He Said Losing My Emotions Was Better, Then He Begged Me to Feel Again novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Everything at Once

I got to him on my hands and knees.

He lay on the grass at the foot of the Stone with his eyes shut and his mouth a little open.

I put two fingers to his neck, and my own hand was shaking so hard I could not find the pulse.

"Doctor!" Gillian was shouting. "Where's the damn doctor?"

"Here," said the town doctor, shoving through the lanterns.

He knelt on the other side and pressed his fingers to Orson's wrist.

Everything in me was loud.

It was the fear and the grief and the rage and the love, all at the same volume.

I wanted to scream at someone, and I wanted to be sick.

I wanted to put my face in his chest and never lift it.

The doctor looked at his watch.

He looked at it for a long time.

"Steady," he said.

"What does that mean?"

"It means his heart is slowing down. It's at seventy." He sat back on his heels and stared at Orson's face. "I haven't seen it under a hundred in a month. Whatever was driving it is gone."

I made a noise I did not know I had in me.

Martha knelt down stiffly on the grass and laid her hand on my back.

"There she is," she said.

"Don't," I said. "Don't say that."

"All right."

"I can't breathe, Martha."

"I know. It's all of it at once. Breathe anyway."

Orson's eyelids moved.

I watched them and nothing else on the green.

He opened his eyes, and they were hazel and unfocused, and then they found me.

"Hi," he said, hoarse.

"Don't you say hi to me."

"All right."

He tried to sit up and the doctor pushed him down again.

He looked past me at the lanterns, and the faces, and the Stone standing over us in the moonlight.

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