Saved
Stones taught me to fly,Love taught lie,
Life taught me to die,
So it's not hard to fall,
When you float like a cannonball.
-Cannonball, Damien Rice
Oliver Oken taught me to love. He showed me that people who care don't always get torn apart and that there really is such a thing as soul mates. And that fate isn't just some naïve concept for girls that want fairly tales more than they want the way things really are. He taught me to pick my battles, he made me happier than anyone else ever did. Just by being there. And I thought I made him feel the same way.
Oliver Oken taught me heartbreak. If there was love, it couldn't be taken away that easily. In the blink of an eye. And if people didn't get torn apart, what happened to them? To us? If there was a fate, how could it be so cruel as to take him away from me so fast when I'd only just got him?
Oliver Oken was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of seventeen. He'd been labeled as diabetic since a year before, and when they pricked his finger to get a blood sugar reading the bleeding never stopped. So they sent him to a specialist in New York. He told me he was going out for his grandma's 80th birthday. And I believed him because I believed in a thing called trust.
Oliver Oken was in remission that January when he collapsed at the mall. I didn't know what was going on, so I started yelling about insulin at the security guard who came to help us and at the paramedics after that. His blood sugar was fine though, both times they checked it. And I was crying in the back of the ambulance with him, convinced I'd killed him by letting him talk me into buying him a Choco Taco.
Oliver Oken fell into a coma for two days. I assumed it was a diabetic coma, and everyone was instructed not to tell me otherwise. I never left his room, so his parents and the doctors held meetings in the hall 'as not to upset me'. I was already upset enough though, scared to death of loosing him. Death, wasn't that ironic? Then he woke up.
Oliver Oken fell in love with me. He hadn't planned to. He'd planned to die my best friend. It was just that every time he saw me, my shining blond hair, my cobalt blue eyes, he couldn't help himself. And when I started lighting up at the sight of him, he could never bring himself to tell me. And then he kissed me, and he was a goner.
Oliver Oken didn't leave the hospital for a year. And to be honest, I really didn't either. I was back at school maybe two days when he had a second attack and then I never left. The nursing staff arranged to never have anyone share Oliver's room so I could stay with him every night. They thought were right out of one of their Nicholas Sparks novels.
Oliver Oken didn't die in that hospital bed. He entered remission again in March of the next year. I insisted in staying with him in the off-campus apartment his parents paid for and I just never left. We hardly left the bed that first year, even for classes sometimes. We had a second chance. And we weren't going to waste it.
Oliver Oken thinks I saved his life. In reality, he saved mine.
AN: I was originally going to kill him off but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I needed to prove Lilly wrong in this one. She was so cynical, so angry, so me. And I don't want more people to be like me, in fact I'd like to be proved wrong about my love life. So thus, this emerged.