by J. K Harper
I opened my mouth to say, “I know that our first time just ended with you punching yourself and then disappearing into thin air,” but I stopped myself.
My throat was sore but that wasn't what stopped my words from forming, confusion was. I took stock of myself. My costume was gone, replaced by a hospital gown. I was lying in a hospital bed, crisscrossed with tubes. Machines beeped just behind me and Mark stood beside the bed, dressed like a doctor still.
"What the hell…?"
Before I could finish, the curtained walls surrounding us separated with a whooshing sound like a shower curtain and another doctor dressed just like Mark came in, with a nurse on her tail.
They were both in scrubs, the only thing telling them apart was the white coat the one lady wore. She introduced herself and the nurse with her and immediately started talking.
"Welcome back to us Hannah, you gave us all quite a scare arriving by ambulance all bloody and unconscious like you did. Mark here set us straight, although he threw us off at first as well, dressed as one of us and covered in what we originally assumed was your blood. Between him, and the medic who wheeled you in, we were able to rule all the blood out, thankfully. Halloween is a hell of an interesting night to work in the Emergency Room, let me tell you. You're very lucky someone at that party had an EpiPen on them and knew how to use it. How are you feeling?"
"An EpiPen? That's for allergies, right? But I'm not allergic to anything. I don't understand. I was just standing in the hall at the party, facing Mark right after we…"
I so did not want to finish that sentence, so I skipped right over it instead, "…and I blinked and now I'm here. What happened?"
Mark started to fill me in as the doctor and nurse took my vitals, checked me over, and kept injecting things from a tray into the IV bag hanging beside my bed.
How did I go from syringe shots on a waitress's tray to real shots and syringes, all in the blink of an eye?
I focused on Mark as they worked, trying to fill in the blanks.
"We weren't standing together in the hall; I did find you passed out all alone in the hall though. I just happened to see you go through that door and I followed you. It's a good thing I did, too, or it would have been too late. It was almost too late as it was."
I interrupted him, confused, "No, I followed you into that hall, right after I sent you that text. I thought you were … I thought we were going to go find a room to…"
I didn't want to just say “I thought we were going to go find a room to have sex in” when the nurse and doctor were right there listening, but by the small smile the nurse wasn't quite able to hide I figured she'd gotten the jest anyway.
Mark must have understood as well, cause he said, "Oh, I got your text alright, and we were definitely going to, but after I read it I didn't see you for a few minutes. I finally spotted you by the door.
It wouldn't open so you ate whatever was in your hands to free them and you forced the door open with your hip and disappeared. I followed you to … well, what you'd said in the text, only when I followed you through the door you were laying on the floor just a few feet down that hall.
You weren't breathing. You looked kind of swollen and you had one hand up around your throat. I yelled back through the door for someone to call an ambulance so of course people came running. Someone said you looked just like they did when they'd gotten stung by a bee. She was the one who had an EpiPen and she used it on you.
It seemed to help. The ambulance got there pretty quick and agreed that you'd had some sort of severe allergic reaction and they brought you here.
They had to cut your costume off and they gave you all kinds of shots. They were shouting things about CPR and having to tube you, but right as they were going to the shots started working, I guess.
Hannah, they said you almost died!"
"He's right, about all of it. The shots were of Epinephrine, which is more of what was in that EpiPen, and we also gave you an antihistamine and things to help open your airway. You had a hell of a reaction to something. He said he saw you eat something right before you went through the door. What was it?"
I answered her.
"Some kind of mixed nuts, with butter, sugar and nutmeg. They were really good. I just took them so I could get away from the waitress though, she said they would make me dream of my one true love. The other one she had was to curse a rival, or something else equally pagan and Halloweenish. I've never had any kind of nut allergy before, though. Why would I be allergic now?"
"Nuts are funny. Peanut allergies are totally different than tree nut allergies. You can be allergic to one line of tree nuts, but not another. So, for example, you could be allergic to walnuts but not pistachios, because the two are only distantly related and don't share the same proteins.
Some allergies only show up later in life, so as a kid you could be fine, but as an adult—not so much. Adult onset is definitely rarer, but when that is the case, the first time it does happen tends to be more severe for some reason. Now that you're stable we can get an allergist in here to run tests, but our first priority was of course just keeping you alive.
I'm sorry your party ended like it did, sounds like you had something other than ending up here in mind when you stepped through that door."
I was about to say, "You have no idea," but I guessed from the gleam in her eyes that she knew exactly what we'd been planning.
Only that meant that it hadn't really happened.
So I didn't follow Mark into that room and lose my virginity to him like that?
That did make the whole Mark/not Mark thing there at the end make more sense.
If I dreamed the whole thing while I was passed out in the hall that meant that I hadn't had sex. Or run into Mark right after, while thinking I'd just had sex with him. That also meant that Mark hadn't punched the guy I had had sex with, the guy who reminded me so much of Cole when he'd smiled. Course that also meant that the Cole-looking-other-Mark hadn't disappeared into thin air when punched by the real Mark.
