I love you deeply, intimately. You're all I can think about, you're all I want in this life. I waited too long to realize it, to say it, but it's the God's truth. I love you and I want you to be with me forever. I'll do anything you want me to in order to prove this to you but I love you. I LOVE you."
She stared at me, her lip quivering now. Suddenly she shook her head almost violently. "No." She said. "This has to stop. If you have feelings for me as you say then you'll leave me alone like I asked. Just leave me alone. Stop talking to me, stop thinking about me. I need to get you out of my life and keep you out of it."
"I'll do that if you do one thing for me." I said. "Just one little thing."
"What's that?"
"Look in my eyes and tell me you don't love me. If you can truly say that you don't love me, that you don't miss me, then I'll leave you alone forever."
She sighed, tossing the blanket on the foot of my gurney and wiping a tear that was forming in her eye. "I do love you Bill." She said. "If I didn't this would be a whole lot easier. I've loved you almost since the first time we started talking together. Don't you see that that is the problem? Love like that doesn't just die. You hurt me badly. You devastated me. You showed me how blind I could be about seeing certain things because of love. You showed me how much love could hurt me and how it could keep on hurting me long after I stopped talking to you.
"Don't you understand? I'm just now getting to the point where I can go for an hour or so without thinking about you. I'm just now starting to get you out of my system. And here you are telling me everything is all right and we should just go back to the way we were. I can't do that! I will not live through that hurt anymore."
"You won't have to Nina." I told her. "You won't have to. I'm not saying we should go back to the way things were. I want more with you now. I want to be with you always, don't you see? I am not the same person I was last month. I've changed. I will never hurt you that way again."
"Bill, if there's one thing I learned through all of this," She said, really crying now. "It's that love sucks. We weren't even going together, we never even kissed each other, and you were able to hurt me. How much more could you hurt me if we did start going together? How much more, Bill?"
"A lot more." I said honestly. "But I won't. I promise you that. I won't."
"How could I believe you? After all the girls you had, after all the girls you used and then tossed over your shoulders like a beer can, how could I ever trust you not to do that with me? What's going to happen when you get tired of me? How long will that take?"
"It'll take forever Nina." I said. "I will never get tired of you and I will never treat you the way I've treated other girls. When I was doing that I was being stupid and immature. I was being self-centered. But I've learned a few things. Getting your teeth kicked in by consequences does that for you. The most important thing I learned was how much you meant to me and how stupid I'd been to not see what you and I had together, to not seize it while I had the chance.
"I want one more chance Nina. Just one more. I've given you all the promises I can and you can take them for what they're worth. I can give you all the assurances I can and you can take them the same way. But what it comes down to is your choice. If you want me to, I'll walk away from you now and never enter your life again without permission. If you ask me to do that I will, and I'll be feeling the same hurt, the same guilt, the same feelings that you've felt, that you're feeling now.
"If you give me that one chance, you'll be taking a chance of your own. You'll be gambling with your own feelings that I am true to my word and that I won't hurt you again. I think that love is like that. But if you tell me to leave you'll be taking another kind of chance. You'll be taking the chance that it might have worked out and you will never have known it. I think we have something special Nina, something very special. Thanks to my stupidity we never got to explore it fully. I'd like to try now. Just one shot Nina, that's all I ask. Just take one little gamble."
She wiped her eyes again with the back of her hand and then sniffed. "It's not a little gamble." She said. "It's a big one. The biggest one."
"We can start slow Nina." I told her. "I'm not saying we should rush out and get married. I just like to be with you. I'm not complete when you're not with me. I know that sounds like a freakin' cliche from a romance novel but it's true. I think about you all the time. I want to be with you, to talk to you. Is that too much to ask?"
She shook her head. "I don't know anymore Bill." She said. "I just don't. I need some time to think about all of this."
"Take all the time you want Nina." I said. "Just don't tell me to leave yet. Just don't tell me that until you've thought it over. I will if you want me to, but I hope you won't."
"I have to get back to work." She said. She turned and headed back through the curtain.
"Nina," I said.
She turned to look at me.
"Thanks for listening to me."
She nodded and slipped out of my sight again.
The doctor came in a few minutes later. I don't know if you've ever had stitches before but it is certainly not one of life's greater pleasures. He stuck a needle into my hand in eight different places in order to inject lidocaine. The pain from this rivaled everything associated with the time I'd been stabbed. There are an obscene amount of nerve endings in a person's hand. When he was done I had a neat line of eight stitches keeping the wound closed. He promised he would write me a prescription for some pain pills and then he shot off to his next patient.
It was Nina who came in to give me my discharge paperwork. Her face was once again blank as she entered the cubicle, clipboard in hand, and sat down on the stool the doctor had used. I looked back at her.
"You know something?" She asked me quietly.
"What's that?" I asked.
"The girls at school have been complaining about you lately."
"They have?" I asked, not at all sure where this was going.
She nodded seriously. "I hear them in the bathroom and between classes all the time, just like I always did before. Of course before I could never bring myself to believe what I was hearing."
"Nina I told you…"
"Shhh." She hushed me. I shut up.
"Anyway," She continued. "Lately they've been saying things about how you're getting kind of uppity and so forth. Saying you won't go out with anyone anymore, won't do your vacuum cleaner routine," She gave me a sharp look, "Whatever THAT is."
I swallowed, blushing.
"I ignored them when I heard them talking about you." She went on. "Like I said, I didn't want to hear ANYTHING about you lately. But after what you just said, it came back to me."
"Did it?"
She nodded. "It did." She looked at me for a moment. "What I'm trying to say is," Another deep breath. "Well, if you're not doing anything else at lunch tomorrow, why don't you come over and sit with me? I just read a cool book and I've been dying to discuss it with someone who has some intelligence."
I smiled, my heart warming as I heard this. "I'll be there Nina. I've read a few books too."
"I'll keep an eye out for you." She said, "Now, here are your discharge instructions. You need to keep this wound dry and change the dressing every day. When you take a shower…"
Chapter 8
The best of times
Are when I'm alone with you
Some rain, some shine
We'll make this a world for two
All memories of yesterday
Will last a lifetime
We'll take the best, forget the rest
And someday we'll find