Shattered Glass & Broken Hearts

She’s not dead. If she was, that machine wouldn’t be registering her heart rate. If she was dead, she’d be in the morgue, not in the ICU. If she was dead, you wouldn’t have felt her heart beat when you put her hand on her chest. See? She’s fine. She’s gonna be fine. She’s gotta be fine.

The thoughts were jumbled in Ronnie’s head as he sat quietly in a chair at the end of Emily’s bed later that night. The hospital staff had begrudgingly allowed him into the room earlier, but only because Emily’s father had okayed it. He couldn’t pretend to ignore the anger he’d seen in the older man’s eyes, but they both had one thing in common: their love for Emily.

He’d been sitting there for two hours, maybe even three in the hopes that she’d move; that she’d blink, give some signal, no matter how small, that she was going to be just fine.

But she hadn’t. And he already knew she wouldn’t; that she couldn’t.

Her father had told him that she was in a medically induced coma. The words scared the shit out of him and it made him realize that her situation was much more serious than his. All he had was a few scratches and a bruise. But Emily?

Her life was hanging in the balance.

It was all his fault. He was the reason all of this was happening, he told himself. He was the reason she was fighting for life in this hospital room, her chest only moving up and down because a fucking machine was pumping oxygen into her body. This wasn’t the Emily he’d loved; the girl who’d saved him.

This beaten, bandaged person couldn’t be the beautiful, radiant girl he’d known for awhile; had loved for even longer than that.

“Em, wake up. Please,” he whispered to her, standing up from the chair and walking around so that he was standing beside her now, his eyes looking down at hers. “Em, please. I know I fucked up last night. God, I was so wasted. So fucking drunk. I should’ve listened to you, baby. But I’m so sorry. If you wake up…Em,” his voice croaked before he moved to his knees, grabbing her bandaged hand in his. “Em, if you wake up, I swear to God I’ll be fucking perfect for you. I’ll be the kind of guy I should be, the kind of guy who you deserve. I’ll do anything you want, Emily. But please, please wake up.”

She didn’t move. He heard a breath come from her mouth, but it wasn’t hers. It was the machine. If he didn’t know it was keeping her alive right now, he’d jerk it out of her mouth and kick the damn thing until it was broken. He knew how much she hated machines like that. She’d always said they looked so phony, like the ones from General Hospital and ER.

“What are you doing in here? Visiting hours ended two hours ago. You need to leave. Now,” a voice told him from the doorway. Ronnie lifted his head and frowned when he saw a woman standing there. She was clearly the head nurse, and she didn’t look pleased that Ronnie was still in the hospital room.

“Just give me one minute,” he whispered, lifting his head to look up at the nurse.

She just gave him a stern look before sighing, her eyes almost softening as she turned away. “Just one,” she warned him before she walked back to her desk down the hall.

Ronnie waited until the nurse was gone to turn and face Emily again. Her eyes were still closed; those beautiful eyes that were so similar to Max’s, but different in a much better way. Emily was his world, the entire reason he existed.

And yet, she wasn’t even alive. Not really. Could someone truly be alive if it was a machine that was doing their breathing, keeping their heart in rhythm? Could Emily truly be alive if she couldn’t talk for herself, move, or even open her eyes for that matter?

No.

The stark realization hit Ronnie like a ton of bricks and he felt a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach before he pushed some hair out of her eyes. “I love you so much,” he whispered in a broken voice. “I’ll never stop, Em. Believe me. But…You’re better off without me. You’re safer without me,” he added, a dark look forming in his eyes when flashbacks of the car wreck last night hit his mind.

Tires crunching. Metal screeching. Emily screaming, and gravity working. Blood…so, so much blood. Emily crying, sobbing, writhing in pain. His eyes watching, body unable to move because of being pinned. Silence. Darkness.

He closed his eyes, willing the images out of his mind before he opened them again, looking down at Emily. If she could pull through this and she made it out of this hospital outside of a body bag, she’d be better off without him. She needed someone who wasn’t going to hurt her, who wasn’t going down a dangerous path that would end in some city morgue somewhere with the words John Doe tied around his toe.

She deserved a hell of a lot more than him and that was why he needed to leave now and never look back. No matter how much it hurt, no matter how wrong it felt, it was what he needed to do, Ronnie told himself. If he stayed, she’d end up dead and there was no way he could live with himself if she ended up dead because of him.

He looked down at his wrist and realized that he still had a bandana wrapped around it. A bitter smile tugged at the corner of his lips. It had always been Emily’s favorite that he wore, and he’d never given it to her because it was his favorite, too.

But now, that didn’t seem to matter as he pulled it from his wrist, untying it roughly before he rested it on top of her hand. If she didn’t have so many IVs and machines attached to her hand, he would have tied it around her wrist, too, just the way he did with his, but he didn’t see the point if the doctors would just have to take it off to rebandage, rebag, and reattach the IVs and machines every day until she left the hospital.

“I love you. Remember that, Em,” he murmured quietly, hearing footsteps coming towards the room. Probably the nurse coming to tell him to leave again.

Before the woman could come and tell him to leave for a second time, Ronnie leant down and pressed his lips firmly against Emily’s, kissing her as well as he could given the fact she couldn’t respond. After all, this was the last thing he’d ever be able to give her. After tonight, Ronnie didn’t plan on seeing her again. No matter how much he loved her, he just couldn’t. His love was the toxic kind, and he refused to see Emily get hurt anymore because of his selfish attitude.

He stood up straight slowly after kissing her, feeling his heart breaking in two as he looked down at her battered body. He had been the one to do this. Even if he didn’t want to, leaving was for the best. He sighed softly, looking at the bandana he’d placed on her before he turned on his heels, walking towards the door before he made his way down the hallway towards the elevators so that he could leave.

He wasn’t ever planning on looking back as he left the hospital. He had hurt her one too many times. It couldn’t happen again and he was determined to stay away even if it killed him. He knew she wouldn’t understand, that she would be hurt when she woke up and realized what he had done, but he needed to, as much for himself as for her.

All he could hope was that in the end, she realized that he’d only done this because he truly loved her. He really only wanted the best for her. He wanted her to have a happy, normal life with someone who could give her the kind of love she read about in fairytales when she’d been younger. That was the kind of love Ronnie couldn’t give her, and so he needed to walk away so that she could maybe, someday, find it for herself.