Close As Strangers » (Ashton Irwin a.u.)

Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Sleepless

I come to my senses and blink the rainwater from my eyes. Pain. Pain is all I can feel. It's all over my body. I can barely move.

"Grace?" I ask, turning my head to make sure she's there. I remember the crash. Is she even alive?

I see her looking lifeless and bloody. "Grace! Oh my god! No!" Despite my own injuries, I fumble with my seatbelt and it finally releases its hold on me. I feel glass cutting my skin, but she is my only concern.

She's barely breathing. I examine her, and after finding nothing broken or stuck, I undo her seatbelt and pull her out of the car. I set her limp body on the muddy grass. Rain begins to mix with the blood and run from her face.

"Oh god," I whisper hoarsely. "Grace, please stay with me, okay? Don't leave me."

I hear sirens and people gathering by the guardrail we went over despite the traffic and the weather. People are running around me, and I am separated from Grace.

Questions, blankets, ambulances. I don't remember much of it. I watch medics carrying her away from me. They're shoving me in the back of an ambulance and closing the doors. I am forced to stay on the gurney while they do whatever they do. I'm too focused on whether or not Grace will make it. My body is shaking, and I don't know if the rain or shock is to blame. I don't know anything right now.

"You should really lie down," a medic tells me.

"I'm fine."

"Sir, you-"

"I'm okay."

"What's your name?" the other medic asks.

"What?"

"Your name, sweetie. Do you know it?"

"Ashton... Irwin..."

She smiles. "That's good. You're okay. We'll be at the hospital shortly. And I know you don't wanna wear this ugly looking thing," she says, holding up a neck brace, "but you're gonna have to wear it for us, okay?"

Within a minute or two I am being rushed somewhere for critical care in the world's most uncomfortable neck brace. People stare at me as they fly past my line of sight. All I can see are lights and hands moving above me.

I hear another set of wheels behind us, and I'm pushed to the side as I get a glimpse of the silver ring on her pinkie finger passing us.

"Grace!" I call out.

"She's okay," the woman medic tells me. "She's in great hands. I'll make sure of it."

"Don't let her die," I beg her. Tears well up in her eyes.

"I won't. I promise."

In a blur I'm out of the neck brace, and I'm getting my arm bandaged by some red headed nurse in a small room. She would pour the alcohol down the cuts on my arm, but I wouldn't flinch. She'd bandage it so carefully as if I would break.

"You're lucky, you know," she says. "It could've been a lot worse."

"Yeah," I reply. I sound angry, and I must be because my other hand is clinging to the bed sheets with white knuckles. "Sorry," I tell her after seeing her face.

"It's okay. I know what you're going through. I lost my fiancé in a car accident, though you haven't lost yours."

"She's not my fiancée."

"Oh," she says softly. "Well I hope she's okay."

"Thanks."

"You can leave if you'd like. The room I mean."