She didn’t owe him anything, not really, not at all. Or at least that’s what he kept telling himself. He was just doing what anybody else would’ve done. “Maybe a little, yeah.” More a joke than serious, in reality she didn’t owe him anything. He was being a decent person, helping a friend. But he also wasn’t above getting some mileage out of the comment. But maybe not until after she’d made it through this. When whatever panic she was surviving through subsided. When her baby was born. “No. Take that back. I’m not,” said with more force than he expected. If anything she was too good to him.
He took the phone from her, nodding his head after request and muttering a ‘yeah, sure’ to the first part. The second part, well that was the part that made him pause. Would he stay? Maybe the better question was should he stay? Crisis or not, it was still Mike’s memorial. But Rae still looked a little panic, and he was almost ashamed to admit he’d do just about anything to eases the panic out of her face, even just a little. “’Course I will,” he answered quickly, pocketing her cell phone for the time being.
Breathing a sigh of relief when one of the medics came by, he filled in what details he could, letting Rae fill in the rest and finally setting her gently on a bed. “I’ll be out there,” he told her with a motion back towards the waiting area, or what passed as a waiting area. “I’ll text everyone, let them know you’re here.” If he was avoiding saying how long he’d stay, well, he couldn’t be faulted for that. It wasn’t like he really deserved to be able to stay and wait out the labor; that was something for family, and he definitely wasn’t that. Not even a little.
It wouldn’t hurt to just see how things played out.
“You’re in good hands,” he told her with a quick squeeze of her hand. “Everything’s gonna be okay.” One last smile before he stepped out of the medical staff’s way, before he went to let her friends know that EJ was on his way.
It was kind of surreal now that he’d had a chance to settle and stop for a minute. They were just announcing the deaths of those that had lost their life in the bomb, and now, if everything went okay, Rae would be celebrating the birth of her son.