The One Who Got Away – CH 15

Chapter 15

Part One: Here

And so he began telling her. He told her what kind of day August 19th of two years ago had been; a sunny Saturday with clear blue skies, promising a perfect late summer weekend. How he had gone for a swim in the morning and then later to a brunch at a work colleague's house outside of town. And that it had been on the drive back from there that he had gotten into the accident.

Kay pushed herself up on one elbow now, coming out of her cuddly position against his chest. There was a discrete line of tension on her forehead; that look people got when they wanted to know something but were also afraid to hear it "So what happened?"

For a moment, Seth faltered, struggling with the familiar inner aversion to going there; getting the emotional fight or flight response he always felt when confronted with the memory. He swallowed against the resistance in his throat. And then he told Kay what he had barely told anyone because he was so ashamed of it: "It was my fault."

His whole adult life, he had not once checked his phone while driving. But on August 19th, just this one time, he had. "I was supposed to meet a friend at the beach later and we hadn't fixed up a time yet. So when my phone dinged, I quickly wanted to see if it was him texting…," Seth licked his lips. "It was just one second. But it was enough. When I looked up, I was about to crash into the car in front of me. I had missed how it had slowed down, so…," He unconsciously shook his head. "I jerked the wheel to the right, and that made me fly over a ditch." Blinking, Seth reminded himself of the one good thing about it. "At least I didn't hit the other car. Only crashed mine." And my body.

"Seth…," Kay's hand was on his cheek, and looked at her. Her mouth moved tonelessly, as if she was struggling for words, and she was shaking her head at him. Seth held her gaze. "This," – he maintained, glancing down at his unfeeling body – "is my fault." He needed to say it again, because he knew she wanted to tell him otherwise. 

Kay winced visibly, but she shook her head again. "Or the fault of the driver in front of you," she eventually uttered. "Or anyone's, really. You can't blame yourself, you're not…," she squirmed, then went quiet. 

"Who knows," Seth replied with a smile, mainly to make her feel better. She wasn't the first one to tell him it wasn't his fault. He had told it to himself, too – had tried telling it to himself. It didn't change the fact he was a quadriplegic because he had looked at his phone while driving. It was really that simple. 

Sometimes he couldn't help but think that maybe it was better to be responsible himself than to be the victim of someone else's mistake. At least like this, he'd never had to plague himself with the question of why this had happened to him. Instead, the question was and forever would be how he could have been so stupid and careless. 

"So, you went over the ditch…?"

Of course Kay wanted to know all of it, how could she not. Seth’s mouth felt dry. "Can I have some water, please?"

She leaned across him to grab the sipping bottle from his nightstand and wordlessly held the straw to his lips. When he was done, she kept holding on to the bottle, her hands clasping it like some kind of anchor. She was fully sitting up now, her back straight. "Do you even remember what happened next?"

Seth nodded slightly. He couldn't remember the impact or being pulled out of the smoking car, but he did remember lying on the ground and not feeling that ground under his body. Most of all though, he remembered not being able to breathe. "I never lost consciousness," he mumbled.

"The whole time?"

"For a long time."

Kay swallowed. "So you knew what was going on with you?

"That I was paralyzed, you mean?" Seth shook his head. "Not at first. I was just confused. And scared. I thought I was dying." Which I was. Remembering the feeling of suffocation inevitably made his chest tighten, and he strained his neck muscles to take a deeper breath. The memory was pulling him in like a maelstrom, just as it always did; making the present – his bedroom and Kay – appear sort of far away now, almost unreal. He wasn't really here anymore, he was there, at the accident site, lying on the ground, people standing and kneeling around him.

Like something out of a dream, he felt Kay's knuckles stroke his jawline. "Hey," she whispered. "Come back." Seth blinked, seeing her but also not seeing her, until she intently locked eyes with him, the frown on her face one of unease and concern. Taking a deliberate breath, he managed to tear himself out of the flashback. "Sorry," he mumbled.

