by Casey, L. A.
I was thoroughly exhausted, and before I could attempt to move, my eyes drifted shut and forcibly pulled me into a dreamless slumber.
A throbbing ache in my leg brought me back into awareness. My eyes darted open and once again I found myself staring at the off-white ceiling. It took me a minute to think straight and realise that I wasn’t dreaming. I was in a hospital, I reminded myself. I needed to speak to someone. A nurse, a doctor, anyone.
The Call button.
I needed to press that bloody Call button, wherever it was. I moved my arms, jerky movements at first, and felt a pulse reader on the index finger of my right hand. My left hand skimmed over a wire next to my hip. I tugged on it and a remote of some kind came into contact with my hand. Moving hurt more than it should; in fact, my whole body was sore. I bit my lip to focus on feeling the buttons. I couldn’t tell what any of them were for so, as best as I could, I tugged it on to my chest. I peered down for a moment and saw a large red button. I wasn’t sure what it did, but I pressed it anyway.
I exhaled a deep breath, the simple movements having completely drained me.
For a few seconds, nothing happened, and I worried that I’d pressed the wrong button, but then noises and a voice came from my left. I heard a door opening followed by soft footsteps. A face suddenly appeared over me and it startled me. It was a woman who appeared to be in her mid- to late fifties; she had dark brown skin, and eyes to match.
“Hi there,” the lady said. “Can you hear me, sweetheart?”
I winced, the volume of her voice causing the already painful ache in my head to worsen.
“Too loud. My head,” I rasped, finding that talking was a little difficult. “It hurts so bad.”
The woman frowned and lowered her voice. “I’m going to page your doctor so he can come see you right away. I’ll get you pain relief while I’m out there. I’ll be back in a minute, okay?”
I didn’t want her to leave me, but I urgently needed the painkillers that she could provide, so I tentatively said, “Okay.”
When she disappeared from view, I began to panic. I was terrified that she wouldn’t come back and that I’d be stuck in the position I was in with no one to help me. I could barely lift my head or move my body. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, or what had happened to put me in the situation I was in, but whatever it was, I knew it wasn’t good.
Breathe, I told myself. Just breathe, Noah. It’ll be okay.
I focused on inhaling and exhaling deep breaths. It helped calm me down, but only just. True to her word, the lady came back to my side within a minute. She had a glass of water in one hand and an IV bag in the other. She saw me eye the bag and said, “It’s only paracetamol, but it’ll help kill the pain quicker through your IV. The doctor can prescribe something stronger once he gets here.”
I started to nod but stopped as soon as I started. The movement was too much – everything at that moment seemed to be all too much. Not only was my head killing me, my body was aching beyond measure. The nurse used a remote to raise the top half of my bed, but not by much, just enough so I could see the plain white room without having to strain to lift my head. She helped me drink some water then, and once I’d had a good few mouthfuls, it made me feel a little more human.
“What happened to me?”
I felt so tired that it was a fight to keep my eyes open.
“You were in an accident,” the nurse said, careful to keep her voice low. “You hit your head pretty hard.”
An accident? I thought. I was in an accident?
Slowly, and with difficulty, I lifted my hand to my forehead, and it was only then that I felt a compressed bandage of some kind wrapped around my skull. I looked at the rest of my body and, though my torso and legs were hidden by a blanket, I could feel padding on different parts of my skin. I lifted the blanket and peered down.
The medical gown I was wearing had ridden up and it gave me a decent view of my battered body. A battered body that was larger than I remembered: my thighs were wider, and I had a flabby gut. I remembered the nurse telling me I’d been in an accident, so I put it down to being swollen from injuries I’d clearly sustained.
I had a bandage on my lower abdomen. My left leg from my knee down was in a black boot cast. It jolted me back to when I’d fractured that same leg in two places when I was twenty-one at a dance studio, and had to wear a similar cast during my recovery.
