A/N: Thanks to everybody who reviewed or commented! I really love the fact
that you guys take time to tell me what you think!
SPECIAL THANKS TO: jordangirl (Beth) for researching some very important information that I needed for this story for me! All hail the Oracle!
A/N #2: Same time, same place, as chapter 30! Here we go!
********** CHAPTER 30 **********
~~Nigel~~ I shifted uncomfortably in the bed as the nurse left the room to bring my dad up to see me. My face probably spelled out how I felt to Garret and Jordan--complete shock and confusion. I hadn't spoken to the man in years, let alone see him face to face. Ryan, who was as confused as I felt, sat silently as I attempted to process what was happening. My father was actually in the United States, and he was actually here to see me in the hospital. This was either weird, or a mistake of names.
"Do you want us to leave?" Jordan reached over and touched my arm, snapping me back into reality. She looked as if she was worried about me, and she probably was. She knew what the man had done to me...I'd told her myself, and it had been one of the hardest things I had ever done.
Shaking my head, I slowly turned my gaze to Garret. "Not yet...just wait until I ask you to, alright?"
"No problem. We'll stay as long as you need us." He smiled, then looked down at Rudy, who was asleep beside me in bed, snuggled into the thin cotton blanket. "At least he's comfortable."
"Yeah." I gently rubbed behind his ears, smiling when I got a half-awake snort in reply. "He's my little buddy...sleeps on my scrubs and keeps 'em warm for me." I was about to say something else when I heard a soft knock on the doorframe.
All three of us turned our heads at the sound, and I stared blankly at the man who was entering the room.
He'd changed. Last I remembered he still had a full head of dark brown hair, but it was now replaced with a swatch of gray. He was still tall, and still lanky, but his face was slimmer. He carried with him a large, brown cloth bag, and he slowly crossed to my bed. I sat up and felt my back grow tense, and my heart started racing. I was scared, even now.
He stood at the edge of my bed and looked down at me. I'd changed as well. I'd gone from being a rebellious teenager with short black hair to my current state, an adult with my hair the length it was now. Sure, I was covered in bandages and had a tube running out of my chest, but it was still me. We stared silently at each other until he finally spoke.
"Nigel..."
"Yes?" I was amazed at the fact that I even found my voice with my nerves jumping like they were.
"How are you?" He paused and looked down the entire length of me. "You don't look so good."
"I'm alright." Looking over at Jordan and Garret, I attempted not to make eye contact with the man who'd finally come to see me. "I did get shot you know. You don't look too good after you get shot."
"I didn't know." He looked over at Jordan and Garret. "Who are your two friends?"
"I work with them. That's Garret, and that's Jordan." I motioned to them respectively before waiting for his reply.
He extended a hand to the both of them and smiled. "Jonathan Townsend. Pleasure to meet you." After shaking both their hands, he turned back to me. "You never told me you knew people here."
"You never asked, so why did I need to? It's not like you ever call to ask how I am doing." Feeling the pang of hurt inside of me, I heard my voice grow slightly agitated. "Why did I have to almost die to hear from you?"
He turned back and looked at me. "You never called either." His voice grew quieter. "I need to talk to you about something important, and I'd like to do it in private..." Glancing over at Garret and Jordan he nodded. "...without them, preferably."
"We can leave, it's not a problem." Garret stepped forward and held his arms out for Rudy. "You want us to take him?"
"No. Leave him here...if you guys could leave us alone for a while...please?" I looked up at them. Jordan looked at me as if I were crazy, and Garret just nodded before taking Jordan by the arm and starting to walk out.
"We'll be in the waiting room if you need anything Nigel."
"Thanks Garret." I smiled at him, then looked back down at the bulldog sleeping next to me. If only the little bloke knew of the chaos that was probably going to erupt, he would have gladly chosen to go with Garret and Jordan to wait outside of my room.
Turning my attention back to my father, I shook my head. "Why are you really here?"
"Can't a father come visit his son in the hospital?" He pulled up a chair and sat down next to my bed.
"Yes, but it's you. You hate flying, you hate America, and you hate me. That's three against you being here."
"I don't hate you." He sighed. "You just think that because you left on bad terms."
"I left because you made me so mad that I couldn't take being around you anymore. You wrote up the bad terms that I left on."
"You always have to turn this around on me don't you."
"It's your fault." I shifted my weight again and started picking at the spot where my IV had been in. Ignoring the pain, I figured it would be better than looking at him while we were arguing.
