His Every Word Read Online Free Page A

situation and they said they could make an exception.” Scarlett smiled at her hopefully.
    Kallie felt a surge of gratitude and relief flood through her. “So I can come with you?”
    “Yes,” Scarlett nodded. “We’re going to see Hunter.”

    ***
    Hunter was in the Intensive Care Unit in a private room.
    Walking inside for the first time, Kallie clutched her purse as if it was a life preserver and she’d been thrown over the side of the Titanic. Which, truth be told, was exactly how she felt as she first saw him in the hospital bed, hooked up to machines and tubes and looking nothing like himself
    It hit her like a body blow and she physically hunched over as she thought about the pain and agony he’d endured on her behalf.
    Scarlett glanced over at her. “Are you all right, Kallie?”
    “Not really,” she admitted breathlessly.
    “I don’t think he’s awake. They said he was sedated and that the surgery had been really tough on him,” Scarlett told her.
    Kallie could barely control her arms and legs. Just staying there, knowing how powerless she was—it was the single worst feeling she’d had since the moment she’d realized Hunter had been shot.
    “Oh my God,” she said, her hand clapping over her mouth as she made sense of what she was seeing. “He’s on a ventilator. Oh God.”
    Scarlett nodded anxiously. “Yes, well—I’m sure that’s common…I’m sure it happens with this kind of thing.”
    Kallie knew what a ventilator meant. It meant that Hunter couldn’t breathe on his own—he was hooked up to a machine that did it for him.
    It brought her back to an unpleasant childhood memory.
    One of Kallie’s classmates had been hit by a car on a busy road. Kallie had been taken to visit her in the hospital. Her mother had tried to prepare her for what she was going to see, but nothing could do it justice. The girl she’d just played with at recess a few days before, was stretched out on a hospital bed, silent and unresponsive, breathing with the aid of a machine, just as Hunter was doing now.
    At the time, Kallie had been struck dumb with fear, hiding behind her mother, barely able to express afterwards how shocked and horrified she’d been at the sight of her school friend having been reduced to an inanimate object.
    Now, standing in a similar hospital room more than a decade later, it was as if Kallie was caught in a nightmare and a time warp all at once. The past and the present seemed horribly intertwined, and she felt like a tiny fly caught in the web of some vast universal plan that didn’t care about her or anyone she loved.
    Kallie forced herself forward, stepping closer to Hunter’s bed, not wanting to see more evidence of just how badly hurt he was, but knowing that she couldn’t run from this.
    He was here like this because of her—because he’d been willing to die for her.
    The least she could do was bare witness to his suffering.
    As she drew closer, Kallie was able to clearly see the large dressing over his chest, and the dark shadow of blood buried deep within the layers of gauze and medical tape. He was shirtless, but his legs remained covered by a white, sterile looking blanket.
    His torso was grotesquely swollen from the trauma. The bruising was like something out of a horror movie. There were concentric circles of purple morphing into blues and greens and even darker, blackish bruising near his clavicle.
    With the help of the ventilator, his breathing was fairly deep and consistent, although the machine sound made it seem as though he wasn’t even completely human anymore. He was partly a machine now, and without that part, he wouldn’t survive even a few minutes.
    His face was slack, making him look older than his years. His cheeks were sunken in, his eyes darkened.
    She traced his heart monitor with her eyes, as well as an IV running to his arm, filling him with lifesaving drugs or fluids that he desperately needed.
    His battered chest rose and fell, rose and fell in