"Don't apologize," she said softly. "You don't have to continue if –"

"No, it's fine, I want to." Now that he had opened the door to the memory, the only way to close it again was to go all the way in and through. It was almost funny – he always had such a hard time talking about this, and he had never been able to bring himself to go there with Kay. But now that he had started, it was like an avalanche had come into motion. Seth took another breath. "The people who had pulled me out of the car kept asking me questions I couldn't answer. I remember how one guy kept telling me to squeeze his hand, and I just thought he was making no sense, because how could I squeeze his hand if he didn't even give it to me." He huffed softly. "And then I suddenly saw it. My hand in his, I mean. I think that's when I knew." Closing his eyes in reflex, he swallowed, pushing down the echo of the fear he had felt in that moment. Merely thinking of it made his heart go faster, adrenaline rushing his system. "I couldn't really breathe as it was, but when I realized why… I kind of started panicking. I don't know how much time passed before help arrived, but it seemed like forever."

Kay bit her lip. "But you were still breathing?" 

"Definitely didn't feel like I was."

"Then how did you not –?"

"I'm not sure. At one point, someone tried doing mouth to mouth on me. Maybe that helped a little." Seth shrugged – or at least meant to, because shrugging didn't really work when he was lying down. "When the ambulance arrived, I wasn't breathing at all and no longer conscious. Woke up over two weeks later in the ICU."

She gasped. "Two weeks?!"

"They kept me in a coma. Apparently I got really sick after a few days… pneumonia and an infection in the trach site." He paused, clearing his throat. "My family was told I probably wouldn't survive. So they… kind of prepared themselves to… –" he broke off when Kay dropped his sipping bottle onto the mattress and embraced him with sudden impulse. Her face was buried in his neck. "You almost died," she realized aloud. "God, Seth, you almost died."

"Almost," he said softly, with a loving nudge against her head. "But I'm still here."

Kay's breath hitched, then she pushed herself up, nodding wordlessly, looking at him with so much pain and love in her eyes that it made Seth's heart ache. Leaning down, she pressed her lips onto his for a very, very long moment. 

They went quiet for several minutes, their faces close to one another after Kay had laid her head down next to him, on the edge of his pillow. She was looking at him unabatingly, her green eyes dancing over his face almost with amazement and at the same time deeply lost in thought. Her hand was on his cheek, thumb gently stroking, until at some point it wandered lower, along with her gaze. She sneaked her fingers under the collar of his shirt and carefully, lightly, traced the outline of his tracheostomy scar. "Did it hurt? The tube?"

He shook his head. "I didn't have any feeling in my neck at first. Everything below my jawline was gone. Couldn't even properly feel the pillow under my head."

Kay's eyes were wide. "Jesus."

"Yeah." An isolated, floating face – that had been him in that first week after the coma. With a lifeless body that hadn't seemed to belong to him; a body not breathing on its own. Seth blinked, and he pushed his shoulder back into the mattress, just to reassure himself that he could do so. "It was kind of ironic," he mumbled. "When I started to become aware, my first conscious thought was that I could breathe again. After that feeling of not getting any air, that was… such a relief. Such an incredible, huge relief." He snorted softly. "Until at some point I realized that actually, I was not breathing at all. A machine was simply doing it for me."

"That must have been so scary," Kay grimaced.

Worse than scary: world-shattering. "And no one explained things to me. Or maybe they already had and I just didn't remember. But in that moment, when I realized I was still completely paralyzed and on a vent, I had no idea what my exact injuries were. I just wanted to know my prognosis, and I was waiting for someone – anyone to tell me that it was all just temporary." Seth unconsciously shook his head. "But no one explained anything."

"And you couldn't ask," Kay remarked softly, a pained frown lining her forehead.

"I tried, but…," he trailed off. Over and over again, he had silently mouthed the question, in several variations, and over and over again had his parents, along with several nurses, tried to understand what he'd been trying to say. Until his mother had become so stressed out by the whole thing that she had started to cry, so he had stopped. 