My arms were destroyed, covered with bruises and minor scrapes; some were scabbed, and others were red lines where scabs had fallen off. My body looked as if it had been to war and back again. I tried to remember what had happened to me, I closed my eyes and forced myself to think about the accident that the nurse had spoken about, but I drew a complete blank.
“I don’t remember anything about an accident.”
“That’s okay,” the nurse said with a warm smile. “What’s important is that you’re conscious and alert, you’re moving around beautifully too. I can see it hurts, but movement is good. Can you feel all your fingers and toes?”
“Yes,” I answered. “But everywhere . . . hurts. My leg and my head the most.”
“I know, love,” she said, as she moved to my right and attached the painkiller bag to the IV that was already in my arm. “This will help a little. You’ll start to feel some relief in a few minutes.”
I hoped she was right.
“Which hospital is this?”
“King’s College,” she answered.
I nodded; it was my local hospital. It made sense for me to be treated here. I glanced at her name badge and caught the words “Intensive Care Unit” above her name, and my heart just about stopped. My eyes darted up to hers in an instant.
“ICU?” I said, baffled. “Your name badge says ICU. That’s for critically ill patients though. Am I okay?”
Talking so fast made my words sound jumbled together even to my own ears. Fear slammed into me like a train, and the beeping from the machine was faster now and more bothersome than before.
“Now, honey, you need to calm down. This is the ICU, but you’re okay, you have to listen to me—”
Our attention turned to the door when it suddenly opened. I watched as a middle-aged male doctor walked in and I felt relieved to see him. He had dark brown skin like the nurse, his eyes were soft and his smile was bright. The nurse seemingly didn’t have answers to my questions, but maybe he would.
“What happened to me?” I asked as he took a step towards me. “How did I get here? Why am I—”
“Whoa.” The doctor raised his hands in front of his chest and chuckled. “Give me a second to look at you, Noah. I’m Doctor Abara, it’s wonderful to see you alert.”
I tried to relax, but I couldn’t.
I was in pain, and the not knowing how I came to be in hospital was stressing me out. The doctor came to my bedside and asked me to do a few things before we could talk. I followed his little penlight, then his finger, then when he touched a part of my body with his pen, he asked me if I could feel it. I told him that I could feel everywhere the pen touched. He asked me to say the names of random objects when he pointed them out. He asked me to move my arms and legs and toes. It pleased him when I completed each task.
“Can you remember anything about your time with us, Noah?” he quizzed, and I noted then that he spoke with an accent. “Anything at all.”
“A tiny bit,” I answered. “I woke up once before now, but I must have fallen back asleep. I opened my eyes and I was here, but I don’t know how I got here. The nurse says I was in an accident but I can’t remember any accident.”
He nodded and made a note of some sort on the chart in his hand. We went through a series of questions about my well-being, about my pain level from one to ten, and a bunch of other things I didn’t really care about. When the examination was over and the doctor had finished making notes on what I now knew was my personal patient chart, he looked up at me and smiled once more.
“I know this is tiresome, but I could g
o back to jail if I don’t follow protocol.”
I blinked. “You’ve been to jail?”
“Once,” he answered with a nod. “In Monopoly. It wasn’t fun, I’ll tell you that much.”
I stared at him in silence, then he laughed and looked at the nurse and said, “Tough crowd.”
I humoured him when his gaze returned to mine. “Ha ha.”
“Sorry.” He grinned. “No more bad jokes.”
“You can tell me a million of them after you answer my questions,” I bargained. “How does that sound?”
“Like a deal.” The doctor winked. “Fire away.”
I had so many questions that I needed the answers to, but I didn’t know where to begin. At random, I picked a few and said, “What happened to me? Why don’t I remember anything? Why is talking hard?”
The nurse reached over and patted my hand when my voice cracked. I was scared, really scared. Having no memory of how I came to be in the hospital was worse than anything I had ever experienced before. I felt very vulnerable.
