Total pages in book: 147
Estimated words: 137176 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 686(@200wpm)___ 549(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 137176 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 686(@200wpm)___ 549(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
I knew where he was going with this. “It’s not the same, JJ—”
“Shut the fuck up, Cass,” he snapped. “You don’t get to say it isn’t the same thing until you hear what I have to say. You saw me at my worst, and you assumed that you had all the answers to explain away my behavior, right?”
I nodded but didn’t say anything because I owed JJ my silence.
“I wasn’t in a coma because of the bullet. The doctors put me in a medically induced coma to give my brain time to heal but then they couldn’t bring me out of it. When I finally did wake up, I saw Sully and all these strangers looking down at me like I was some fucked-up science experiment. Sully was the first one to explain what had happened, but I didn’t understand him. Not that day or the next or the one after that. So not only couldn’t I talk, I also couldn’t process, I couldn’t think. I was just… stuck.”
JJ eased himself to the floor so he was sitting next to me. He slowly ran the fingers of his right hand along the inside of my forearm until his fingers were linked with mine.
“It took another six months of speech therapy, psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, and pretty much every other type of doctor to get to me to a place where I understood that I’d been shot and while I would be okay, I had to learn how to do certain things over. By then, my brain had healed enough for me to process things. That should have been a good thing, right?”
I shook my head because I knew JJ to his core. He was a survivor, but he was also a realist. He would have known what was in store for him to become “okay.”
“Every baby step of progress that I made was applauded as if I’d just won an Olympic medal or something. My voice was the last thing I got back. The first thing I wanted to do was scream at the top of my lungs that none of those people had saved me. They’d condemned me to a life I hadn’t wanted. I hadn’t been able to tell them that in the beginning, though. I couldn’t even write a note to say I wanted a DNR form. I was literally a prisoner of my own body.”
The idea that JJ hadn’t wanted any life-saving measures to be performed in the event his heart stopped beating or he was no longer able to breathe on his own made me sick to my stomach.
“When I was released from the hospital, there was this huge crowd of people waiting for me. A lot of them had signs that said they loved me. Officers I’d never met were there by the hundreds. One microphone after another was thrust in front of me. I was a hero. Not one of those people seemed to get the fact that I hadn’t done anything heroic. I’d been shot, I’d bled out on the street, and the paramedics, surgeons, nurses, and pretty much everyone in the hospital behind me had put my body back together. They’d been the heroes. And yet there I was being celebrated as if I’d done something to earn those people’s adoration. The whole thing made me sick. There were officers sacrificing their lives in the line of duty every day and yet I was the hero,” JJ scoffed.
“I didn’t know how to compartmentalize, though. I blamed everyone for what my life had become. I hated all those doctors and nurses and other medical workers, I hated the EMTs who’d gotten my heart started while I’d been lying there in the street, and most of all, I hated the media because they had no idea what I’d become. Hell, they probably would have sold even more papers if they had known.”
JJ lifted his hands and separated them as if scanning a billboard or marquee.
“Hero cop found frequenting gay bars. Medical miracle officer engaging in gay sex with strangers,” JJ called out as if he were actually reading the headline. “After that, the tabloid fodder would have begun. Do you have any idea how many pictures of guys fucking me in dirty bathroom stalls would have ended up on the internet? What would that have done to my brother’s fledgling business? What would he have thought about what I was really doing every night when I told him I was going to hang out with some buddies at a bar to watch the game?”
JJ paused and drew in a deep breath to calm himself before continuing.
“I didn’t compartmentalize. I played one role during the day and another at night. Losing even that small piece of my past made it feel like I’d lost all of it. My mind would convince me that the life I’d led up until the moment where everything went blank was some kind of lie or trick that my brain had come up with. Sometimes I still don’t know how to reconcile all the different versions of myself that have popped up. At one point I wondered if I might have that multiple disorder thing, but when I looked it up, it said people who suffered from it were being protected by alternate personas who took over when the person couldn’t deal with something. I knew all my personas. I was in the driver’s seat the entire time.”