Drop Everything Now

Drop Everything Now

Alessandra Thomas

Praise for
Drop Everything Now
:

“This book rocked my socks off. I’ve already been a fan of Thomas since
Picture Perfect
, but I think
Drop Everything Now
is my favorite of her works. Andi’s situation is tough and realistic and the way she handles it shows strength and perseverance that was present in her character when she was introduced in
Subject to Change
. But as endearing as Andi is, the best part of this book is Ryder. Hot, attentive, and a stripper! How can you beat a hero like that? His relationship with Andi is total swoon. A very enjoyable read.”

~Laurelin Paige, Bestselling Author of
Fixed on You

“A smoking hot but heartfelt look about the choices that define us in life and love. Drop everything now and read it!”

~ Sophia Bleu, Author of
Catching Liam

Copyright 2013 by Alessandra Thomas

Developmental Editing: Paisley Grant

Copy Editing: Becca Weston

ISBN-13: 978-1492709077

ISBN-10: 1492709077

All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

Chapter 1

The
pediatric oncology wing at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia was chilly with blowing AC and smelled like industrial-strength cleaner. Still, I couldn’t have imagined a happier, warmer place on earth, and it was all because of the tiny hand that clung to mine.

I grinned down at six-year-old Rachel, whose bone marrow biopsy had just come back free and clear of leukemia. She’d been lucky; she’d had ALA, the “good” kind of leukemia, which responded to chemo better than other types. Still, the four weeks she’d been in chemo and then the HOT unit, shut off from the outside world, had been full of pain, nausea, exhaustion, and tears—for both her and her mother. As a child life specialist, it was my job to do my best to see them both through it using distractions, light talk therapy, and various coping mechanisms.

Days like today made it all worth it. Today, Rachel got to ring the bell signifying she was officially in remission and could go home. Her olive-green eyes sparkled up into mine as she hopped from foot to foot.

“Can I ring it now, Andi?”

I laughed and ran a hand over her knobby little head, which was just starting to sprout a new growth of peach fuzz. “Not yet, sweetheart. Doctor O’Donnell wants to say something first.”

Doctor O’Donnell, who I rarely saw smile, arrived at our little circle, which included Rachel’s mom and a couple nurses who had become really attached to her, right at that moment, beaming. “Miss Rachel,” she said in a stern voice, lowering her glasses down her nose. “We need to have a talk.” Rachel’s eyes went wide as she stared at Doctor O’Donnell. “You and I beat cancer together this month. I think we’re a very good team, don’t you?”

Rachel nodded, a smile teasing at her lips.

“So,” Doctor O’Donnell said, smiling along with her, “are you sure you want to leave me here alone to fight cancer all by myself? What will I do without you?”

Rachel giggled, catching on to the joke. Heck, even I smiled. Doctor O’Donnell ran this ward like a boot camp—all business, all the time—and we almost never saw her break ranks. So when she held up a hand for a high five, spunky Rachel wasn’t having any of it. She launched all 45 pounds of herself at Doctor O’Donnell, flinging her arms around her neck and almost knocking her over. We all cracked up—it was so Rachel and so great to see her feeling so much better.

After she released the doctor, Rachel skipped up to the big brass bell on the wall and rang it loud and long with both her spindly little arms. Her mom and I laughed when we looked at each other and realized we were both wiping tears off our cheeks.

There was pretty much no better way to start my last semester of college—the last one before I’d be able to start working at a real job I adored, out in the real world. After just fourteen more weeks, I’d be heading to D.C. for a prestigious fellowship and training program for the country’s leading child life therapists. Things were absolutely perfect.

I kissed Rachel on the cheek and helped her mom carry the last of their stuff to the car. “Keep in touch,” I said, squeezing her mom tight one last time.

She nodded with tears in her eyes. “You know where to find me.”

I tapped the top of their car twice before I waved goodbye and headed back into the hospital. As I stepped through the automatic double doors, Joey, one of the newest child life interns, came bouncing up to me.

“Hey, babe, what’s up?” I sniffled.

“Aw, did you just see Rachel off? I’m so happy for them.” Joey grinned. Joey was always grinning these days—so different from when I’d met her as a miserable pre-med student. I was glad she’d been able to make the switch to this career path.

“Anyway,” she went on, “you have a call at the station. From Vegas.”

I tilted my head. “That’s weird. Mom never calls while I’m working.”