“What I’m about to say will sound very scary,” Doctor Abara said, “but trust me when I say that, right now, you’re okay and you’re in the best place receiving the best care.”
That doesn’t sound very good.
I swallowed. “Okay.”
“You were in an accident where you hit your head very hard, so to protect itself your body has been in a coma for fifteen days.”
“What?” I exclaimed in shocked disbelief. “A coma? Fifteen days?”
The machine next to me started beeping rapidly, but one screen-tap from the nurse silenced it.
“I know it must be startling to hear, but you’re okay,” he stressed gently. “What you need to do right now is take a few calming breaths. Noah, look at me. Noah!”
I lifted my hands to my head and whimpered. The throbbing pain had drastically worsened; it was so bad that I could barely hear anything the doctor was saying. I felt my eyes roll back and my vision started to fade to nothingness, when suddenly my head dropped back against my pillow. I fell into darkness, feeling scared and very much alone.
CHAPTER TWO
NOAH
Eighteen years old . . .
“Noah?” His voice drifted towards me like a song on the wind. “If you’re playin’ hide and seek, ye picked a rubbish spot to hide, green eyes. I’m already in your house, you can’t exactly get away from me.”
I opened my mouth, not knowing what I was going to say in response, but I didn’t have to worry about it when hands clamped down on my waist, making me screech in surprise. Warm, strong arms slid around me to keep me from darting away, and low laughter filled the room.
“Gotcha.”
I shivered as his hot breath fanned my ear and neck.
“I wasn’t hiding,” I said, lifting my chin. “I was just . . . I was just—”
“Ye were just what? Lookin’ behind the bathroom door for someone else?”
I blew out a big puff of air as frustration gripped me.
“Fine,” I grunted. “You caught me; I was hiding.”
My body turned to face his, and when he nudged under my chin with his finger, encouraging me to look up at him, my stomach burst into a mess of butterflies. I was a tall girl, taller than every girl I went to school with. I stood five foot ten inches, but Elliot’s massive six foot five inches dwarfed me and made me feel tiny, feminine.
I loved that feeling.
Elliot McKenna, I thought to myself. Where do I begin with him?
Elliot had moved to my home town just over seven months ago, in the middle of the school year. His father had opened a new Irish pub in town called McKenna’s. Moving to a different country would be daunting, hectic and maybe even a little scary to most people, but not Elliot. He was two months shy of eighteen when I met him, and once he became close friends with a classmate of mine, AJ, we became close too, but in an entirely different way.
Elliot was the first boy that I had ever taken an instant fancy too. The moment I saw him, I felt an attraction . . . and so did every other senior girl in school. He was gloriously tall, had a mop of thick, dark hair, eyes the colour of the ocean, and a dimple in his right cheek when he smiled. He was gorgeous, and to top it off, he had an accent. An Irish one to be exact. He was a Dubliner. I didn’t believe he even thought I was a member of the female gender until he kissed me on the night of his eighteenth birthday when we celebrated with him.
That kiss brought us closer; it brought us to now.
“Why were ye hidin’ from me, green eyes?”
I swallowed as my palms became slick with sweat. “’Cause I’m nervous.”
“About what?”
He was speaking to me, but his ocean blues were on my mouth and so was his thumb, brushing over my lower lip. It was terribly distracting and for a moment or two all I could think about was encircling his neck with my arms, reaching up and crushing my mouth against his. I resisted that urge because it went against what I’d planned to say to Elliot McKenna.
I was breaking up with him . . . and I couldn’t kiss him and do that at the same time, or at least I was fairly sure I couldn’t. I wasn’t entirely certain about the rules when it came to breaking up with a boy who technically was never your boyfriend to begin with. It was new ground that I was covering, so everything was unknown.
It was a complicated mess on a good day but I was certain of one thing: in the span of the few short months that we had been casually dating, I had fallen in love with Elliot, and I didn’t want to be strung along and hurt beyond repair, so I had to cut him loose even though I didn’t want to. I had to, in order to protect myself.