Kay was biting her lip. "So you were just… left hanging until someone would finally tell you what was going on? That's awful."

He attempted a shrug. "I was heavily medicated and sort of kept drifting in and out. So it's not like I was fully awake and aware the whole time. It was all kind of a blur." Even thinking back now, it seemed surreal; something that had never truly happened, like a fever nightmare the memory of which never faded. Seth cleared his throat. "At some point, a doctor came for that talk. She explained my injuries to me and told me that I would probably not regain much function at all, and definitely not below my shoulders. So…," he looked at Kay. "That's when I finally knew."

She uttered a heavy sigh, nodding. "What I don't understand, though," she remarked after a moment of silence. "How were they able to tell that you wouldn't regain anything below your shoulders but at the same time they weren't sure about the rest?"

"Because I have two types of lesions," Seth explained, and then went on to tell her about the difference between his incomplete C2/C3 and his complete C4 injury. The doctors’ prediction had been that he would perhaps regain some neck movement and partial breathing function – at maximum. "Luckily I ended up getting more than that," he noted, lending Kay a smile.

"Luckily," she repeated, her features deeply in thought. "So is the incomplete injury the reason why you have less function in your right shoulder?"

Seth nodded. "And why I still have some weakness in my neck. Working on that."

"After how long did things start to improve?"

"Sensation came back pretty soon. Movement took a lot longer."

"Must have been a huge relief. When you got feeling back."

He hesitated. "It was, at first. But then I was disappointed that I still couldn't move anything and still had no breathing function. And the way things were, having more sensation also meant more pain." A world of pain. "So I kind of assumed that that was it; that more sensation and more pain was all I would ever get."

Kay was knitting her brow. "I can't imagine how you went through all that without really being able to talk," she pondered. "Didn't you feel kind of… isolated?"

It was hell. Seth swallowed. "Yeah, it was… hard. I felt really alone. Even though saying that is unfair to my family, because they supported me all the way. They truly did their absolute best to be there for me, but…"

"...but you couldn't share what was going on inside of you," Kay noted softly, giving him an empathetic look. "You were alone with your thoughts and fears."

Oh Kay. She understood it so well. He nodded. "I was in constant pain, I still couldn't move my head one bit and still had zero breathing function, I was ashamed of bringing this upon myself, and I felt I had ruined my family's life. All of that sort of… sent me into a downward spiral mentally."

He had never shared this with anyone. Of course people close to him had witnessed it from the outside – his brother and his parents, Eddie, Brian… They had been there at the time, but Seth had never told any of them later on about how bleak those first few weeks actually had been for him. And that feeling of being alone in this, that feeling of inner isolation? It had never truly gone away. Not until now, with Kay. Sharing all of it with her was not as hard as he had been afraid it would be; in fact it was not hard at all. Because she was his Kay. Seth silently looked at her; at that face so full of empathy and understanding and love. And for the first time ever since his injury, he didn't feel alone anymore.

Kay wiped his eyes, which he hadn't even realized had become wet. He gazed at apologetically. "It was a dark time."

She bit down on her lips; that thing she did whenever she was trying to hide an emotional reaction, and her voice was uneasy, quiet when she spoke. "Did you ever… wish that… that you wouldn't have survived?"

He swallowed, nodding. "For a while, yes. Very much."

Kay exhaled shakily. Her lip started to tremble and tears shot into her eyes. Seth hated seeing her cry. "Don't," he whispered, and she bit her lips more, but the tears had already started streaming down her face. "I'm so sorry Seth," she sobbed. "I'm so sorry I wasn't there."

He unconsciously shook his head. I'm not. Quite the opposite; he was grateful for the fact that she had never gotten to see him in that despondent and broken state. Inching his head closer, he started kissing away the tears from her face, salty spot after salty spot. "You're here now," he said. We are both here.