I told Mom about all my shifts so she could save us both time by just calling my cell phone when I was done in the ward. Plus, we’d had our daily phone call this morning—rehashing
The Bachelorette
episode from last night and laughing over my story of the fraternity boys who had done a cross-campus walk in heels to raise money for some charity. Mom and I were best friends—so close that she often got up at 6:00 a.m. her time just to have a cup of coffee with me over the phone.

Joey and I started back toward the elevators, moving at our usual fast pace—that’s just how people walked in a hospital.

“Oh, it’s not your mom. It’s a guy.”

My stomach twisted. “Did he say who?”

Joey shook her head. “Just that he’d wait to talk to you. Didn’t want to leave a message.”

That was really weird. The only guy I still knew in Vegas was my mom’s husband, Mike, and we’d only talked about a dozen times since they’d gotten married a couple years ago. There wasn’t anything wrong with him really, but she’d met him after I’d moved to Philly for college and we’d just never clicked.

He’d definitely never called me. Ever.

As soon as the elevator dinged, I rushed off and called, “Thanks, Jo!” over my shoulder before I speed-walked over to the nurses’ station. I was a little out of breath when the head nurse, Alice, handed me the phone with one hand while flipping through charts with the other.

“Hey…Mike?” I said. My voice shook.

“Hey, Andrea,” he said, clearing his throat. “I have some bad news.” I couldn’t tell whether his voice was soft because of the shitty connection or because he couldn’t get the words out. My mind raced. What was ‘bad’? They’d lost the house? The dog had died?

“There’s been an accident,” Mike said, his voice audibly wavering now. Instantly, I felt like I was going to throw up. “Your mom…she got the worst of it.”

“Oh my God,” I whispered, my hand flying to my mouth as my breaths became short. “Oh my God, Mike.”

“She went into surgery, and they’re trying to fix up all the internal bleeding now. The doctors seemed confident,” he choked.

I clutched the desk, feeling my legs start to give out underneath me. Alice stared at me with wide eyes and called one of the other nurses over while she rolled a chair underneath me. I collapsed into it.

“So what’s her status?” I managed to ask.

“She had some pretty traumatic head injuries, and since she hasn’t woken up yet, they don’t know the effect—what her capabilities will be. For now, since she’s in surgery, she’s on a ventilator and heavily sedated.” Then his voice broke, and he started to sob into the phone.

I’d never seen Mike cry—not even at the wedding.

One of the nurses appeared beside me with an emesis bin and squeezed my shoulder.

“Okay,” I stuttered into the phone. “Okay, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“That’d be good,” Mike said, his voice breaking again. “Just…try to stay calm. There are direct flights through East-West airlines, I think. I’d book you one, but…”

“No, no. Don’t worry about it.” I knew that Mike’s contractor work had dried up since the Vegas real estate market went bust years ago and had never really recovered. Mom’s job as a nurse helped them make ends meet but only barely.

“Okay, Andi. See you soon. Stay safe.”

“I will,” I whispered before putting the receiver down on the desk with a trembling hand. Someone else—Alice, maybe—hung it up on the console before my head whipped to the left and I vomited into the bin.

I let my head hang there for a few minutes, trying to catch my breath. Tears dripped off my chin, and Alice rubbed my back while someone else took the bin away and handed me a sterile wipe to clean up the puke on my lips.

“Bad news, huh, baby?” Alice murmured. “What can we do?”

Through flowing tears, I told her everything. She reminded me so much of my mom—middle-aged, patient, and kind, always taking care of the college students who worked on the ward in one way or another. I couldn’t look at her without thinking about what my mom must look like right now, fighting for her life on an operating table. When I was all the way across the country.

Alice helped me log on to the airline’s site, and I emptied my entire bank account into the earliest direct flight. Vague thoughts of how I was going to make up for the income I’d lose from missing shifts at the coffeeshop for the next few days—or weeks—flitted through my head, but I pushed them out. I tried to remember the techniques I used with the kids on the ward. Breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth. Visualize a peaceful, steady place.

But all I could visualize was the sight of my mom, my best friend in the world, bloodied, bruised, stitched, and intubated, lying still on a hospital bed.

Chapter 2

There
weren’t too many hospitals in Vegas, and I prayed I was telling the taxi driver to head to the right one when I told him to take me to St. Christopher’s where Mom worked.

