Just This Once by Evelyn Jeannie Hall

Twenty-One

Consciousness returned to Zane in delayed increments. First came the sounds. The buzzing hum and steady beeping of machines. The hustle and bustle of people rushing by. The murmuring of a collection of lowered voices. The squeaky wheels of what reminded him of a mailcart. Rubber soled footsteps with the occasional clicking of a harder heel. A cough. Sniffling. Even some weeping.

After that came smell. The pong of bleach and rubbing alcohol. Other rather noxious disinfectants that increased in their pungency off and on. The odor of food that didn’t appeal to him. In fact, just now he could detect some sort of meaty scent that made him feel sick. To keep that feeling from becoming the most prevalent, he held himself perfectly still.

Sometime later came sight. Initially, he saw nothing but the red of his eyelids. The only thing he could tell for sure was that this place was full of light. Lots of it. So much he wished they’d dim it a bit. Hadn’t they noticed him trying to sleep this off? This illness or bender or whatever it was? He had this ambiguous sense of floating, hovering between wakefulness and dreams.

Had someone placed weights over his eyes? They felt so heavy. He imagined miniature sandbags being settled on his eyelids like those cucumbers women used when they went to pricey spas. Maybe they put one of those goopy masks on his face and wrapped a towel around his head, too. The visual struck him as funny, and he had to chuckle at the ludicrousness of it.

And Christ, the second he did, he realized how sore he was. Not just sore, but achy, especially in his left leg. The discomfort made him shift it, and his foot whacked into something solid.

“Fuck…”

“Zane?”

That voice. He knew that voice and who it belonged to, but even as he searched his brain for the name, retrieving the information seemed to take forever. Eventually, it emerged.

“Lacey?” he managed, though his throat sounded like someone had scraped it with sandpaper. With an effort, he pulled his eyelids apart, and was greeted by the most hypnotizingly beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

“Yes!” She yanked his hand up to trace her lips over his knuckles, kissing them over and over. At least that much didn’t hurt. “Yes. I can’t believe you’re awake.”

Still, this thick weariness tugged at him like an undertow.

“Feel out of it… So wiped.” And though he didn’t want to mention it, his leg now pounded like a motherfucker.

“I know. I know. But see if you can keep your eyes open, okay?”

“’kay.” He attempted to concentrate on anything but his damn leg, which wasn’t easy. After blinking at her a couple of times, it occurred to him that he needed to tell her something, something crucial. “I was a stupid SOB to you before.”

She offered him a sad smile. “That doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Yeah, it does. I was totally out of line.” He struggled to make his mind relate what he had to say. “I had no excuse for my behavior, and I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too, for refusing to take your calls. For not returning your texts. If I had, maybe you wouldn’t be here…” she trailed off, and what she’d said made exactly zero sense. How did their fight have anything to do with being here? Where the hell was he, anyway? And why did thinking feel so difficult? “You’ve been in a coma for a whole week,” her voice broke on the last word, and her big blue eyes brimmed with moisture.

Automatically, he tried to pat her hand, but his arms seemed restricted somehow. Every part of him felt restricted. Or maybe unwieldy was a better word. Weighed down and just… tender all over. Then, he digested her actual words. He’d been in a coma, and not only that, he’d been in one for a week. He scrutinized his surroundings. Yep, it looked like an ICU ward with its curtained alcoves and the knowledge that essentially, he’d been put on display. It wasn’t like this was his first rodeo.

Had he been beaten up or maybe runover by a bus?

Jamming his eyes closed, he tried to remember how he got here. He had this indistinct memory of waking up feeling crappy followed by a sensation of wrongness he hadn’t known how to explain. Then, he wasn’t sure what happened. Everything had gone to mush after that. Still, he’d never experienced a coma previous to now.

Goddamn diabetes.

He took some deep breaths and grounded himself again. Hospital stays while unpleasant, didn’t have to be the end of the world. He peeked up at Lacey again in time to see tears skidding down her cheeks.

“Baby, don’t cry. I’ll be okay.”

“But you don’t know,” she argued, her voice clogged. “Your shin is broken because you injured it during your seizures and your kidneys are… well, neither of them are functioning. Not at all.”

Some foul initials entered his head due to the constant exposure he’d had to medical jargon over his life. ARF. Acute renal failure. He examined the left side of his body. His leg was in a cast from his knee down and the inside of his arm showcased some telltale tubing inserted into two sites on either side of his elbow. Since the tubing was clear, he could see his own blood being filtered into a white rectangular machine on the opposite side of Lacey. Dialysis. Something he’d hoped to never have to resort to, but here he was.

Damn. This fucking sucked. Talk about kicking a guy when he was down.