Part Two: Cuddling logistics 

This was harder than she had thought it would be. For so long, Kay had wanted to hear the story of Seth's injury. And now that he was finally telling her, her heart felt like it wanted to break into pieces. All those things – accident, hospital, diagnosis, rehab – had been abstract so far, ominously lying in the dark. Now they were tangible, palpable, full of imagery and emotion that reflected in Seth’s eyes as he was talking. Kay had never been this aware of how far he had come, what a long and difficult road he had traveled in the past two years. And realizing it now made her feel so very, very proud of him.

He told her more. About rehab, and how it had given him things to work on, slowly bringing him out of his depression. How one day, he had suddenly been able to nod his head and how from there on had regained more and more muscle function. How he had relearned to breathe, bit by bit. How he had become accustomed to driving a wheelchair and how he had learned what it means to live as a quadriplegic.

A full hour passed like that, and by the end of it, there was still a lot more left to be told, and Kay had about a thousand more questions that had yet to be answered – but there was plenty enough time for all of that. The door was open now.

Kay glanced at the clock on the wall. Time to call that Uber. "It's late." She gave Seth a kiss. "I should be on my way soon."

He paused, gazing at her shyly. "Would you… like to stay? Sleep here next to me?"

Surprised, she grinned widely at him. "I would like that very much."

"Just one thing," Seth added awkwardly, after they had shared yet another kiss. "How do you feel about someone walking in here at some point during the night? ‘Cause Brian needs to turn me."

Kay couldn't help but wonder if turning him wasn't something she might be able to do, too. But that was a conversation for another time. She smirked, shrugging. "I think I can handle that."

When she came back from getting bed-ready in the bathroom, once again wearing Seth's grey college t-shirt, she found him positioned on his side, the sheets pulled up to his shoulders. In the free spot, Brian had laid out a pillow and a separate blanket for her.  

Seth smiled as she crawled in. "I think that t-shirt is officially yours now."

"I was hoping you'd say that," she grinned, leaning over for a kiss. Then she scooted up close – as far as that was possible, because his bent legs were blocking the way. "There's got to be a workaround for this," she mumbled and lifted up the sheets, incidentally finding he was wearing his usual sleep attire – just boxers. Seth watched with a slight frown on his face, not entirely without worry. Kay glanced at him with a smile. "Your knees. They're stopping me from cuddling up."

He chuckled, giving her a curious look. "Well why don't you turn the other way and let me spoon you?" 

"Good thinking."

"I know, right?"

She grinned. "But then I won't be able to kiss you."

"I will be able to kiss you, though."

"I guess that's a good argument." She moved her backside up against him, pulling up her legs alongside his. In her lower back, some object was slightly poking her, and it took her a moment to figure out that it was the catheter tube curving over the waistband of his boxers. Don't want to accidentally block that off, she thought, moving her hip an inch forward. Still leaning on one elbow, she glanced toward the pillow. His bent left arm was positioned in such a way that she would be lying directly on top of it. "Can I move your arm up a bit?"

Seth peered at it with detachment. "Sure."

She repositioned the limb alongside the bottom edge of the pillow. This way, it would fit into the gap between her shoulder and her head. Once Kay was fully lying down, she reached behind herself and took Seth's other arm from his hip, intending to wrap it around her chest. For a short moment, the elbow stiffly extended. She waited for it to become slack again, then pulled his hand close, keeping it in hers. It was like Seth was actually holding her, and Kay closed her eyes with a happy sigh. It was so amazing to be this close to him, to feel his warm body in her back, and his legs against the soles of her feet. She wished Seth would have been able to feel all that, too. Because it felt like heaven.

Behind her, he was wiggling his head on the pillow, his breathing pattern suggesting he wasn't being successful in whatever he was trying to do. "Can you move your head a little closer?" he asked. "I can't reach you."

"Who knew cuddling could be so logistically challenging, right?" she joked, obliging with his request.

Seth chuckled softly. "Good thing we both like a challenge." He started nuzzling around in the back of her neck, and Kay realized he was trying to push her hair out of the way. "Need help with that?" 

"Yeah," he mumbled with a smile in his voice. "Maybe."

