Read Story: SEASON 1 EPISODE 79
Grab ur tissues🤧
Outside the Cinema – The Ambulance
The paramedics moved fast, strapping Duane’s limp body onto the stretcher, and Ivory scrambled up beside them, refusing every hand that tried to hold her back.
“I’m coming with him,” she said, voice raw and shaking. “I’m coming, don’t you dare try to stop me.”
They didn’t argue. There wasn’t time.
Inside the ambulance, she gripped his hand — cold already, so much colder than it had ever been — and pressed it against her cheek, sobbing so hard her whole body shook with it.
“Stay with me,” she whispered, over and over, the words losing all shape by the third or fourth repetition. “Stay with me, please, Duane, please, please, please—”
The paramedic worked over him with brisk, practiced efficiency, calling out numbers she didn’t understand, pressing gauze against wounds that kept soaking through anyway, and Ivory could only watch, useless, still clutching his hand like it was the only thing keeping either of them tethered to the earth.
Her mind spun backward without her permission — the kitchen at midnight, the breakfast he’d made her that first morning, the way he’d carried her home when she couldn’t walk, the pool, the mall,
the I love you, Ivy.
He’d waited so long to say it. He’d only just said it.
He can’t leave now, she thought desperately, tears streaming steadily down her face. Not now. Not after Ron. Not after everything. I finally let myself trust someone again, I finally let the walls come down, and if he leaves too—
She didn’t let herself finish the thought. She couldn’t.
“I love you too,” she said instead, pressing his hand harder against her cheek. “I love you, Duane, do you hear me? I love you, so don’t you dare stop fighting. Don’t you dare leave me like this.”
The ambulance screeched to a halt outside the hospital, and the doors flew open, hands reaching in to pull the stretcher out, wheeling him fast down a corridor that blurred past Ivory in streaks of white and fluorescent light.
“Ma’am, you need to wait here,” a nurse said, catching her by the shoulders as she tried to follow through the double doors marked Emergency — Authorized Personnel Only.
“No, I need to be with him, I need—”
“Ma’am, please. Let them work.”
The doors swung shut in her face, and Ivory sank into the nearest chair, blood — his blood — still drying dark and stiff across her palms, her dress, everything she’d worn to that beautiful, perfect night that felt now like it belonged to some other lifetime entirely.
She cried without stopping for what felt like hours, the waiting room slowly emptying and filling around her, strangers glancing at her with pity she was too broken to acknowledge.
The doctor finally emerged, pulling off his gloves, and Ivory was on her feet before he’d even fully cleared the doorway, rushing toward him with desperate, fragile hope written across every line of her face.
He stopped in front of her. His expression told her everything before he opened his mouth.
“I’m so sorry,” he said quietly. “We did everything we could. We lost him.”
The words didn’t land at first. They simply hovered there, meaningless, refusing to attach themselves to anything real.
“No,” Ivory said. “No, that’s not — you’re wrong. Let me see him. Let me see him right now.”
She didn’t wait for permission. She shoved past the doctor, running down the corridor, following the sound of a gurney’s wheels squeaking against the floor ahead of her, and there — there, being wheeled out of the emergency room, a white sheet drawn up over a body she recognized by the shape of his shoulders alone.
“NO.” She sprinted the last few steps, throwing herself against the gurney. “No, no, this isn’t — Duane, wake up, wake UP—”
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