I was confusing myself just thinking about it, but I was also grateful to know that everything had been some kind of medical emergency-induced dream and none of it had been real.
Because real would have meant that I'd let some sort of…
I struggled with it, not wanting to even give my delusional hallucinations a name. As if having sex with some kind of ghost could actually have been real.
I almost laughed with relief, lost in my own thoughts, as the doctor told Mark that they'd be back to check on me later.
For a minute there, I'd almost believed that I'd had sex with Cole's ghost, and watched him disappear with his satisfied, shit-eating grin when Mark found us.
And then I was here.
As odd as a sudden onset of an out-of-nowhere, severe, nut allergy was, the idea of Cole being a ghost that came back to the party to haunt it and have sex with me was way more odd.
Suddenly the one waitress's words rolled through my mind. She'd said, "Eating that will make you dream of your one true love. Don't you want to know who you're destined to spend eternity with?"
That's probably why I dreamed what I had when I was passed out on the floor in the hallway. That, and the other waitress's offhand comment.
"You haven't truly lived until you've had a ghost's penis," she'd teased, holding up a white-chocolate banana half.
My delusional hallucination explained, I breathed a sigh of relief.
Mark turned to me as the others left.
"You scared the shit out of me, you know."
"I'd imagine so. I scared myself, to be honest. I'm glad you found me so fast. If I really was as bad as you say…"
"You were. I thought…"
He didn't finish his thought, but the rest of the sentence was written in the concern in his eyes. He'd thought I was going to die.
To lighten the mood for us both while we waited for the allergist to come down and run some tests on me, I said, "You would not believe what I was doing
while you were saving me."
"What do you mean?"
"I didn't know I was lying there dying. In my mind I slid through that door and followed you down the hall to one of those rooms. You grabbed me, never saying a word. You pulled me inside and you pinned me against the closed door and we…"
The curtains pulled aside again right then, and a different nurse popped her head in.
"Oops, I thought Dr. Maddox was still in here. Sorry, carry on."
The curtains closed as swiftly as they'd opened and Mark said, "Yes, please. Carry on. What did I do to you after I pinned you against the door? I want to hear all about where your naughty mind was while you were passed out, cause it definitely beats the reality of what I was going through during that time. Don't leave out a single detail. Did I unzip that hot dress you were wearing and kiss my way down from your lips to your breasts?"
I don't know where the nerve came from to tell him every teasing, delicious detail, probably from all the epinephrine still pumping through my veins, but tell him I did.
I lingered on the part about how he had me pinned facing away from him so he couldn't kiss me from lips to breasts, but he could, and did in my hallucination, yank my dress up and finger me.
I mentioned that I'd worn no panties, and hearing him groan during that part of my story egged me on.
He asked me if I'd been wet for him and I whispered, "So wet that after only a few teasing strokes of your fingers you couldn't resist pulling yourself out of your scrub pants and sliding home."
"Ah hell, Hannah, I'm tenting my scrubs right now. I like your version of events way better than the real ones. What happened next?"
"Are you sure you can handle what came next? If I'm making you uncomfortable…" I teased, glancing down at the tenting he mentioned. I still couldn't believe I was teasing him so brazenly. We hadn't actually had sex yet, but my words were so bold, like phone sex but without the actual distance or aloneness that came with it.
"Very uncomfortable," he agreed. "But we can fix that later, once you've recovered. Keep going, your story is hot as hell."
I told him everything.
Well, almost.
I lingered on how he turned me to face him, and how I wrapped my legs around him as we came together against the cold, metal door.
I also told him how we straightened ourselves up, left the room to go back to the party, and ran into him in the hallway saying, "There you are! I've been looking all over for you! What in the world made you go exploring through the halls of this old place without me? You know it's haunted, right?"
"Wait, what?" Real Mark looked as shocked now, hearing my story, as I'd felt then.
"I know, right?" I added, "And then you saw the guy I was with walk out of the room right behind me, adjusting his pants, and you said 'Who the fuck is that?' and you punched him! Only it went right through him as he disappeared.
I turned to you confused as all hell, and then boom! I was here. You were calling my name and asking me if I knew what had happened to me."
"That is wild!"
"Tell me about it! It felt so real!"
I left out the part about the ghost reminding me of Cole, but everything else was dead on as I remembered it.
"It felt almost real hearing you tell it, look, I've got goosebumps and an erection. Well I'm glad my dream self left you satisfied. As soon as you're healthy and out of here, maybe we can recreate some of your story. I was all hot and bothered by your text earlier, but now, hearing those erotic words fall from your lips, I'm almost ready to do what you said and pull myself out of my scrubs right now and…"
CRASH!
The empty tray that the doctor had left behind went flying off the counter and onto the floor.
"Easy now," I teased. "I think your elbow must have gotten as excited as the rest of you there when you went to yank on your scrubs."
"But, I didn't hit it. At least … I don't think I did."
The curtains parted again, and a new doctor walked in.
"Throwing things already? Didn't like the Jell-O or what?"