"Never mind who's fault it is. That's in the past." He reached out and touched my arm, and I immediately jerked away from him.
I still had that feeling inside. Whenever I looked him in the eyes, or whenever he came near touching me, I got the feeling of utter pain and despair in my chest, and I felt as if I would die if he came near me. Shaking my head, I swallowed deeply. He knew what was wrong--he could read it across my face.
"I'm sorry...I wasn't thinking." He returned his hand to his lap and he shook his head. "I guess you never got over that."
"How could I?" I whispered. The man before me had beat me. Abused me. Scared me. Treated me so horrible I would feel the need to run away from him, to run away from my life, to hurt myself. It was because of him that I'd taken up cutting myself as an escape from the pain he inflicted every day of my life. I subconsciously rubbed my shoulder--the site of hundreds of paper-thin white scars, each bearing the weight of severe pain and suffering, each a mark of fear that couldn't be taken out of my life. He'd found them once--questioned me relentlessly on their existence, but I couldn't get brave enough to tell him what was really wrong, the fact that he was hurting me inside, long after the pain from the hitting had faded.
Upon seeing me touch my shoulder, I saw his face fall. "Nigel...listen...I need to apologize for what I did to you."
"You don't mean that. You knew what you were doing." I shook my head. I was NOT about to accept a half-hearted apology from a man who had done the things he'd done.
"You're right. I did know what I was doing, but I was too frustrated to stop myself. What I did was wrong--I knew that. You were the victim of all of my anger and my sadness, and you never should have been...your mother's death didn't help either."
"Like it's her fault and she had anything to do with it. You wouldn't listen to her when she yelled at you to stop hurting me, you just yelled back." I wrapped an arm around the softly snoring bulldog at my waist. "You don't care how I felt about myself when you hurt me."
He sat silently.
"See. You don't even care about me now. You just came here to ask me for something, and me nearly getting killed just gave you a nice cover-up. What is it this time?" I paused, feeling the anger inside of me rise. "You get laid off? You not have enough beer to get you through the week? You haven't been laid in a week? What is it?" I threw my arms open wide. "Go ahead. Hit me. Get it over with, I know that's what you want to do. Ten years or so without your little punching bag lying around...I beat you've got some good cases of anger to throw out on me this time."
"I came because I needed to apologize."
"No you didn't." I glared at him. "You couldn't have. Parent's who hurt their kids don't apologize, they only hit harder. In that case...I'm up for getting knocked so good I go unconscious...maybe even into a coma. I'm a bit overdue for a wallop, don't ya think?!"
"Nigel...listen to me. I--"
I cut him off before he could finish. "You aren't sorry. You meant everything you did, you even said so yourself. You want nothing more than to whack me a good one across the face. You want--"
"I want to tell you that I'm dying." He cut me off short of finishing my sentence, and I shut up. "All I wanted to tell you today is that I'm sick."
My brain nearly stopped short when he said that he was sick. I shook my head. I didn't believe him. "With what?"
"I have portal cirrhosis."
I shook my head. "Which is?" For the life of me, my information from years at college and my classes disappeared and escaped my head when he said the name.
"The cells in my liver are dying and being replaced with scar tissue instead of re-growing." He paused. "It's because I drank so much after your mother died...I never stopped until the doctor told me I was sick."
"That doesn't mean you're dying." I looked up at him, noticing the pain that was in his face.
"Yes, it does. Without a liver transplant, my body will stop filtering blood as well, and it'll spread to my other organs...the doctors say at the stage I'm at now, I only have three months."
For some reason, my heart dropped out of my chest and hit the floor. I started feeling very awkward--the man sitting next to me had hurt me all my life, but he was also my father, and I couldn't deny that fact if I tried. I couldn't speak, so he continued on.
"I came here to tell you that I was sick...and I was supposed to give you this..." He reached into the bag which until this moment had gone untouched and pulled out a package wrapped in plain brown paper. He held onto it for a moment, then sighed. "Your mother wanted me to give this to you when you moved out, but I never got the chance because you left after we fought that one night." Handing the package to me, he smiled weakly.
I took it from him slowly, then set it on my lap. Carefully picking at the yellowed tape that held it together, I unwrapped the item as slowly as I could, careful to make sure that I didn't tear anything accidentally. It was a box, wrapped in the paper, and I opened the flaps and peeked inside, curious as to what was contained in the box.
"You were only ten when she got sick...but you still knew what was going on...you've always been a smart little bugger." He smiled at me as I opened the box. "I don't know what's in there, she never told me and made me promise not to open it."
