Tana grabbed my hand and held it tightly as we walked behind them, listening to Rett and Hart talk about coffee and growing up.
As we stood in line, my brother turned around and tapped Hart on the shoulder.
“You mind if I ask you a question?” Hart shook his head. “What in the hell is up with the squeaking? Like, do you want to turn out like this chump?” he gestured over his shoulder at me with his thumb. “Glad to see your sister finally knocked some sense into him, though. Check out those eyes.”
Burying her face in my chest, Santana snorted and started laughing, her shoulders shaking with it instead of tears. It was that and the fact Hart did the same thing that saved my brother at that moment.
Then he just had to take it a step further. “Let me tell you how bad it was before Mom and Dad forced him to use deodorant.”
“Pawpaw says Croix was like that, too,” Hart murmured, looking torn between smiling and crying at the mention of his brother.
“That was you, asshole,” I snapped, elbowing him in the back as I reached for a bottle of water. “You said it was against your religion—even though you swore you were an atheist—and that a girl you had a crush on had said they used radiation in them to make them smell ‘musky.’”
Rett glared at me over his shoulder as Hart and Tana started laughing again. “She had a big rack, everyone believed her, and I wasn’t going to risk glowing in the dark or growing a tail. You still had to have a chat with our parents about stopping your armpits smelling like the locker room did, though. That’s worse.”
Sighing, I pulled Tana into my side and pointedly ignored him after that. She scored major points when she wound her arms around my middle and pointed out, “He smells outstanding now, so maybe I should thank your parents for that?”
Rett made a gagging sound and poked Hart in the side. “Okay, new advice—find yourself a girl when you’re older who has no sense of smell like your sister. When your pits smell like a five-year-old jockstrap, it’s important to find someone who won’t be able to tell.”
The reunion between Tana and her family had hit hard, and even Rett had murmured under his breath, “Fuck, that’s killing me.”
Jerry had cracked as soon as he’d seen her and had cried silently as he’d hugged her, but her mom had sunk down on her knees on the hospital floor, the sound of a hurt animal bursting out of her.
It wasn’t a sign of weakness, none of it was. It was fear of the unknown that could possibly be about to take one of their loved ones away forever after only twenty-six years of being in the world.
“Do you ever go into training or a deployment and wonder if you’ll make it home alive?” I asked him, the situation warranting the morose question that’d just occurred to me.
“Twice. I’m sure there’ll be more, but so far, I’ve only had that fear two times.”
Then, just to make the situation worse, a specialist came out and spoke to them. Apparently, even though they’d been here for roughly twelve hours by that point, they’d only had brief updates on Croix’s situation. Now they were being summoned to a private room off to the side of the main waiting room.
“Doc, how’s he doing?” Merrick asked stiffly, visibly bracing himself.
Tiredly, the surgeon sat down and launched into it. “As you know, we had to remove his spleen yesterday because of the bleeding. Once we had that under control, we put a plate in the humerus to stabilize it, and casted the breaks in his ulna and radius.”
That injury made sense to me if the vehicle had hit on his side, and from my limited knowledge on car accidents, his spleen injury wasn’t rare, either.
“The injury we were keeping an eye on overnight to decide what the best course of action was took a turn, which was why we took him back into the OR, as you know.”
“What was that?” Tana asked, her voice high pitched. “If it was a serious injury, why didn’t you fix it yesterday? Can’t leaving things mean risking his life?”
The doctor, seeing a new face in the room, smiled sympathetically. “Sometimes we need to see what’s going to happen to provide the best course of treatment. I take it from the visible similarities between you and Croix, even with his injuries, that you’re his sister?”
“Yeah, my name’s Santana.”
Getting up and holding his hand out, he introduced himself. “Doctor Jones Wickfield.”
“That’s a pretty badass name,” Rett said under his breath. “Way better than Remy.”
“Doesn’t get much better than Remington unless your name’s Ruger, Everett.”
“Just to fill you in a bit, Santana, the bottom half of Croix’s leg was crushed in the accident. While we’ve operated on his spleen and some of the injuries we could fix more easily, certain ones can or should be left a bit longer, just so we can see what the best course of treatment is.”