He introduced himself as the allergist after his teasing comments about the noise from the flying tray. As he picked it up and placed it back on the counter, he started talking about what all testing me to see what I was allergic to entailed.
I sat up to shake his hand and felt somewhat groggy doing so.
"Take it easy, your body has been through a lot today."
I just nodded at him and let him ramble on about patch testing my skin but my mind was on how sore my body was. The weird part though was that it wasn't the injection sites or any normal body parts that were sore.
It was my inner thighs that protested my movement. And the area between them.
I eased my hand down under my blankets, nonchalantly looking like I just had to scratch an itch on my hip, but I slid my fingertips between my legs real quick as the two men spoke to each other without looking at me.
I was sticky.
Maybe I'd gotten myself worked up a bit as well, telling Mark my naughty tale?
I was wet, but as I explored further down the inside of my thighs, I was more sticky than wet.
What the hell?
A quick flash of memory filled my brain. In my hallucination, I had yanked open the door right before meeting Mark in the hallway, with the other Mark's, or Cole's, or whoever my brain had invented's warm come still slick between my thighs.
Surely that's something else? Something from having my clothes cut off? Something from being worked on, unconscious? Cause it can't be come, I thought.
It can't be. Right?
Chapter 5
As I sat in the allergist's treatment room, hours later, preparing to find out what I was allergic to, my thoughts and emotions were a jumbled mess.
Mark was waiting in the Emergency Room for me. They'd come for me with a wheelchair even though I told them all that I was fine, and they'd made him stay put. He protested, wanting to stay with me, but they'd insisted.
I was fine with that turn of events though, not because I didn't want him around but because my thoughts and attentions were elsewhere. I knew it was probably all the drugs they'd given me to keep me alive that was making it possible for me to entertain the thoughts I was entertaining, but the thoughts persisted regardless of my thinking that they were insane.
Two things kept tripping over themselves in my head—my thighs were sticky, and Mark really hadn't been anywhere near that tray.
Taking them one at a time, I focused on my sticky thighs. My rational mind kept insisting that anything could have been spilled on me once the medics cut my costume off. I'd seen plenty of hospital dramas; people were not highly concerned with messes when someone was dying.
Things were ripped open with teeth and squirted with abandon. Anything could be coating my thighs—and yet every erotic second in that room at the party, the one that it wasn't possible for me to have been in, felt so real!
The coldness of the metal door against my nipples, the slickness of the fingers sliding around in my juices, the fullness as I was filled with hard cock … every touch, every grunt, every wave of my orgasm felt so real.
But according to Mark, I never even made it to that back room, I never even made it down the hallway. So how…?
I abandoned that train of thought out of pure frustration, and instead turned my attention to the tray. When I teased Mark about knocking it over with his elbow, I'd believed that was what had happened, even when he'd said he didn't hit it. But then when the doctor came in and picked it up, he'd put it pretty damn close to where it had originally been, and Mark was right- he was too close to me on the bed to have hit it with his elbow. So how did it fall?
Although fall was putting it mildly. It was almost more like it was … flung.
Hard.
Like maybe Cole wasn't happy that Mark was getting credit for my hallucination.
Or maybe he wasn't happy that Mark was saying he was about ready to pull his cock out of his s
crubs to reenact it right there.
But that was insane! That would mean that it had actually happened, and that Cole was here, listening. Like some kind of ghost.
Yep, I finally concluded, it's got to be the drugs making me believe this shit. Either that or I hit my head when I passed out. Cause otherwise I was just bat shit crazy.
I shivered at my own thoughts and felt a finger of chills run from my elbow, up my arm, over my shoulder and tease my neck, almost like a caress.
Stop it, Hannah! Now you are imagining things, I scolded myself.
Finally the allergist, Dr. Greene, started speaking again after setting everything up.
"We'd normally start with the skin test, or the prick test, as it's also called, but you still have too much antihistamine in your system for that to be accurate, and a blood test would take days, so we’re going to do what's called an oral food challenge.
You said what you ate right before you collapsed was a mixture of nuts, butter, sugar and nutmeg, so we're going to test you for various nut allergies. Since nut families are so varied, I'm guessing you either had a nut you'd never had before, or you had an adult onset allergy to a nut you could have had before. Since adult onset nut allergies are so much rarer, I'd guess it was a new nut, not a new allergy, so we're going to be sampling nuts."
"Is that safe? What if what happened before happens again? It almost killed me, or so you guys have said."
"We're prepared for that, all of the same shots you had before are on hand, and we're going to start with very small amounts and monitor your reactions. Are you ready?"
"I guess. It's not like I've got anywhere else to be, let's figure this out."
"I'm going to start with a whole peanut, to rule it out. I'm almost positive you're more of a tree-nut allergy person, so let's rule peanuts out first."
I took the little, plastic, pill cup he offered me and dug the peanut out with my fingers, rolling my eyes internally as I did so. I was quite convinced this whole thing was silly, I'd eaten nuts all my life and had never had any issues, but whatever.
I placed the peanut on my tongue and started to chew as he stared at me.