I reached inside and pulled out a plain white envelope, now yellowed with age, that had my name across the front of it in the obvious script of a female. I tore it open carefully, and I unfolded a single sheet of stationary paper to see it covered in handwriting in neat little rows.
Reading through it silently, I realized that it was a letter from my mother, to me in the future, after her death. The general tone of the letter was positive, but I caught myself choking back a tear occasionally upon the mention of an event that I remembered or a song that she'd sung to me when I was little. After I'd finished, I placed it aside and reached back into the box.
Pulling out a well-worn and aged teddy bear, I smiled to myself. I had been given the bear at birth by my grandmother, and rarely had it left my presence during my young years of life. Through countless days of me being sick and him being there to keep me company while I was snuggled up in bed, the many times I had dragged the little guy out into the backyard of our house to be daringly rescued by myself or one of my friends, even to the tragic moments of him being given a bath in the washing machine (frightening in itself).
"I remember how you gave that to mom when she got sick...she was so touched that you gave him up to make her feel better...you made her very happy, Nigel."
I had given the bear to her on one of our trips to visit her in the hospital, because I didn't want her to be alone after we left. The look on her face had been priceless...even with how bad I knew she was hurting because of the medications and treatments she was on for the cancer.
Also in the box was a small photo album, containing various photos of all of us together in random places or on family vacations to the shores or up north. As I flipped through the pages, I pointed out pictures to my father, and I had to ask him who a lot of the people were because I couldn't remember ever meeting them.
I thought the box was empty, but I noticed in the bottom that there was another wrapped item that I had missed before. I unwrapped it to find a well used copy of the Bible that I recognized immediately. She always used to read me stories out of it--thrilling tales of ordinary people doing amazing things. I gently opened it to where the ribbon used as a bookmark had been placed, and a wallet sized picture of me and her sat inside. It had been taken before she had gotten sick, and I was still young, when she had taken me to visit my uncle and aunt once.
Closing the book, I looked up at my dad, who had tears in his eyes. It was obvious that he had been watching me look though everything, and I'm sure it was painful for him to remember mom getting sick and losing her to the cancer. We didn't speak for a few minutes, we just stared at each other's faces silently.
"You know...she loved you so much...and she was afraid you wouldn't understand what was going on and that she was dying." He finally spoke, after clearing his throat a few times. "The only thing that hurts me is that I have nothing to offer you that can make up for what I did to you...but I'm afraid I'm going to die and you won't realize that I'm truly sorry."
"You can't change the past...but I see often enough how bad it hurts to lose somebody you love. The worst one's are when they never got to say goodbye...I don't want to go through that again." I cleared my throat, as I heard my voice waver ever so slightly.
"I just want you to know that I'm sorry...you don't have to forgive me, and honestly I don't expect you to. I can't even forgive my self for hurting you the way I did."
"But I do forgive you, Dad." I softly said the words that I had swore I would never say to him so long ago. His argument of apology had been convincing enough, and thinking back to the agony I'd seen children go through at the loss of their parents made me rethink my stance of hatred against him.
"You do?" He looked at me, almost in shock.
"Yeah. You may have meant it...but it's not worth you going through more pain than you're going through already...and that you're going to go through." I looked over at him. "Are you going to stay in the States for treatment or are you going back home?"
"I was planning on heading back home after I knew you were alright...and after I apologized. I figured you wouldn't want me here anyways."
"Well...besides the fact that I'm stuck in here for a few more days, you're more than welcome to stay here for a while...do you have a hotel or anything?"
"I just got in off the flight this morning...I haven't made arrangements yet."
"Then...I suppose you could stay at my flat...but you'll have to feed the cat and the dog for me..." I looked down at the mass on my bed, who was just now awakening. "This is Rudy."
"I could do that...if you're sure that's alright with you..."
"Whatever you want to do. It's just a little place...bedroom, bathroom...kitchen and a living room. But it's enough for me--it's probably a mess though. I'll have Garret get you a key and show you where it is." I then pressed the call button on my bed to summon up a nurse. "They only take a minute or two to get in here to figure out what the hell I want."
He laughed. "Prompt service...something you'd hope for in a hospital."
"Yeah."
A nurse walked in, exactly (according to my dad who was timing it) three minutes and twenty seven seconds later. "What can I help you with today?"
"Can you ask Garret and Jordan to come back in here please?"
"Certainly." She then exited the room to get them, while we started chatting again.
Surprisingly, this had gone a lot better than I had hoped, and I was glad. Now...just to get me out of the hospital and away from that jello....
