”
“I’m going to scoot up, backwards.
Very slowly.”
“No.”
“Wait, I thought I was a baby.”
“Yeah, well, babies shouldn’t climb stairs.”
“I don’t want your help,” I said helplessly.
“You need it. Face it.”
“And what are you going to do every time I need to leave my apartment? Maybe I should stay with Michael and Ursula. This hasn’t been well planned.”
“You’d rather stay with newlyweds than let me help you up some stairs?”
“Yes,” I said firmly.
“Honestly.”
“Fine. Carry me upstairs, but just this once,” I said. “I’ll talk to Mary about fixing the elevator later.” Oliver rolled his eyes, and then he lifted me up and lurched up three flights of stairs while I prayed for my life that we didn’t tumble backwards.
Oliver regained his breath as he bent over the kitchen counter, gasping, and then made it over to the sofa where he’d laid me, covered me with blankets and pillows and brought me a glass of water with a straw. He settled in the armchair and said, “You scared the hell out of me, Lane. Don’t do that again.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“I’m serious. I threw up all over myself and fainted when I saw you. I was a mess. You wouldn’t let me help, my colleagues wouldn’t let me help,
I got kicked out for—”
“You got kicked out?”
He nodded. “You know, they had it under control. And you didn’t want me there, and you were obviously uncomfortable. The point is, I couldn’t help you. I was no hero.”
I softened, just looking at him there, completely hel
pless. “You just carried me up three flights of stairs. You drove me home. You filled my prescription. You told me I looked like hell instead of lying to me. You helped.”
He shook his head. “Not like I help patients. Not like you saved me.”
“I saved you?”
“You say I have a hero complex, but I’m the one who needed sa
ving. You fixed me.”
“How?”
I said through tears. “How could I possibly fix you?”
“You just want me. You don’t want anything else from me. You don’t want me to save you. You don’t care that I was in love with my future sister-in-law or that I’m a complete asshole most of the time. You just wanted me, like I was.”
“Yeah, well.” I wiped the snot off my face. “I want that too. For myself.”
His face fell. “You have that. I just want you. I know you said you don’t love me, but I don’t accept that. Because the way I feel about you, I would do almost an
ything to not feel like this, to go back to being apathetic about women, to thinking what I felt for Mia was more than a misguided attempt to make myself feel better about my life. I don’t like knowing that you can wreck me by falling off a bicycle in the middle of a busy street. I don’t like that you’ve got part of me, forever, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” I said as my voice cracked.
“You idiot, I love you. You don’t have to like it, but there it is. You’re my best friend, I love you, I’ve loved you since I threw that phone at you and you didn’t push me away, and I’m never going to stop. I can’t.
“Say something. Please say something, Laney,” he said.
“You don’t love me,” I said.
“I do,” he said, exasperated, kneeling in front of the sofa and putting his hands on my face gi
ngerly.
“No.” I shook my head. “You want me to pin back my hair and wear different clothes and be less of a doo
rmat.”
“But those help you! You like those sugge
stions.”
“Yeah, but I want you to want me even when I’m a mess, not when I’m the cleaned up version of me that you like.”
“That’s just stupid. Wanting you to be a better person is bad?”
“No. It’s not bad. It’s sweet and caring and lovely, and not at all what I want. I don’t want you to fix me.”
“I’m
not
fixing you. I just want to help you.”
“I don’t want that kind of help. I want something more,” I said, sobbing full-force now.
“That’s what you have to say to me? You don’t want me?” he said, standing up, and I shrugged, unable to find the courage to repeat it, because I wasn’t sure of anything.
He stormed out of my apartment, and I pulled the soft grey bla
nket he’d laid over me up to my chin and cried.
“I see your problem. He carried you up three flights of stairs, tucked you in, told you
you saved him, that you were his best friend, and then he said he would love you forever, no matter what,” Emily said. “How ruthless. So of course you broke his heart.”
“You don’t understand,” I moaned. “He’s
Oliver.
He’s beautiful and smart and perfect. Women love him. And I’ve got this for a face.” I motioned to my road rash and my patch. “And my legs,” I said, looking down at them covered up again. I’d had to cut all of my tights to accommodate the cast, shredding a few of them in the process, but I just didn’t want to feel vulnerable and ugly on the outside. I already felt like that on the inside whenever I thought about Oliver. “And I don’t want him to fix me.”
“I get that, but honestly, Delaney, are you really that dense?” Ursula said. “He loves you. He’s miserable. M
ichael, tell her.”
Michael said, “Yup. He looks like he’s going to enter the Bataan Death March any second, wil
lingly.”
“It can’t be that bad,” I whispered.
“You—you don’t
believe
him,” Emily said, wide-eyed, and my face heated. “You don’t, do you?”
“Maybe he thinks he loves me, but
look at me! Someone like Oliver will
figure it out
. He’s going to get bored with me.”
“You don’t believe you’re enough for him?” Emily said. “But you are. And you might not think you’re bea
utiful, but does he make you
feel
beautiful?”
“Yeah,” I said, my chin tucked into my chest. “He makes me feel wonderful, but he’s going to leave. He leaves all women.”
“So he’ll leave you? For someone younger and prettier?” Ursula said.
“Oliver’s not like that. He’d just find someone better suited to him,” I said.
“I’m done talking about this,” Ursula said with a huff of indignation. “Let’s order pizza.” She thumped on my cast a little too firmly and I grimaced and said, “No black olives. Remember, no black olives.”
“I’m ordering black olives. You can pick them off and give them to Oliver,” she said.
“He’s coming over?” I panicked, straightening my shirt. “I can’t see him. It’s been days since we’ve talked.”
“Michael invited him,” she said with a shrug.
“And
you
invited
me,
” I said. “You could have told me.”
“Then you wouldn’t have come, and talked.”
“Well, I’m leaving now.” I carefully lifted my leg off the sofa and clumsily made my way to the apartment elevator with my crutches, only to bump into Oliver coming out of it.
“Oh. You,” he said, and then stepped around me. Then I closed my eyes and knew I was absolutely making the right decision, and hobbled into the elev
ator.
“Oh. You,” I said. Delaney looked like she was going to cry as I walked around her. I didn’t care. She was heartless and callous and cruel. I’d poured my heart out to her and she’d given me nothing. She wanted the impossible. I sat down on Michael’s sofa and crossed my arms, anger bubbling up in me.
She’d been running away from me since I’d met her. She’d never wanted anything from me. I told all of this to Michael and Ursula and Emily and Sam, who sat across from me and stared.
“What?” I said finally.
“Nothing,” they all said, murmuring and looking away. All except Sam, who said, “Wait, why is wan
ting nothing from you a bad thing?”
“Because!
She doesn’t want my help! She doesn’t want my advice or my protection!”
“She wants to be her own woman? Make
her own decisions? Have her own revelations?” Sam said.
“Yes!” I said, nodding madly, glad that someone finally unde
rstood. “And I want her to be with me.”
“Well, I’m glad she left,” Sam said. “Good for her, knowing what she needs.
Especially after that jackhole Cliff.”
“Wait, what? You’re on
her
side?” Ursula said in disbelief.
“Oh, absolutely,” Sam said, and then he leaned forward and e
xplained it all to me again.
“You really do say just the right things, Sam,” I said and then ran down five flights of stairs. She was still there, waiting for her taxi when I finally got there.