When the driver pulled up to the circle drive, I motioned for him to stay in his seat—I didn’t need him to help me lift my little duffel bag from the seat beside me. I swiped my card through the machine at the back of the cab—thank God for credit card machines everywhere in this damn town—and winced at the $24 fee.

I expertly wove my way through the bright, glass-walled foyer of the hospital. Mom had worked there since I was in elementary school, and I would take the RTC bus to stay with her after school until her shift was over at 2 a.m. The cafeteria ladies would sneak me leftovers, and I would curl up in the empty on-call rooms until she came to collect me and take me home. This hospital was my childhood, and a big part of the reason I wanted to work in the field I’d chosen. Because of it, I’d learned that everyone in a hospital, not just the patients, needed TLC sometimes.

I was at the ER intake desk within a few minutes, breathlessly asking the triage nurse whether my mom was back there. Just as I was tripping over her new last name—“Hughes” still sounded so weird after “Maria”—a familiar face sped around the corner and pulled me into an embrace.

“Oh, Andi.” Mom’s friend Carol had the same teased, bleached-blonde hair, huge earrings, and cheap perfume she’d had since I was a junior in high school.

A sob ripped through me as I finally got words out. “She’s here, right? The ambulance brought her here?”

Carol squeezed me harder. “Yeah, baby, she’s here. She just came out of surgery. She’s still sedated.”

Carol kept her arm around me as we strode down the hallways to one of the biggest rooms in Intensive Care. Mom was one of the most senior members on the nursing staff, and it was obvious the hospital staff was going all out to take care of their own. They’d set Mom up in an east-facing room with the good light-blocking shades and a nice couch for visitors. For me.

Mom’s petite body seemed to only take up half the bed, and against the white sheets and white bandages wrapped around her head, the huge purple bruise stretching across her cheek seemed even darker. Her eyes were gently closed.

“You said she was awake,” I said to Carol, panicked.

“Shhh, hon. She’s resting. When you have traumatic head injury like this, the brain is trying to recover and reorganize itself. She’s gonna be sleeping a lot, okay? But she’s conscious.”

“She was blinking once for yes and twice for no for a few minutes.” Mike’s Southern twang—something I’d never gotten used to—came from a wheelchair at the head of her bed, where he had one arm in a sling and another in a huge white cast.

That was when I remembered—I wasn’t the guest that would be using the couch, staying overnight. That was for spouses. For Mike.

He had his head in his hands, and when his eyes finally met mine, they were red and puffy. I’d never seen Mike cry.

“It was all my fault,” he said, his voice breaking.

Carol went over to him and touched his shoulder. “Now stop that. It wasn’t your fault. There’s no way you could have seen that guy crossing the median, and even if you had, you would have had to swerve into traffic the other way.”

He just buried his head in his hands again, rubbing his fingers into his eyes.

Carol piddled around the room, rearranging some things and wiping Mom’s face gently with a damp washcloth. I stared. I couldn’t believe this. I just wanted to touch her, but even with all my experience working with cancer patients and their families, I couldn’t think of a single thing to do. I worked with chronically sick kids, not people in the trauma unit. And in all my years helping other families, I never imagined it would be me.

Carol said, “Okay, baby, visiting hours are gonna be over in about half an hour, and Mike’s the only one who can stay overnight.”

I just nodded numbly.

“But you can come back tomorrow, okay?”

I managed to look at her. “I know. Thank you,” I finally managed to choke out.

When Carol left, it was just me and Mike. I pulled a chair up next to him, and we sat together in stunned silence for a little while. After about ten minutes, Mike pulled his hands down from his eyes and slowly looked over to me. For the first time, it really hit me—he loved my mom so much, so completely. It made my heart drop. I could totally see the anguish of her being so badly hurt staring back at me.

“It’s going to be dark soon,” he said. “I’ll give you my keys and some cash so you can get settled back at the house.”

“The house” was a one-bedroom, one-bathroom townhouse with decades-old used furniture and probably noisy partying neighbors. They’d bought it when they got married and were perfectly happy in it, but it was definitely not in a great part of town. There was no way I was staying in that tiny space—not by myself and especially not with Mike, who I barely knew.

“No, Mike,” I said, almost touching his forearm before pulling back. “I already have a hotel.”

He nodded and swallowed hard, taking a long look at Mom. “Okay. The neurologist said he’d be in first thing tomorrow morning to look at her again.”

