From Ashes

About ten minutes after we’d gotten off the property, she groaned and her eyes fluttered open. My heart started racing as I brushed my hands lightly over her throat; her pulse was still soft, too soft. “Cassidy, baby, can you hear me?”

She nodded and it looked like she was still struggling to breathe.

“Thank God,” I whispered, and rested my forehead on hers for a moment before sitting up to look into her honey eyes. They held mine for barely two seconds before rolling back again. “No, Cass, no. Wake back up!” My hands started doing their check, and when they passed over her chest, I realized it felt wrong.

Even compared to her shallow breathing in the bathroom, this felt wrong. I put my hand back on her chest and crouched low in the seat, making myself eye level with my hand. It wasn’t fucking moving.

“Cassidy, Cassidy, babe, I need you to wake up. You hear me? Wake up, darlin’, please, God, wake up.” I let one hand go to her wrist and the other go to her throat. “Damn it, babe, please.” My hands were shaking so bad, I had to take deep breaths in just to calm them so I could check for a pulse. “Come on, sweetheart . . . open your eyes again.” I kept quiet as I focused and about cried out in relief when I felt the faintest beat in her throat. “Keep breathing, Cassidy, ple—” My words broke off on a sob and I let my forehead fall onto the top of the seat. “God, Cass, don’t leave me, wake up.”

“Gage,” Dad said gruffly, and I looked up through tear-filled eyes to see flashing lights. He hit the brakes, put on the emergency lights, and started flashing his brights at them.

They’d just started to pass us when they slammed on their brakes. Thank God for that dispatcher. I was already out of the car and ru

I held her hand and silently pleaded with her to breathe. Once in there, the EMTs started an IV, shot her with something else, and when they started spouting off words, all I heard was anaphylactic shock. My heart stopped; there was no way. No way, she’d never been stung before; that couldn’t happen from just one sting, right? I gripped her hand tighter and begged God not to take her from me after just giving me her. Twenty minutes later, just as we were pulling up to the emergency room driveway, Cassidy’s eyes opened halfway as she took the deepest breath she’d taken in who knows how long and locked on mine for a split second before the EMTs moved the stretcher out of the ambulance.

I jumped out with them and kept her hand in mine as they wheeled her in. We’d just gotten to the double doors inside the waiting room when a large male nurse stepped in front of me, stopping me from going farther.

“No, I have to go with her!”

“You can wait out here; if you’re family, a doctor will be out to talk to you.”

“She’s my wife, I need to be in there with her!” I tried to sidestep him, and when he put a hand to my chest, I just threw it to the side and kept marching forward. She’d just opened her eyes again. I needed to be there for her.

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask that you calmly sit down, or I’m going to have you removed.”

“If that was your world, would you let some nurse with a complex—”

“Gage.” I turned to see my dad behind me. As I opened my mouth to tell him how ridiculous this guy was being, he spoke again. “Son, sit down. They’ll talk to us when they can. In the meantime, you’re not doing Cassidy any good if you get kicked out of the hospital.”

He didn’t wait for me to respond; he put a hand on my shoulder and led me over to the chairs.

Other than filling out the paperwork for Cass, I didn’t move, and I didn’t speak. I just stood there staring at the doors, willing them to open with Cassidy’s doctor behind them.

C ASSIDY

I WOKE UP and blinked quickly at the bright lights. What on earth? I went to shield my eyes from the light and something tugged on the inside of my arm. I looked down and saw an IV coming out and let my head hit the pillow. What was I doing in the hospital?! Looking to the other side, I saw Gage asleep on a chair, one hand lightly holding mine, the other wrapped around his broad chest.

“Gage.” My voice came out barely above a whisper, but his eyes shot open. “What’s going on?”

“Oh thank God.” He stood and bent over the bed to cup my cheeks, and his hands trailed down my throat and chest in an awkward pattern before separating and grabbing my wrists. “How are you?”

“What are you doing, and why am I in a hospital?”

“Cassidy,” he breathed, and the name sounded so happy on his lips, it almost came out as a laugh. “Darlin’, you’ve got to stop scaring the shit outta me like this. We’ve had enough trips to the ER this year, all right?”

I nodded; I’d forgotten about getting pneumonia. “But why am I here?”

“You had a severe allergic reaction to the scorpion sting. Scared the hell out of me. You passed out in the bathroom, your eyes were rolled back, and you were barely breathing. You only came to for a second before we met up with the ambulance, and then again when we got here, but other than that you wouldn’t wake up and your heart rate was so slow—” He stopped and had to force down a swallow. “Cass, it was like it wasn’t there at all. Your chest wasn’t even moving.”

I gasped softly as I watched the nightmare play out over his face again.

“When we were in the ambulance, they kept saying ‘anaphylactic shock,’ and a part of me knew that couldn’t be it since you hadn’t seen a scorpion before then, but with how you’d been over those last twenty or thirty minutes, baby, I thought I was going to lose you if they didn’t do something soon.”

Fat tears were falling from Gage’s eyes, and I let my fingers brush them away from one cheek before curling them around his neck.

“You weren’t going into anaphylactic shock, you just had a really bad allergic reaction. Your doctor said with already being weak and having a shot immune system from having the flu, it just made your allergic reaction that much worse for you and your body shut down to protect itself from the reaction.”

“I don’t remember anything after you put me back in bed after getting stung.”

Gage nodded and planted his forehead into the crook of my neck, inhaling deeply. “You haven’t woken up long enough to say anything; I figured you wouldn’t.”

“How long ago did this happen?”

He looked over at the clock for a few seconds before turning his face back toward my neck. “Almost seventeen hours ago.”

Oh my God. I tried to swallow but my throat was really dry, and just as I was about to say I needed a drink, I felt Gage’s body shudder. “Hey, it’s okay, I’m okay.”

“You weren’t, Cassidy. You weren’t. I’ve—I’ve never been more scared in my life.” He admitted softly, “Your chest wasn’t moving; you don’t know what that was like. And half the time I thought I was making myself believe I was feeling a heartbeat.” As he spoke, one of his hands came back up to my throat, then trailed down to my chest and ended at my wrist. All of it was soft as a feather, and very practiced, and now made sense. “I’ve thought you left me before . . . but not like this, never like this. I thought you were—” He choked out a shaky breath and didn’t speak again.

“I’m never leaving you again, I told you.” I tried to laugh, but it sounded wrong. I couldn’t imagine what he’d gone through, but I knew it would kill me to see him the same way. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.