Chuckling, Kay gathered up her hair in her hand, arranging it over the side of her head. She gasped when in the next moment Seth's lips were on her skin, softly kissing the nape of her neck. She had been wrong before: This felt like heaven. "Please keep doing that," she murmured, and he did. Seth, my Seth. The last time they had spent the night like this, it had been after hours of passionate sex. Tonight, they were going to sleep as a couple; a couple who as such had not made love yet. Funny, how life works. Of course Kay also wanted more than this right here – was looking forward to more than this. But she knew Seth wasn't there yet, and that was ok. The intimacy they had shared tonight had been no less important or less deep than the intimacy of sex.

Seth was still kissing her neck. "We've got a problem," he mumbled.

"A problem?"

The tip of his nose playfully rubbed her skin. "Who's going to turn off the lights now?"

Kay woke up when someone squeezed her shoulder. In her drowsy state of mind, for a short second she actually thought it was Seth. But of course the hand belonged to Brian, who was leaning over the bed. "Sorry," he whispered. "I need to…"

With a yawn, Kay started untangling herself from under Seth's arm, and she half sat up. "Do you need me to get out of bed?"

Brian shook his head. "No. Just scoot all the way over." He looked somewhat embarrassed and awkward, which was a first as long as Kay had known him, but also not surprising. Because this was a little awkward. 

Slipping out from under the sheets – quickly replacing them with the blanket – she moved to the far end of the bed and lay down again. From under half-closed eyelids, she watched how Brian swiftly started removing pillows, then positioned Seth's limbs for the shifting. Seth looked like he wasn't even fully awake, only once or twice tiredly blinking his eyes open before his face disappeared from Kay's view when the PCA rolled him onto his other side. A cushion for his back, one between his legs, some fumbling with the catheter tube and Brian was done. The whole thing had taken no longer than five minutes. "Night," he whispered, awkwardly waving at her before he turned off the lamp and left the room. Kay scooted close to Seth again, curling up against his back now and slinging her arm around him. She buried her nose in the nape of his neck, then fell back asleep right away. 

"Mmm, I want to wake up to this every day," Seth mumbled groggily, his voice still heavy with sleep. 

Covering his stubbly cheek with more kisses, Kay smiled. "Same."

He lazily turned his head up in her direction, blinking one eye open. "How did you sleep?" 

"Like a baby."

"Despite the interruption?"

She ran her fingers through his brown waves. "Didn't bother me. Brian seemed a bit embarrassed though."

"Yeah," Seth chuckled, sleepily closing his eyes again. "Can't blame him, poor guy."

Kay glanced at the clock. It was almost eight. "He's probably gonna come in soon, right? To start your routine."

Seth simply nodded, looking like he was about to doze off again. 

"Seth?"

"Mhm?"

"I was wondering…," Kay rested her chin on his shoulder. "How much privacy do you need from me in the mornings?"

He knitted his brow, thinking, then opened his eyes. "I need some."

Snorting, she tousled his hair. "That's very specific, thank you."

Seth chuckled softly. "Yeah, sorry." His shoulder twitched under her. "There's certain stuff that's…"

Kay raised an eyebrow. "...private?"

"Yeah," he glanced up sheepishly. "Like the management of my bodily functions."

"So bathroom stuff."

"Basically."

She nodded. "Figured as much. Anything else?"

"Uhm…," Seth cleared his throat, thinking again. "Not sure."

Kay smiled, because he looked so adorably confused right now, with those heavy eyelids and the slight frown on his face. Still too sleepy to think, are we. "Ok, let's do it like this," she suggested. "If the door is all the way closed, I’m not coming in. Good?"

Seth smiled, looking relieved. "Good."

The door stayed closed for a long time, at least for one hour. Kay wasn't surprised, and she just enjoyed a first breakfast on the patio, looking at the pine trees and reading a magazine. Who knew, maybe next time, the door would be closed for less than an hour. She felt optimistic.

