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into fourth gear and started to spin in slow menacing circles. My leg, the time I had tried to step off from the bed, it had held back. I didn't think of it at the time. Could it be permanently gone? I pushed the covers off from my leg and tried to make it move by sheer force of will. It sat there selfishly failing to twitch even a toe. I was certain that just yesterday it was moving, perhaps sluggishly but nonetheless it was still moving. My eyes searched around the room in a panic, I don't know what I was looking for. Dr. Swaresh gave me a comforting pat on the hand. Nic gripped the edge of my bed and caught my flailing look, he held it there confidently.
                “Breathe” he repeated over and over. “Look at my eyes and breathe Sam”
                The rising panic in my chest threatened to overwhelm the small grasp of reality I held onto. Dr. Swaresh went on about my leg, his opinion on what surgery would be best and what the percentages were for success. In a monotonous drone I heard him say that the piece was slipping further across my spine. It had already severed the peripheral nerves which had caused the sluggishness and they needed my permission to operate again in hopes of removing it permanently. I stared into Nic's eyes and blew air in and out of my lungs which pumped furiously. Wasn't the accident enough? Fate had taken away Nic's life and now it seemed determined to keep taking things away from us. I felt a bond between us, we'd both been victims here and no one understood what we had lost except each other. I asked Dr. Swaresh to excuse me so I could process this new information.
                “What am I gonna do?” I hated the way my voice shook. I wanted to be strong in front of Nic. Here he was a cripple for life and I was being a big ninny about the possibility of becoming the same thing. I scrubbed at my eyes to get rid of the welling tears and stared down at my legs. There didn't seem to be any difference, left to right they looked identical. I tried again and again to make the left one move. It stubbornly refused. I laid back on the bed and closed my eyes.
                “You're going to be fine” Nic's voice wasn't mocking or laughing anymore, he was soft and serious. His cold hands wrapped around my cheeks and took away all the heat and pain. My mind raced. What could I do with useless legs? What was I capable of? I thought of Nic and how he must have felt as a kid. I wondered what he had wanted to be when he grew up, a firefighter, a police officer? I never had those big dreams but even my small ones were being taken away. I wasn't strong enough to handle something that huge. Big embarrassing tears escaped from the corners of my eyes and soaked his hands, still holding my face. I looked at him through the distorted water.
    He was so young, I couldn't remember what it was like to be 19, I knew I hated it. No one treated you like an adult except when you did something wrong. His expressive eyebrows drew together in tender concern and held up those velvety brown eyes that I could see at this distance were speckled with gold. He had soft cheeks, just barely shadowed with a scruff of facial hair and it framed his perpetually grinning mouth. We were so close, I felt like I was being pulled with a magnet towards him. I blinked away the tears and realized where my mind had been heading. Ridiculous!
                “Thanks, Nic” I slipped my head out of his hands and used the blanket to dry my eyes. “I wish I could be as confident as you.”
                “It's alright, I have enough for the both of us.” His grin made my heart beat a little faster. That's when I realized that I was clearly going crazy. It was probably for the best that Dr. Swaresh had brought in the psychiatrist. A ghost shouldn't be making me feel emotional, a 19 year old ghost shouldn't be making me feel...I didn't even admit it to myself. The one thing I was