Enemies With Benefits (Book One)

thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

Early Sunday Morning

Collin Myers and I have been sitting in this waiting room for around three hours now. It was as expected, because I'm assuming that due to the damage on the car, the extent of injury on their bodies should equal or surpass. Right now I was laying against Collin's side, with my legs spread out into the other chair. A while ago he put his suit jacket over my torso in order to keep me warm.

"Your mom works here, right?" The boy asked, trying to fish something from in between his teeth. I nodded my head and hummed, thinking to myself about when I would have told him that information.

I craned my neck to look up at him. "How did you know that?"

Collin shrugged, and looked up at the television screen that was anchored our way. "Because whenever I would come here with my Dad, I'd see you with a woman wearing scrubs. I just assumed that it was your mother."

My eyebrows furrowed slightly because I don't recall ever seeing Collin Myers here when we were younger. I spent majority of my childhood in the hospital due to my father always being away on business. Something tells me that Collin could relate, since he made it seem like he frequented the Emergency Room a lot. "How often did you used to visit the hospital?" I inquired.

The brunette looked off to the side in thought, and I allowed him to do so. "Hmm ... Probably like every other weekend. My dad was a huge drunk with invincible kidneys, I mean he always had alcohol poisoning. I couldn't count the amount of times that I'd come home from middle school and see him passed out somewhere around the house. I couldn't even wake him, so I'd drag him into the car and drive him to the hospital." Collin confessed, chuckling sporadically throughout his recollection.

This sounded like an extremely dark time in his life, and he is rarely ever open and honest with me, so I didn't want to say the wrong thing and mess it up. "Where was your mother?" I asked, and Collin immediately jumped out of whatever trance he was in that made him emotionally vulnerable.

There it was, the wrong thing.

"I don't fucking know, as a matter of fact, why am I even telling you this? I mean you of all people." Collin scoffed, only doing so to make me feel unworthy of hearing about his troubled past. A part of me knew that he was only doing this in order to push me away, but I still got upset.

"Me of all people? Fuck you and your sob story, I don't give two shits." I inform, moving away from the boy so that we weren't touching at all. As he glanced over at me, I realized that his jacket pooled at my waist. So I balled it up and threw it in his direction. He held his hands up to prevent it from hitting him in the face.

That's usually how things go between us, so I wasn't surprised, and like I said, I didn't care. If he wants to bottle up his emotions, then who am I to try and stop him? Collin Myers is his own worst enemy, he's bound to self-destruct eventually.

Just then, the two mechanical doors opened, and a doctor walked out of them. As I scanned his appearance, I noticed that he was in the process of redressing himself. When he called out Lilly and Marcus' name, I made the conclusion that he was on the surgical team that operated on the two.

Collin and I scrambled from our seats, and as we did so, I noticed a small frail woman approaching the doctor as well. It was their mother, who literally just walked through the hospital's front doors. She had a used tissue clutched in one hand, and the other pulled her wool coat across her body.

Mrs. Kent stopped momentarily when our eyes met, probably since she recognized me from the few times I visited her house with Lilly. She stepped up beside me, and discreetly held onto one of my hands.

"Are you the mother of Lilly and Marcus Kent?" The doctor questioned, gesturing his clasped hands at Mrs. Kent. She nodded quickly, too choked up to speak words, and I informed him that Collin and I were with them about ten minutes prior to their accident.

"As you know, Lilly and Marcus sustained numerous injuries as a result of their car accident. Since Marcus was seated on the passenger side, he was able to avoid extreme harm. He managed to walk away from the accident with a torn ligament in his left arm, caused by a laceration from shrapnel." He informed.

It was a relief that Marcus wasn't severely damaged, I remember at some point during our freshman year of high school, he got hurt really bad during a football game. He was benched for the rest of the season, and it really did a number to his mental stability. That boy's dream has always been to play football professionally, and at the time, he thought that goal had been crushed. I'm glad that he doesn't have to go through that again.

"Lilly on the other hand, being seated in the driver's seat, received the brunt of the accident. When she arrived at the hospital, she was unconscious, stable, but unconscious. After doing a CT scan we found that her heart had been severely damaged, but my team and I were able to fix it in surgery.

A few minutes after Lilly arrived in the ICU, she began to code, or, go into cardiac arrest. We spent around twenty minutes trying to revive her, and even though were successful in getting her heart beating, her brain had been deprived of oxygen for a substantial amount of time.

Mrs.Kent, it is with deep regret that I have to inform you that Lilly is in fact presumed brain dead. This means that her brain has lost all of its function, and due to the fact that she cannot breath on her own, she has been put on a machine to aide her in doing so. She unfortunately will not regain consciousness." The doctor finished.

My hand clamped over my mouth as it gaped open, the only thing that came out of it was a scratchy whimper. From the corner of my eye I saw Lilly's mother drop to her knees, and the doctor standing before us rushed to her aide. I didn't even want to look over at Collin, who had probably walked off already to conceal his sadness. It was something he always did, which is why I let him console himself as I started my grieving.

Lily Kent was legally dead, and there was nothing that anyone could have done to prevent it. The police had identified the drunk driver as a kid from our school, but has yet to release their name to the public. I'm guessing because they didn't want to unleash a world-wind of hate-speech against their name. But now that this is considered a case of third degree murder, everything might change.

I looked over at Collin, who was pacing back and forth a few feet away. Regardless of how he treated me in the past, as well as a few minutes ago, I still felt incredibly sorry for him. He went on that date with Lily because he felt like he had finally found a girl who cared about him similarly to how he cared for her. The boy isn't really one for relationships, or being romantic and going out on dates for that matter. Until Lilly, Amber was the only girl he had ever truly had that connection with.

Hopefully, this doesn't discourage him from getting back on the horse because everyone is deserving of love, no matter how evil their persona.