Page 9 of Desire Me
She glanced up, a bit wild-eyed, at the nurse beside her bed.
“Your name?”
Her mouth opened.Say your name. Say it. My name is…
What was her name?
She managed to croak, “My name is…” Her eyes stung. Tears welled, and her heartbeat pounded so hard in her throat she thought she’d pass out. “It’s…”
The nurse’s eyes narrowed, one capable hand closing on her wrist. She hated that hand, hated the woman’s calm and competence when she couldn’t even manage basic talking, when the black spots were reappearing in her vision. She tried to remind herself to breathe, to get the precious oxygen she so desperately needed.
Only terror allowed her to bypass her body’s turmoil.
“I don’t know,” she cried weakly. “I don’t know my… I don’t know my name.”
The nurse bent over her just as the black spots became a cloud that obliterated everything else.
∞
Pain.
The pain was everywhere. It ebbed and flowed, pulled her under, tossed her around. The funny thing was, she didn’t move. She was aware of her body, the bed beneath her, the fabric covering her, but it was the pain that jostled her awake. If she could just ease the pain…
Get up. If you get up, it’ll stop.
She managed to shift—a hand, a leg, her hip. Pain morphed into agony.
Liar! It doesn’t stop!
And yet as minutes trickled by, the pain did ease. Not disappear, that much was true, but the subtle shifting of her body managed to dull the ache in her muscles. Pain became soreness. Her brain registered the change and deemed it safe to awaken. Gradually the need to open her eyes, to see what she couldn’t, drove her to flutter open her eyelids.
White.
A sense of déjà vu enveloped her. She’d seen this before.
But where? When?
A suddenrrrrrrrsound filled her ears, and a vise grip tightened on her upper arm. Her gaze jerked down.
A blood pressure cuff. She—
Theshhhhhhof the cuff releasing relieved the pressure. She sucked in a breath. Glanced at her lap. White sheet and white gown with a little blue pattern. Her opposite hand had a needle stuck in the back, a line leading to a pole next to the…was that? Yeah, a hospital bed. An IV pole. A bag of clear liquid hung from the top hook, a second waiting beside it. Various gauges and monitors and displays beeped and hummed nearby. She couldn’t see past the wall of white curtains surrounding her, but she knew she was in a hospital, knew something was terribly wrong, but what?
A memory rushed into her brain, a nurse, calm and competent. A hand on her arm as knowledge, cold and horrible, filled her mind. Or not so much knowledge as the lack of. A well of nothing taking over her awareness until she’d had no choice but to run from it. To escape the reality that she didn’t know her own name.
She didn’t know her own name.
Closing her eyes, she forced herself to breathe past the panic rising in a swell from deep in her belly. She couldn’t let it win, couldn’t let the pain win. She had to stay aware, stay awake. She couldn’t keep herself safe if she was unconscious.
Why did she need to keep herself safe? Had someone hurt her? Was that why she was here, in a hospital bed?
She probed the recesses of her mind, but nothing surfaced. The only memory was that of the nurse, of realizing she had no idea who she was, where she was, what was going on, with her body or her identity. That yawning, empty pit terrified her. The not knowing was worse than the pain, and she fought the urge to let both swamp her and take her back down into oblivion. It seemed so easy, but it wasn’t safe.Shewasn’t safe.
God, what was happening to her?
She had no idea how long she lay there, just breathing, probing at her mind, before the squeak of a sliding door sounded outside her curtain. Not just a bed, then. She wasn’t in the ER or something like that. Somehow she knew doors on cubicles were a bad thing. When the curtain was thrown back, she skimmed past the nurse entering and caught a glimpse of a long, central nurses’ station and a glass wall beyond that, segmented by sliding glass doors just like hers. ICU, maybe?
Was she that hurt?