TBC...
**thanks for reading!**
SPECIAL THANKS TO: jordangirl (Beth) for researching some very important information that I needed for this story for me! All hail the Oracle!
A/N #2: Same time, same place, as chapter 30! Here we go!
********** CHAPTER 30 **********
~~Nigel~~ I shifted uncomfortably in the bed as the nurse left the room to bring my dad up to see me. My face probably spelled out how I felt to Garret and Jordan--complete shock and confusion. I hadn't spoken to the man in years, let alone see him face to face. Ryan, who was as confused as I felt, sat silently as I attempted to process what was happening. My father was actually in the United States, and he was actually here to see me in the hospital. This was either weird, or a mistake of names.
"Do you want us to leave?" Jordan reached over and touched my arm, snapping me back into reality. She looked as if she was worried about me, and she probably was. She knew what the man had done to me...I'd told her myself, and it had been one of the hardest things I had ever done.
Shaking my head, I slowly turned my gaze to Garret. "Not yet...just wait until I ask you to, alright?"
"No problem. We'll stay as long as you need us." He smiled, then looked down at Rudy, who was asleep beside me in bed, snuggled into the thin cotton blanket. "At least he's comfortable."
"Yeah." I gently rubbed behind his ears, smiling when I got a half-awake snort in reply. "He's my little buddy...sleeps on my scrubs and keeps 'em warm for me." I was about to say something else when I heard a soft knock on the doorframe.
All three of us turned our heads at the sound, and I stared blankly at the man who was entering the room.
He'd changed. Last I remembered he still had a full head of dark brown hair, but it was now replaced with a swatch of gray. He was still tall, and still lanky, but his face was slimmer. He carried with him a large, brown cloth bag, and he slowly crossed to my bed. I sat up and felt my back grow tense, and my heart started racing. I was scared, even now.
He stood at the edge of my bed and looked down at me. I'd changed as well. I'd gone from being a rebellious teenager with short black hair to my current state, an adult with my hair the length it was now. Sure, I was covered in bandages and had a tube running out of my chest, but it was still me. We stared silently at each other until he finally spoke.
"Nigel..."
"Yes?" I was amazed at the fact that I even found my voice with my nerves jumping like they were.
"How are you?" He paused and looked down the entire length of me. "You don't look so good."
"I'm alright." Looking over at Jordan and Garret, I attempted not to make eye contact with the man who'd finally come to see me. "I did get shot you know. You don't look too good after you get shot."
"I didn't know." He looked over at Jordan and Garret. "Who are your two friends?"
"I work with them. That's Garret, and that's Jordan." I motioned to them respectively before waiting for his reply.
He extended a hand to the both of them and smiled. "Jonathan Townsend. Pleasure to meet you." After shaking both their hands, he turned back to me. "You never told me you knew people here."
"You never asked, so why did I need to? It's not like you ever call to ask how I am doing." Feeling the pang of hurt inside of me, I heard my voice grow slightly agitated. "Why did I have to almost die to hear from you?"
He turned back and looked at me. "You never called either." His voice grew quieter. "I need to talk to you about something important, and I'd like to do it in private..." Glancing over at Garret and Jordan he nodded. "...without them, preferably."
"We can leave, it's not a problem." Garret stepped forward and held his arms out for Rudy. "You want us to take him?"
"No. Leave him here...if you guys could leave us alone for a while...please?" I looked up at them. Jordan looked at me as if I were crazy, and Garret just nodded before taking Jordan by the arm and starting to walk out.
"We'll be in the waiting room if you need anything Nigel."
"Thanks Garret." I smiled at him, then looked back down at the bulldog sleeping next to me. If only the little bloke knew of the chaos that was probably going to erupt, he would have gladly chosen to go with Garret and Jordan to wait outside of my room.
Turning my attention back to my father, I shook my head. "Why are you really here?"
"Can't a father come visit his son in the hospital?" He pulled up a chair and sat down next to my bed.
"Yes, but it's you. You hate flying, you hate America, and you hate me. That's three against you being here."
"I don't hate you." He sighed. "You just think that because you left on bad terms."
"I left because you made me so mad that I couldn't take being around you anymore. You wrote up the bad terms that I left on."
"You always have to turn this around on me don't you."
"It's your fault." I shifted my weight again and started picking at the spot where my IV had been in. Ignoring the pain, I figured it would be better than looking at him while we were arguing.
"Never mind who's fault it is. That's in the past." He reached out and touched my arm, and I immediately jerked away from him.