“I’m so selfish,” Lacey interrupted his fatalistic reverie. “Bawling all over you when you’re the one in this bed.” He wanted to comfort her, but his reserves were almightily low. “And I should’ve offered you the choice of whether you wanted to hear the good news versus the bad news first.”

He attempted to keep the bitterness out of his tone. “So is the coma and dialysis portion of the story the good or the bad?”

“The bad news,” she rushed to tell him. “Now, let me share the good.”

Zane worked to configure his features into something less despondent, but the planes of his face probably looked more like a grimace than anything else. “Hit me.”

“They’ve already found you a donor kidney.”

A donor kidney would mean the dialysis would be temporary rather than a lifelong sentence. His despondency lifted. “Yeah?”

As long as he didn’t reject it, a new kidney would mean a decent quality of life for fifteen to twenty years before he’d have to seek out either another donor or other alternatives. For the first time since hearing this life altering information, he had a glimpse of genuine hope.

“Yeah,” she said, beaming at him. “Mine.”

Zane’s hope popped like an overinflated balloon. “No.”

“Yes.” Her smile dimmed by several notches. “I’m a match. Isn’t that incredible?”

“Lacey…” He shook his head feeling more disturbed now than when he discovered he’d gone through a seven-day coma. “That’s not okay. I can’t let you do something that dangerous.”

“You can and you will.” She thrust out her chin as she straightened her slender shoulders.

“No. I forbid it. It’s too much of a risk to you. I’ll just stay on dialysis. I’ll be fine.”

“No, you won’t. Your mom and sister are both here, Zane, and they explained what Dr. Rajeesh told them. Dialysis is not optimal long term. Your quality of life will be impacted if you don’t receive this transplant. Your physical strength. Your mental acuity. If you miss a dialysis treatment, you could experience even more issues. You could slip into another coma or worse. This isn’t something you should play around with.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” he half-shouted, earning a jaundiced glare from a Nurse Ratched-like lady in blue scrubs who was passing by. “Sorry. I’ll keep it down.” Another more compassionate looking nurse appeared next, and he extended her an apologetic shrug, as well. A wild alarm near another patient went off, and they each vanished. “Lacey, this is a big deal, and I can’t let you do it.”

“You can’t stop me, you giant oaf,” she countered. “This is my body, my organ, and my choice to help you.”

“Not if I refuse, it’s not,” he argued, refusing to be responsible for her damaging her health for the sake of his. Complications arose from surgeries all the time.

“Fine.” She broadcasted her outrage far and wide. “If you won’t take it, maybe somebody else will.” Lacey pivoted on her heel and started to clomp away from him.

“What are you saying? You’re not having your kidney removed just to spite me, are you?”

“I’m sure someone would be thrilled to have my kidney. I’ll go inform the medical staff that there will only be one of us taking them up on their surgery.”

“Lacey…” He battled to push himself into a seated position, but he couldn’t. Like, physically couldn’t. He almost howled in frustration. Zane had never felt so useless, so much like wasted space. He smacked his clenched fists against the guardrails on the sides of his bed, and it caused his arms to tremble. Pathetic. He’d taken seasoned opponents to the mat on more occasions than he could count, yet now…

His vision blurred, and his eyes stung. Fearing that he’d triggered another health episode, he went stationary. A prickling sensation seared its way down the length of his esophagus, and a burning pain filled his chest, making it hitch. Jesus Christ, was he having a heart attack like his dad? Then, condensation-like droplets splashed on the front of his hospital johnnie.

What the hell?

Lacey darted back across the alcove and leaned over him, looking both worried and remorseful. His chest hitched again, and only then did he register the hitches as sobs. Awesome. On top of everything else, he could add public humiliation to his list of regrets. He hadn’t lost his shit like this since his birthdays had still been in the single digits, not even after what Aliyah had done to him. And to do it in front of the woman he most needed to be strong for?

Fucking kill him already.

“Zane, I didn’t mean to upset you.” Lacey used her palms to whisk the wetness off his cheeks. “I pushed back too hard, and I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “No, I…” But that issued from him as a sob, too. More rose from him without his permission, making it impossible to speak plainly. Part of him yearned to hide, but what would be the point? Lacey was witnessing this breakdown in all its mortifying glory, and so much of his dignity had already been ripped away.

She twisted around to grab a box of tissues from a nearby table and hurried back to him. “I shouldn’t have dropped such a huge shit bomb in your lap. It’s okay if you need time to process everything, I swear.”

As rapidly as his loss of composure had overtaken him, another emotion took its place, and he snorted. Distantly, he wondered if the staff would move him from the ICU to the psych ward. Lacey cocked her head to the side as if questioning his sanity as well, and that made him snort again, though there wasn’t any humor in it.

