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Tim felt like a jerk. She wasn’t playing with him; she really was sick, and he had gotten nasty with her about it. He should have known she wouldn’t lie to him the way other women had.
When they arrived at the hospital, the cab pulled up to the Emergency Room and Tim paid the driver. He ran around the car to help Ava out and practically carried her to the front desk.
“She needs to see a doctor right away. She’s bleeding,” he said to the nurse.
The nurse could see the towel that they had used to stem the flow of blood was stained red. She immediately called for triage, and they came with a wheelchair to take her into a room for treatment. They left Tim standing outside in the waiting area with her purse.
The nurses placed Ava in a bay and transferred her to a bed. Two more nurses entered to take her vitals and a doctor followed a minute later.
“I’m Dr. Kalinsky. Let me see what we have here,” he said as he removed the towel. He cleaned the wound that was no longer heavily bleeding. It was just oozing. She looked at the gash as he worked on it.
“How did you manage to do this?”
“I’m not feeling well, and I decided to see if I could clear out my sinuses with a hot shower. I stepped under the water, and I passed out, I think. When I woke up, my arm was bleeding. I think I hit it against the shower bench when I fell.”
He picked up the chart the nurses had deposited on the bed, and he looked at the vitals the nurses had taken.
“You’re temperature is elevated. It’s one hundred one point two. I think we need to prescribe you a course of antibiotics. Let’s get this numb first; then I’ll stitch it up. Six stitches should do the trick.”
The nurse brought him a suture kit along with a syringe. He inserted the syringe in her wound. Ava gritted her teeth until he removed it. Within seconds she started to feel the numbness taking hold. In the meantime, he checked her ears, nose, and throat. The nurse came back, and he instructed her to take a strep culture.
“You have a couple of blisters on your tonsils and your throat is red. I just want to make sure you don’t have strep. How long have you been feeling ill?”
“I guess for a couple of days. I was very busy last weekend and early part of this week. I didn’t sleep much, and I went running in the rain.”
As the doctor tended to Ava, Tim sat in the hospital waiting room. Her phone had chirped several times in the confines of her purse. He normally wasn’t a snoop, but if he was going to get a leg up on Xander, he needed to do some reconnaissance. He unzipped her purse and pulled out her phone.
He was fortunate that she didn’t have a password on it. He scrolled through the text messages between Ava and Xander. Pretty tame stuff but he did gather some information. It seemed that Xander was away somewhere and might be there for awhile. That would give Tim some time to work on Ava. He wanted her for his own, and if he could spy on her to do it, then that is what he would have to do. He had finally gotten somewhere with her, and just when they started to date, this jerk had come back. He wasn’t going to stand by while Xander swiped her away from him.
First, he installed a cell phone tracking app. This way he would know where she would be at all times. He would have done more, but a nurse came out and called him into the ER. He quickly shoved Ava’s phone back into her purse. He would make sure to undermine her relationship with Xander as much as he could.
Tim entered the room with Ava. Her arm was being worked on by a doctor. She waved to him with her free hand, and he smiled at her as he sat down in a chair opposite her bed. After the doctor was done, he wrapped her arm with a bandage and gave her instructions on how to care for the stitches.
“How many stitches did you get?” Tim asked as the doctor left the room.
“Six. The doctor couldn’t believe I cut it slipping in the shower. He said it the edges were very clean. I have to make an appointment with my regular doctor to have the stitches taken out in a ten days. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to run or workout for a few days.”
“Did they check out why you have a fever?”
“They took a fast strep test and said it came up positive.”
The nurse cut their conversation short as she returned to give Ava discharge instructions and a prescription for antibiotics. On the way home, she leaned against Tim in the cab, resting her head on his shoulder. He sniffed at her hair, which was slightly matted and still damp from her shower. He smelled lavender and made a mental note that she favored that scent.
They stopped at the drug store not far from her house to fill the prescription. She started to feel woozy, and Tim put his hand on her head. She was very warm. He led her to the chairs by the pharmacy counter and waited in line for her prescription.
Later, he helped her into her apartment, got her a glass of water for her medication and tucked her in bed. She fell asleep quickly, and when he was going to leave her apartment, her phone rang. He removed it from her purse and saw that Xander was calling.
“Son of a bitch likes to keep tabs on her,” he muttered under his breath. A minute later the phone chirped, indicating a voicemail was waiting for her. He wished that he had her password so he could listen and maybe erase it but he would figure it out in due time.
* * *
Xander tappedhis foot as Ava’s phone went to voicemail. He left a detailed message asking how she was feeling and that he missed her. He hoped she would call him back because it had been a stressful day. He and his parents had been working with the social worker at the hospital trying to get some hospital beds and wheelchairs over to Lidia and Brett’s home. They would need those items until they were more mobile and that would be weeks. He loved his sister, but he loved Ava more, and now that they were together again he wanted to be with her. He knew she would wait for him no matter what, but they had already wasted so much time.
He went back into Lidia’s house and opened the refrigerator. Right now, he needed a beer or better yet, something stronger. Lidia was not much of a drinker, but he checked her cabinets, finding a dusty bottle of vodka in a bottom one. Xander got himself a glass, filled it with ice and poured a generous amount. Then he went out to sit on her patio.
He sat drinking until he drained the glass. He would have had more, but his parents were napping in the guest bedroom. The last thing he wanted was to give his father a reason for getting on his case. He didn’t want to upset his mother with an argument. He sucked on the vodka-coated ice cubes and then went in the house to clean up. He had put the bottle away just as his father entered the kitchen.
“We’re probably going to be leaving by next week to go home to New York. Your mother needs to be near her doctors. I think it’s better that she get out of this stressful environment.”