I still had that feeling inside. Whenever I looked him in the eyes, or whenever he came near touching me, I got the feeling of utter pain and despair in my chest, and I felt as if I would die if he came near me. Shaking my head, I swallowed deeply. He knew what was wrong--he could read it across my face.
"I'm sorry...I wasn't thinking." He returned his hand to his lap and he shook his head. "I guess you never got over that."
"How could I?" I whispered. The man before me had beat me. Abused me. Scared me. Treated me so horrible I would feel the need to run away from him, to run away from my life, to hurt myself. It was because of him that I'd taken up cutting myself as an escape from the pain he inflicted every day of my life. I subconsciously rubbed my shoulder--the site of hundreds of paper-thin white scars, each bearing the weight of severe pain and suffering, each a mark of fear that couldn't be taken out of my life. He'd found them once--questioned me relentlessly on their existence, but I couldn't get brave enough to tell him what was really wrong, the fact that he was hurting me inside, long after the pain from the hitting had faded.
Upon seeing me touch my shoulder, I saw his face fall. "Nigel...listen...I need to apologize for what I did to you."
"You don't mean that. You knew what you were doing." I shook my head. I was NOT about to accept a half-hearted apology from a man who had done the things he'd done.
"You're right. I did know what I was doing, but I was too frustrated to stop myself. What I did was wrong--I knew that. You were the victim of all of my anger and my sadness, and you never should have been...your mother's death didn't help either."
"Like it's her fault and she had anything to do with it. You wouldn't listen to her when she yelled at you to stop hurting me, you just yelled back." I wrapped an arm around the softly snoring bulldog at my waist. "You don't care how I felt about myself when you hurt me."
He sat silently.
"See. You don't even care about me now. You just came here to ask me for something, and me nearly getting killed just gave you a nice cover-up. What is it this time?" I paused, feeling the anger inside of me rise. "You get laid off? You not have enough beer to get you through the week? You haven't been laid in a week? What is it?" I threw my arms open wide. "Go ahead. Hit me. Get it over with, I know that's what you want to do. Ten years or so without your little punching bag lying around...I beat you've got some good cases of anger to throw out on me this time."
"I came because I needed to apologize."
"No you didn't." I glared at him. "You couldn't have. Parent's who hurt their kids don't apologize, they only hit harder. In that case...I'm up for getting knocked so good I go unconscious...maybe even into a coma. I'm a bit overdue for a wallop, don't ya think?!"
"Nigel...listen to me. I--"
I cut him off before he could finish. "You aren't sorry. You meant everything you did, you even said so yourself. You want nothing more than to whack me a good one across the face. You want--"
"I want to tell you that I'm dying." He cut me off short of finishing my sentence, and I shut up. "All I wanted to tell you today is that I'm sick."
My brain nearly stopped short when he said that he was sick. I shook my head. I didn't believe him. "With what?"
"I have portal cirrhosis."
I shook my head. "Which is?" For the life of me, my information from years at college and my classes disappeared and escaped my head when he said the name.
"The cells in my liver are dying and being replaced with scar tissue instead of re-growing." He paused. "It's because I drank so much after your mother died...I never stopped until the doctor told me I was sick."
"That doesn't mean you're dying." I looked up at him, noticing the pain that was in his face.
"Yes, it does. Without a liver transplant, my body will stop filtering blood as well, and it'll spread to my other organs...the doctors say at the stage I'm at now, I only have three months."
For some reason, my heart dropped out of my chest and hit the floor. I started feeling very awkward--the man sitting next to me had hurt me all my life, but he was also my father, and I couldn't deny that fact if I tried. I couldn't speak, so he continued on.
"I came here to tell you that I was sick...and I was supposed to give you this..." He reached into the bag which until this moment had gone untouched and pulled out a package wrapped in plain brown paper. He held onto it for a moment, then sighed. "Your mother wanted me to give this to you when you moved out, but I never got the chance because you left after we fought that one night." Handing the package to me, he smiled weakly.
I took it from him slowly, then set it on my lap. Carefully picking at the yellowed tape that held it together, I unwrapped the item as slowly as I could, careful to make sure that I didn't tear anything accidentally. It was a box, wrapped in the paper, and I opened the flaps and peeked inside, curious as to what was contained in the box.
"You were only ten when she got sick...but you still knew what was going on...you've always been a smart little bugger." He smiled at me as I opened the box. "I don't know what's in there, she never told me and made me promise not to open it."
