How It's Said

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen

Anna’s POV

It wasn’t the phone call that scared me. It wasn’t even who it was that scared me. It was the helplessness that immediately overwhelmed me that scared me. For the first time in a long, long time I knew I could do absolutely nothing to change the situation. It didn’t matter to me that he had broken my heart over and over again. It didn’t matter that he didn’t want me. I wanted him and knowing that he was in this situation scared me more than life itself.

Eric Rogers was in a car accident.

He his the tree at fifty miles per hour. He wasn’t wearing his seatbelt but somehow he managed to stay inside the car. His head hit the roof of the car. He’s in a coma. In the crash he broke three ribs and cracked his collar bone. Major bruising on his right side where he flew across the car. He’s lucky to be alive.

I can’t breathe. I can’t fucking move. Not Eric. He can’t be injured. He fights and does drugs, a car accident can’t be the thing to bring him down. No, no, no, not Eric. I feel myself start to break down. The phone slips from my hand, crashing to the floor. I don’t hear it. I don’t care about it. All I car about is Eric. I sink to the floor, allowing myself a moment. I need a second. I can’t go see Eric. I can’t let him see me breaking down. He may not love me, he may not even care about me, but I refuse to let him see me care.

“Anna, come on.” Melissa says, tugging on my shirt sleeve. Ethan called me first to let me know, but I know that he’s talked with Melissa since then. She tries to pull me up before letting out a sigh and squatting down in front of me.

“Anna, you need to get up. You want to see him, don’t you?” She asks, moving hair out of my face with a shift of her hand.

I can only nod. Fucking hell why am I so weak. This boy gets to me like nothing else and when he’s injured I can only sit on the floor and cry?

“Come on, Anna. I’ll drive you. Let’s go, okay?” This time I let her pull me up. I grab my purse and we drive to the hospital.

We meet Eric’s family in the waiting room. Ethan pulls Melissa into a tight huge, his lips next to her ear as he whispers something too her.

“How is he?” I ask, my voice sounds scratchy and I clear it before trying again. “Is he okay.” I know he isn’t. He’s in the ER for God’s sake. This is where not okay people go to get better.

Eric’s Dad, or at least, I think it’s his Dad, sets forward. “He’s in a coma.” I already knew as much but hearing it from another person makes it real. Eric is in a coma. I don’t know all the details of a coma, but I know it’s fucking serious. He could never come out of it. He could come out of the coma and not remember anything.

Tears start to prick at my eyes and I quickly scrub them with balled fists. Eric can’t die.

I find myself sinking into a waiting room chair. I don’t want to cry, so I close my eyes for a second and take deep breaths. I’m not gonna cry. I feel a warm hand on my back and I notice Mrs. Rogers sitting next to me.

“It’s okay to cry honey, we all get sad sometimes.” For a woman whose son is in a coma, she looks very calm.

She must have noticed my reaction because she smiled. “I’m scared for Eric, yes, but he’s done so many crazy things over the years,” She shakes her head and sighs. “I know he’ll pull out of this, okay, hon?” She pulls me into her and hugs me. “Eric is a fighter, he’ll be just fine.”

Those words are what keep me going for the next month. Eric is fighter. He’s a fighter. He’ll be just fine. He’ll be fine. I keep repeating that when I feel like the world is going to crash down on my head. Half the time I feel like I’m going to explode from the amount of emotions coursing through me, other times I feel like I’m going to melt into a puddle of tears.

I keep myself busy by working. I’m out of school and without the distraction of Eric, I find I have a lot of time on my hands.

I got a job at a coffee shop. It doesn’t pay much, but I get to socialize with people and keep myself sane. One boy makes my life goes to hell. God what the fuck is wrong with me?

Since Eric went into a coma I’ve spent a lot of time with his family. His mother is an amazingly strong woman, his father funny as fuck, and his brother is the best thing that’s happened to Melissa.

The only good news I’ve heard since Eric’s accident is that Melissa isn’t pregnant. I was worried about that and we did have a long ass discussion about her and Ethan. She apparently loves him. I want to tell her that that isn’t love. She’s only sixteen, but I don’t. I know what kind of appeal a Roger boy has.

I haven’t been in Eric’s room since long before his coma, so I was surprised to see it hadn’t changed. His bed was a mess, something I expected was just Eric. He had clothes on the floor, drugs on his desk and pictures of me on his nightstand.

What nearly broke me was seeing his truck, wrecked beyond repair. The truck was dented nearly to the bed on the passenger side. The truck had caved in on itself, encasing Eric in a bed of crunched metal.

Knowing there’s blood on the roof of the truck where he cut his head makes me freak out. I love him so much and I can’t stand knowing he’s hurt.

I’m not surprised that I fell in love with Eric. He’s an addictive person. He may be crude, harsh, and an asshole, but he’s the most caring man I have ever met. He makes me be a better person just by standing next to him. I don’t need to change who I am. He doesn’t care if I have make up on, if I get straight A’s, or if I want to eat chocolate and watch movies all day. He lets me be me. I love him for that.

Loving him makes it even harder to know that he’s in a coma. People can come out of comas, but what happens after is a tedious process. I don’t know what state of mind he could be in when he wakes up. He could be a complete asshole, he could admit that he cares for me.

I didn’t expect him not to remember our last couple months together.

I didn’t expect him not to remember our time together.

I got the call that he woke up at work. I dropped what I was doing and ran to the hospital. I didn’t care about a job, I wanted to see Eric. I wanted to see him awake and alert. I was so sick of seeing him with his eyes closed, completely oblivious to the world. I’ve spent so much time sitting next to his bed side trying like hell to make him wake up. I talked to him, I played him music, I fucking read to him. Nothing worked.

Now, one month and three days after he went into a coma he wakes up.

Eric’s mother called me the day he woke up. I could hear tears in her voice before she even told me what happened. I nearly started crying myself when I learned that he woke up, but I stopped myself, knowing Eric wouldn’t want me to cry for him.

Melissa drove me to the hospital again. I was nervous as hell heading there. I was freaking the fuck out. I didn’t know what Eric would say. What if he didn’t recognize me? What if he forgot all of our time together?

My questions were answered the moment I walked into the room.

Eric was sitting upright in the hospital bed. A nurse was taking his vitals, his mother standing next to him worrying over him like a mother should. His eyes snapped to mine and a nasty grin came over his face.

“What are you doing here, Sweetheart?” The words are sweet but his tone is harsh.

“Simon says…”

This is not my Eric. This Eric is from before, when he first made the deal with me. Back from when I had to do whatever he said because of our deal. This Eric doesn’t care for me like my Eric does.

This Eric doesn’t care for me.