I had always known that I was soft-hearted and more emotional than most people. I took things personally whether I wanted to or not. I grew attached to those I cared about very easily, and that was why Elliot, as a person, terrified me so much. I loved him. I loved him so completely that it scared me. He was someone who could break me without even trying.
We were both young and maybe it was foolish, but I could see a future with Elliot. One where I was in a stable relationship that would give me the security I needed in order to relax and enjoy my life. I desperately wanted that. I didn’t want to mess around and spend my early years jumping from guy to guy and have the future be unknown to me. I knew what I wanted and what I wanted was to be Elliot’s one and only, the woman he gave his last name to.
I had never thought it was truly possible to find the person I hoped to spend my life with so young, but I believed I had found my future in Elliot . . . and it killed me that he didn’t appear to have that kind of faith in me. If he did, he would have already asked me to be his girlfriend.
“I have to tell you something,” I said with a firm nod as I straightened my spine. “It’s important so you have to listen to me – Elliot!”
His laughter burst free as I slapped away the hand that slithered down my back and squeezed my behind.
“I love how ye say me name, sasanach.” He chuckled. “All prim and proper.”
With flaming cheeks, I thumped his chest.
“Don’t be touching the merchandise, paddy.”
“Am I not allowed to touch what belongs to me?”
A flood of pulsing heat spread from my stomach to between my thighs. My hands moved to Elliot’s growing biceps, where I gripped on to him for dear life as I pressed my legs together. I was a simple girl who didn’t need a whole lot said, or done, to feel ready to climb Elliot like a tree. It was the virgin in me, and the fact that I’d read one too many Highlander historical romance books that made me weak when a man got deliciously possessive.
Damn those Scotsmen and their bloody kilts.
“No,” I squeaked in response. “No, you’re not allowed to touch me ’cause I don’t belong to you or any man. I belong to me.”
Elliot cocked an eyebrow and I even found that sexy. It was positively mortifying what my hormones were doing to my body. I was glad no one could read my mind, because they�
�d be having a good laugh at me and my vagina’s expense.
“Is that so?” he mused as he pressed me against the bathroom door, pinning me with his hard body. “I wonder why that is? Care to let me know?”
Woman up, Noah. It’s now or never.
I cleared my throat and looked at his nose, because I found I didn’t have the courage to look him in the eye as I broke my own heart.
“That’s why I asked you to come here while my parents are away for the weekend. I need to tell you that I’m breaking up with you.”
For long seconds, the room was covered in a veil of silence that prompted me to look up into Elliot’s eyes. All playfulness had vanished from those ocean blues, and a flicker of what I gauged to be worry lingered. Time ticked by as he said nothing. He just stared down at me intensely and unblinking. It was like he was trying to answer his unspoken questions with his powerful gaze.
Eventually, he said, “What?”
I blinked repeatedly as I tried to focus on his words and not his touch.
“I’m fed up wi-with you,” I stammered, as his hands on my waist squeezed ever so slightly. “We’ve been going on dates for five months. One, two, three, four, five months, and you’ve not asked me to be your girlfriend yet.” I dug my fingers into the muscles of his back as he pressed closer to me. “The trial pe-period is over, you aren’t getting a subscription to this body so . . . so we’re done.”
His shoulders sagged almost instantly, and the fear in his eyes faded and gave way to a teasing glint. “Ye think I don’t want you long-term?”
“That’s exactly what I think . . . You don’t have to look so bloody relieved about it either!”
He chuckled. “You’re peggin’ me all wrong, gorgeous.”
“Am I really?” I quizzed. “You look mighty pleased that I’m ending things.”
“I’m pleased that ye’ve got me intentions messed up, otherwise I’d likely be on me knees right now beggin’ ye to give me another chance.”
My brows shot up with surprise. That was not what I’d expected to hear.