“I’ll be here for that. Try to get some sleep, okay? I’ll send a nurse to fix you up with some blankets and a pillow.” He stared at me blankly, and I really couldn’t tell whether he’d heard me or not. He just blinked and looked over at Mom again. I could tell right then that he wouldn’t be sleeping.

On my way out of the hospital, jitters ran down my arms and legs—like they had enough restless energy to run a marathon—but my brain was totally dead. I was so used to having a million things to do: my job at the coffee house; the internship at the hospital, where I spent more time than I technically had to; and my ever-growing mountain of homework. Forget a social life. I was lucky if I occasionally hung out with the kids who’d been RAs with me two years ago or my friend Dara, who had drifted out of my life after she and her boyfriend got engaged over Christmas break.

Never mind that I hadn’t been on a date since November and hadn’t been in a relationship since the year before. And it had been entirely forgettable. Sex with Josh had never been very good. Sex with any of my boyfriends had always lacked…something. The concept of a mind-blowing orgasm was barely on my radar.

That kind of stuff—blissful relationships and crazy, multiple-orgasm sex—only happened in romance novels anyway. Daydreaming might be nice, but I lived in the real world, a world where I had work to do and distraught families to take care of.

When the cab I’d called pulled up, I settled myself into the back seat. “I’m looking for a hotel,” I said wearily, pulling my hair back into a ponytail. “It doesn’t have to be a good one, but it’d be good if it was in a safe neighborhood. As cheap as possible.”

“The Shooting Star should have something for around $79 a night, doll. Right off the Strip, so the downtown police are on it. It’s old but clean, for the most part.”

“Sounds great,” I said, slumping against the seat and sighing. I had a $10,000 limit on one of my credit cards. If I stayed here a week and paid for my flight home, I should be able to pay it off with a few months of overtime at the coffee shop.

By this point, my whole body was absolutely throbbing with exhaustion. I fumbled through my bag for my phone to check the time, but when I clicked it on, I saw an email from my professor, Dr. Sullivan. Shit.

I was supposed to present an analysis of an article tomorrow in class. By now, it was after her office hours at Drexel, and I hadn’t told anyone else where I was going. Class was at 9:00. I decided to give her a call to explain, hoping she’d understand.

Dr. Sullivan’s warm voice greeted me when she picked up. “Hey, Andi.”

“I just wanted to tell you I won’t be in class tomorrow,” I said, trying to keep control of my voice. I was unsuccessful—those little gasps that follow crying were too hard to keep back.

“Are you okay?” Dr. Sullivan asked over rush of cars in the background. She must have been walking to her car.

That was when I lost it. As a therapist, she should have known better than anyone else that asking someone whether she was okay, when she clearly wasn’t, would trigger weeping. Of course, until I called, she had no reason to think anything would be the matter. “I had to fly home to Vegas this afternoon. My mom’s been in a car accident, and it’s bad.”

“Oh, sweetie. Did she have surgery?”

“Yeah. The doctors say everything went well, but she’s just…sleeping a lot?” My voice broke. “She just looks so bad. She’s all beat up.”

She sighed. “Oh, you poor thing. How long are you planning to stay?”

“As long as she needs me to, I guess.” My stomach twisted. “I’m sure it won’t be long. I just wanted to apologize that I won’t be in class tomorrow to present that article.”

She sort of laughed, which confused me. “Andi, that is the last thing you need to worry about. Just keep in touch when you can and remember to take care of yourself, too, okay?”

“I just need to see what my mom needs. I don’t even know what’s going on with her. And she took care of me all by herself for so many years…”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. One thing at a time, okay? Just promise me you’ll remember that you can’t take care of her unless you’re taking care of yourself. Promise me you’ll do that and that you’ll keep in touch. Call or text me any time, okay?”

Damn. She was a good therapist.

I sniffled into the phone. I could only manage to say, “Thank you, Dr. Sullivan,” before she said goodbye.

When we pulled up the hotel—a dirty-looking white building with faded fabric awnings—I let the cab driver grab my bag from the seat beside me and come around to open up my door. When he met my eyes, he didn’t even seem to care that I didn’t have the cash to tip him.

I fumbled in my purse for some cash, sighing at the $32 fee. God, I hoped Mom would improve soon. I couldn’t afford to temporarily live in Vegas for long.

I stepped out of the car just in time to hear the cabbie say, “Thanks, Ry,” and look up to see him handing my duffel back to a six-foot-tall, flawless creation of smooth, glistening muscle topped with a white collar, a bow tie, and a smile.