The Kissing Booth - Chasing Noah

Chapter 22

A/N: This is the edited version of Chapter 51.

...

When I woke up, my room was swarming with people. They were identical in their matching blue scrubs, acting as a single person as they hurried around the room. Most were women, but there was a tall man barking orders. He wasn't doing anything to help the women, but he stood at the foot of my bed, reading off numbers from a chart and pointing at various machines. He wore a stark white lab coat, standing out among the gloomy colors of his scrubs. I think it was Doctor A. It bugged me that I still didn't know his real name. I squinted my eyes trying to make out his name tag again, but it was like I was looking through a glass of water.

Everyone had something to do. Some were rushing carts over to me, others pulled my blankets from their tight hold around me. Another held a squeeze bottle over my chest and I felt a cold sensation take over my entire abdomen. I tried to move my head to see what was going on, but my neck was made of stone. Whoever was standing over me started rubbing the sensation across my entire chest. All of a sudden my paper gown was gone and I felt a draft pick up through the room. I moved to cover myself, from what felt like a hundred eyes, but my arms remained limp at my sides. Had someone opened a window or something? I had to fight the urge to pull the blankets back around me. They were itchy and uncomfortable, but anything was better than this cold that chilled me to the bone. But I knew that these people knew what they were doing and that I had to let them do their jobs.

Their voices were all muffled; like I was at the end of a long tunnel and they were at the other. A voice rose above the rest, calling out and then the room became silent. Most of the nurses had stopped moving, staring expectantly at the one hovering over my chest. My entire body jerked off the bed in a sickening way. It was though my body levitated, waiting for it's return to earth, before I landed with a loud thud and felt every bit and piece of the bed's metal frame cut into my back. The voice that had called out before was there again, yelling through the room, pressing pause on the world as my body jerked into motion once again, only to crash back down a moment later. I had no idea what they were doing to me. The force that it took to shake my entire body and cause it to pause for a moment as life hung in the balance, I knew I should have felt pain. At least felt something other than the increasingly uncomfortable sensation of whatever was on my chest. The chill that it caused, making the breeze that flitted through the room bite at my exposed skin, was the only thing that my mind could make out as the nurses that filled the room looked off with a look of pure destruction.

"I'm okay," I told them, but it was like I was invisible. I looked to Doctor A for help, for any sort of recognition that I was in the room, but all I got in return was a miserable expression. He looked to the clock and because he was in my direct line of vision I could see his lips move as he spoke. After all that commotion, the fact that the doctor would take the time to read the clock; the nurses obviously couldn't care less what time it was. The nurse that stood over me, a shadow covering the part of her face that I could see, lifted the itchy blankets that they had threw around my ankles and covered my cold, naked body. I no longer felt so vulnerable, but I still had to fight the instinct to bat her hands away and do it myself. To grab the sleeves of the gown that had been bunched around my waist and slide my limp arms through them.

When Noah came running through the door, fighting at the hold that Lee had on him to hold him back, I breathed a sigh of relief. Until I saw the mask of horror that they wore. I had only seen that look one time in my life. Now that they were here, I wanted to scream at them to assure everyone that they could stop worrying. Lee was so good at that; calming people down. I tried to push air through my mouth, to form any kind of sound, but I was met with a curtain of silence and the room grew even more silent. It was though the life had been taken from every single object, person. Noah and Lee didn't move. Not a muscle, not a breath, not a sound. Not that I could hear them anyways. Lee's face contorted into an ugly expression, as if he was screaming. Screaming like his heart was being ripped from his pale, delicate figure.