“What made you decide to take me seriously?” I ask.
She sighs. “Are you ever going to get tired of that question?”
“I’m glad you did,” I tell her. “I guess it still doesn’t make sense to me, given the way I looked when we met.”
“There was something in the way you carried yourself, something in the way you spoke,” she says. “You were confident, but it wasn’t just a show. I mean, it was a show, but it wasn’t just a show. I have never felt that.”
“You’re kidding,” I tell her. “You’re probably the most impressive person I know. You know,” I jest, “myself excluded.”
She gives my ribcage another quick squeeze as punishment for the joke, but I’m wheezing laughter as I say, “Ow, ow, ow.”
“In the world I grew up in, real confidence is one of those things you just never find,” she tells me. “In my parents’ circle, you’re either acting confident because you’re trying to cover how incredibly insecure you are or you’re more than a little deluded. You didn’t start getting delusional until I told you I liked you, and by then it was too late.”
I snicker a little and kiss her forehead.
“Can I go back to what I was saying now, or are you going to further undermine the very confidence that tricked me into liking you in the first place?” she asks.
“Fine,” I laugh. “Go ahead.”
She rests her head on my shoulder again. “The heavier that boat felt in my hands,” she says, “the tighter I held onto it and the harder I tried to lift it to the surface, even after you first told me to let it go. I can’t tell you how much I hated you for saying that.”
“You hated me?” I ask.
“…for saying that,” she says, finishing the thought. “I hated you because you were telling me what I knew very well to be the logical thing, but I had no intention of letting that thing go. Like I said, I’m sure that would have changed if I held onto it even five or ten seconds longer on my own, but it was what you said after that. That’s when I knew,” she says.
I want to see if she’ll finally explain what it is that she knew, as that’s not the sort of thing I guess about anymore, but a new person in scrubs comes into the room.
“Miss, I’m sorry, but—” he starts.
“Yeah, yeah,” Ash says, getting up from the bed a second time.
“Thank you,” the man says. At least he’s more polite this time around. “I’m Jack, your radiology technologist,” he says. “We’re going to get you in for a quick MRI to make sure everything looks good and then we should be able to get you out of here.”
He and a couple of nurses release the brakes on the wheels of my bed and they cart me out of the room, with Ash in tow, and down the hall.
Despite the flood of people in the ER, I get right in for the MRI and I’m back in my room before too long. The technician says the doctor will be in shortly and so we wait.
“I didn’t hate you in the objective sense,” Ash says. “It was more a situational thing.”
“What?” I ask.
“We got interrupted before,” she says. “I’m just telling you that I didn’t hate you for anything apart from the fact that you were telling me to let go of something I didn’t feel like I could. It was weird. It almost felt like some kind of accusation.”
“Accusation?” I ask.
“Are you sure you’re feeling all right?” she asks, putting the back of her hand against my forehead.
“You don’t have to take my temperature every time you’re speaking above me,” I tell her, snickering as I pat her on the back, my arm around her. “I just don’t know what you meant by accusation there.”
“Oh,” she says. “I don’t know. I guess it was more like the feeling of being caught doing something you know you shouldn’t be doing. What I was doing was silly and I was mad at you because you called me on it.”
There’s a knock on the doorjamb and my doctor comes in a moment later.
He sighs. “Miss—” he starts.
Ash dutifully gets up from my bed and sits in one of the chairs next to it.
“Your scans look good,” the doctor says. “There’s a little swelling on the side of your head, but it looks like your brain’s all right. Let me get your discharge papers and you can get out of here, but I’d take it easy for at least a couple of days. When’s your next fight?” he asks.
“Two weeks,” I answer.
“Two weeks?” he asks, laughing through his nose. “No, really, how long until you’re supposed to back in the ring?”
“Two weeks,” I answer again.
“No,” the doctor says. “Two weeks is ludicrous. I think it’d be best if you cancel your next fight. Just give yourself a month to let your body fully recover before you try to put it through that kind of strain again.”
“Thank you for your opinion,” I tell the doctor. Judging by the way he’s shaking his head, it looks like he gets what I’m trying to tell him.
“I strongly advise against it,” the doctor says, “but hey, if you want to go out there and get your head knocked off, that’s your business.”
With that, he unceremoniously exits the room, closing, for the first time, the sliding door on his way out.
As soon as he’s out of the room, I’m turned toward Ash, who’s already climbing back into the hospital bed with me telling her, “I’m going to do it—the fight. I’m too close to give it up now.”
This can’t be what she wants to hear, but I’m not going to lie to her. If this is something she’s not going to be able to handle, she deserves the opportunity to walk away.
“I know,” she says, smiling. “I couldn’t stop you if I tried.”
Okay, I wasn’t expecting that.
“Really?” I ask. “You’re okay with it?”
“It’s part of who you are,” she says. “The last few months have been both the worst and the best of my life. I’m not going to lie and tell you that I’m thrilled you’re going to do the fight, but I think I can finally understand why you are. I don’t know if you’ve figured it out yet or not, but what I realized that day at the lake is that, for better or for worse, I love you. If you need to do the fight, I’ll be there. I will go where you go.”
She cuddles up next to me and she doesn’t get up when the doctor comes back into the room with my discharge papers.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Two Weeks
Ash
“Don’t get up!” I command before Mason’s actually awake.
He opens his eyes to find my smiling face a few inches from his.
“Good morning,” I say. “How’d you sleep?”
“I thought I was sleeping,” he tells me, rolling over and closing his eyes again.
“Nope,” I tell him. “You said you wanted to get up at ten.”
He forces one eye open to look at the radio alarm clock next to his bed. The clock reads eight-thirty.