I reached inside and pulled out a plain white envelope, now yellowed with age, that had my name across the front of it in the obvious script of a female. I tore it open carefully, and I unfolded a single sheet of stationary paper to see it covered in handwriting in neat little rows.
Reading through it silently, I realized that it was a letter from my mother, to me in the future, after her death. The general tone of the letter was positive, but I caught myself choking back a tear occasionally upon the mention of an event that I remembered or a song that she'd sung to me when I was little. After I'd finished, I placed it aside and reached back into the box.
Pulling out a well-worn and aged teddy bear, I smiled to myself. I had been given the bear at birth by my grandmother, and rarely had it left my presence during my young years of life. Through countless days of me being sick and him being there to keep me company while I was snuggled up in bed, the many times I had dragged the little guy out into the backyard of our house to be daringly rescued by myself or one of my friends, even to the tragic moments of him being given a bath in the washing machine (frightening in itself).
"I remember how you gave that to mom when she got sick...she was so touched that you gave him up to make her feel better...you made her very happy, Nigel."
I had given the bear to her on one of our trips to visit her in the hospital, because I didn't want her to be alone after we left. The look on her face had been priceless...even with how bad I knew she was hurting because of the medications and treatments she was on for the cancer.
Also in the box was a small photo album, containing various photos of all of us together in random places or on family vacations to the shores or up north. As I flipped through the pages, I pointed out pictures to my father, and I had to ask him who a lot of the people were because I couldn't remember ever meeting them.
I thought the box was empty, but I noticed in the bottom that there was another wrapped item that I had missed before. I unwrapped it to find a well used copy of the Bible that I recognized immediately. She always used to read me stories out of it--thrilling tales of ordinary people doing amazing things. I gently opened it to where the ribbon used as a bookmark had been placed, and a wallet sized picture of me and her sat inside. It had been taken before she had gotten sick, and I was still young, when she had taken me to visit my uncle and aunt once.
Closing the book, I looked up at my dad, who had tears in his eyes. It was obvious that he had been watching me look though everything, and I'm sure it was painful for him to remember mom getting sick and losing her to the cancer. We didn't speak for a few minutes, we just stared at each other's faces silently.
"You know...she loved you so much...and she was afraid you wouldn't understand what was going on and that she was dying." He finally spoke, after clearing his throat a few times. "The only thing that hurts me is that I have nothing to offer you that can make up for what I did to you...but I'm afraid I'm going to die and you won't realize that I'm truly sorry."
"You can't change the past...but I see often enough how bad it hurts to lose somebody you love. The worst one's are when they never got to say goodbye...I don't want to go through that again." I cleared my throat, as I heard my voice waver ever so slightly.
"I just want you to know that I'm sorry...you don't have to forgive me, and honestly I don't expect you to. I can't even forgive my self for hurting you the way I did."
"But I do forgive you, Dad." I softly said the words that I had swore I would never say to him so long ago. His argument of apology had been convincing enough, and thinking back to the agony I'd seen children go through at the loss of their parents made me rethink my stance of hatred against him.
"You do?" He looked at me, almost in shock.
"Yeah. You may have meant it...but it's not worth you going through more pain than you're going through already...and that you're going to go through." I looked over at him. "Are you going to stay in the States for treatment or are you going back home?"
"I was planning on heading back home after I knew you were alright...and after I apologized. I figured you wouldn't want me here anyways."
"Well...besides the fact that I'm stuck in here for a few more days, you're more than welcome to stay here for a while...do you have a hotel or anything?"
"I just got in off the flight this morning...I haven't made arrangements yet."
"Then...I suppose you could stay at my flat...but you'll have to feed the cat and the dog for me..." I looked down at the mass on my bed, who was just now awakening. "This is Rudy."
"I could do that...if you're sure that's alright with you..."
"Whatever you want to do. It's just a little place...bedroom, bathroom...kitchen and a living room. But it's enough for me--it's probably a mess though. I'll have Garret get you a key and show you where it is." I then pressed the call button on my bed to summon up a nurse. "They only take a minute or two to get in here to figure out what the hell I want."
He laughed. "Prompt service...something you'd hope for in a hospital."
"Yeah."
A nurse walked in, exactly (according to my dad who was timing it) three minutes and twenty seven seconds later. "What can I help you with today?"
"Can you ask Garret and Jordan to come back in here please?"
"Certainly." She then exited the room to get them, while we started chatting again.
Surprisingly, this had gone a lot better than I had hoped, and I was glad. Now...just to get me out of the hospital and away from that jello....
TBC...
**thanks for reading!**