“Are you okay?” she asked, her forehead puckered with lines of concern.

“It’s… You mentioned this huge shit bomb landing in my lap, and I pictured that image and…” he let out a disturbingly watery laugh.

Her lips twitched, then she joined him. Soon, the absurdity of the situation had them each releasing gales of repressed mirth that left them breathless. Laughing and crying at the same time wasn’t something he’d known himself to be capable of and going from one extreme to the other made him feel unhinged. Nurse Ratched’s return to cast them the hairy eyeball didn’t help, either.

Listen, carny, halt this tilt-a-whirl. I want off.

Lacey stood on her tiptoes over him, touching her temple to his. Carefully, she draped her arms around his neck, or at least, as far around him as she could considering the height of the bed. He would’ve searched for the controls to lower it, but her altered position had the added benefit of blocking out the nurse’s scowling mug.

“Please let me do this,” Lacey whispered in a beseeching tone. “Please, Zane. I’ve been given the chance to save you, and I’ll never be able to live with myself if I don’t try.”

“You shouldn’t, though,” he rasped out his objection, his chest hitching again. This interaction of theirs had been taxing, and what little energy he’d had was depleted. His tears continued to fall, and he couldn’t do a damn thing to prevent it. “I don’t want you sacrificing yourself for me.”

Her chin wobbled as she began to cry again. Jesus. They made quite the pair.

“I won’t be. The doctors assure me people safely donate their kidneys on a frequent basis. I have two healthy ones, and you don’t. The math isn’t exactly hard to do. Allow me to help you feel better and have a longer life. Besides,” her face brightened. “I’m only serving my own best interests.”

Baffled, he asked, “How?”

“I want you around for long time, so I can hang out with you. Go out on dates with you. Have dirty, nasty sex with you. So we can maybe try out that whole relationship thing.”

“Being in a relationship doesn’t frighten you?”

She shook her head. “Nope. Not anymore. Does it frighten you?”

Hell, yes. “My only attempt at a relationship didn’t turn out so well.”

“I know.”

“We didn’t even make it one year. She told me she wanted a divorce right before our first anniversary.”

“That’s cold.”

“I found out afterwards that she was also pregnant at the time,” he admitted, quietly.

“For God’s fucking sake. She left pregnant with your child?”

“No,” he said, ruefully. “Not my child. Would you believe the kid belonged to a flower delivery guy? I’d buy her a single long-stemmed rose every Monday.” It’d been Zane’s thing. How he’d attempted to be romantic. To be a good husband.

“The father wasn’t the dude to deliver it to her, was he?” Lacey guessed with uncanny precision.

Moving slowly, Zane put his finger on the tip of his nose. “Bingo.”

“So, she was cheating on you with a guy who delivered the flowers you sent her, and he knocked her up to boot? Please tell me you’re kidding. That sounds like an episode from a really shitty daytime soap opera. Or maybe even a scene from a porno.”

That startled another chuckle out of him because Lacey was right. It was one of those cases of truth being way more deranged than fiction. “All that went down when I was a fledgling investment banker. I put in a ton of hours back then and seldom came home.” He shrugged. That’d been the main reason why he’d started the rose delivery every week. He hadn’t wanted his wife to feel neglected. “I don’t know. Maybe her being unfaithful to me was inevitable.”

“There’s a saying that it takes two to make it and two to break it, but that still didn’t give her the right to destroy your trust like that.”

“You sound like my mom.”

“I’ve spoken to your mom. She’s a wise woman.”

Zane grinned at her. “She is that.”

“And I’m not Aliyah.”

“I know. I know you’re not.” Yet somehow, he’d been comparing his ex to every woman he’d ever encountered, including Lacey. Thankfully Lacey and Aliyah had next to nothing in common.

“Zane?” She drew her thumb over the edge of his bristly jawline.

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

He gaped at her, astounded not only that Lacey had said it, but also that she’d declared it first. Time to man up, then.

Past time.

“I love you, too, Lacey Farrell. So fucking much.”

“You should know that I think of you as this massively tough, endlessly dedicated, and devastatingly handsome guy I can’t afford to lose. Please give me permission to offer a part of myself to you.”

He blew out a noisy exhale. Abruptly, his eyelids felt like anvils, and he couldn’t fight her off anymore. Especially when the cost of him winning the debate could mean him becoming an invalid she’d feel obligated to care for. The woman he loved was a little too savvy for her own damn good. She’d cornered him between a rock and a hard place, fair and square.

“I don’t like it, but I suppose not giving my consent would be more trouble than it’s worth,” he muttered, his eyes shutting of their own accord. He was more than halfway to dreamland when he heard her soft reply, accompanied by a kiss so butterfly light it might not have been real.

“Thank you.”