A couple of days later, Kay met up with her mother and her sister for lunch. It had been a while since she had last seen them, and they weren't filled in yet on her and Seth. Whenever Kay had talked to them on the phone lately, there hadn't really been an opportunity to tell them about what had been going on. Mom had a tendency to blabber Kay's ears off about family gossip, cooking recipes and gardening. It was hard to get a word in, much less talk about something in depth. With Stella, it was more of a time problem – she was always very busy with her job and the house she and her husband Paolo had moved into less than a year ago. A long sisterly talk hadn't happened in months. Of course Stella knew who Seth was; what an important person he had always been to Kay. She also knew that she had reconnected with him recently, and that he was a quadriplegic now. But Kay had never gone into detail, or mentioned the fact that she was still in love with Seth. So big sis was in for a surprise today.

"Have you heard from Dad?" Stella asked, poking at her salad. "I haven't talked to him in months."

Kay made a face. "Yeah, no. I should probably feel guilty for not calling him in so long, but…," she sighed, shrugging. Her and Stella's relationship with their father was a complicated one these days. He had been a great dad for all of their childhood. But then, when Kay had been eighteen and Stella twenty-one, he had left their mother for a Russian woman thirty years younger than him. Since then, things had been… different. 

"You surely don't need to feel guilty, Sweety," Mom uttered with a click of the tongue. "He could just as well call you. But he's probably too busy with The Person."

"You know how he is," Stella argued. "He thinks that as his kids, it's our duty to make an effort with him, not the other way around."

Mom sighed loudly. "That's all because of The Person."

'The Person', as Mom always called Dad's new wife, was, in fact, not a very nice person. At least not as far as Kay could tell – she had seen her only a handful of times in the past fifteen years, and the woman had shown no interest at all to get to know her and Stella better. 

"She's controlling him, I'm telling you," Mom continued, attacking the steak on her plate with vigor. "He used to be so different. He had the perfect family, he never wanted for anything. And then she came along, and he claimed to have been unhappy for years. I don't know what that person did to him, but he suddenly became this egomaniac who doesn't care about anyone but himself."

Kay and Stella shared a discreet eyeroll. Their mother had said that exact same thing to them about a million times – and not just to them, but to basically anyone who fell into the trap of bringing up Dad to her. There was nothing Mom loved to get worked up about more. 

"He's always been an egomaniac, Mom," Kay said tiredly. "Don’t pretend he was this perfect, selfless husband for twenty years."

Mom huffed, shaking her head. "You don't know what you're talking about, Sweety. I knew him in different ways than you girls did. I knew him better than anyone." Which was what she always said, every time.

From the other side of the table, Stella groaned, putting down her fork. "Can we talk about something else, please? We've been through this like a million times."

"Yes, please," Kay agreed. "I'd rather we actually enjoy this lunch." And I've got things to tell you guys.

Stella turned to her. "So what have you been up to lately? Any news?"

Kay inadvertently blushed, not able to fully hide a sheepish smile as she bit her lips. Somehow she suddenly felt lost for words. 

Her sister's eyes widened in realization. "Oh my God, you got a new guy, haven't you?"

"Well…," she blinked shyly, stalling a bit by shoving some pasta into her mouth.

"She does!" Mom exclaimed. "Look at that face she's making!" She and Stella shared an excited grin, then both of them gaped at Kay in anticipation, waiting. 

"Yeah, so," she began, after swallowing her food. – Why on earth did she feel so nervous all of a sudden? – "I've got a new boyfriend. And uh… we're very much in love. And… it's Seth."  

What the hell is wrong with me? Kay wanted to slap herself. This was definitely not how she had wanted to say it. She had wanted to announce it happily and proudly, because that was how she felt about being with Seth. Instead, this just now had sounded like a stammering school girl delivering bad news. 

Stella was frowning at her. "Seth as in the Seth?”

Mom, too, seemed confused. "Your old architect friend? But… isn't he in a wheelchair or something?"

Oh God. Here we go. Kay took a deep breath.

To be continued...