Page 67 of Guilty as Sin
A crowd of people had gathered, as crowds always did, and they were as helpful as crowds generally were. Which was not at all. Jace had an arm around Lily, and now, he yanked his T-shirt over his head and got it over hers. “Lift your arm through,” he said, and she didn’t. He turned to Charlotte, who had come out from the desk and was standing and staring like everybody else. The one person who had a phone right there, and who was, of course, not using it. He said, “Call 911. Tell them we need an ambulance.”
“No.” Lily clamped her palm more tightly over her thigh. “No. Get me out of here. I got hit. In the dark. Take me to the hospital. And call the cops.”
Jennifer, the gym owner, made her presence felt at last. “Did you slip and fall?” she asked. “In the shower? Kelli,” she instructed, “go make sure everybody’s doing all right in the ladies’ locker room.”
“No,” Lily said forcefully. “Somebody hit me.” She told Jace, “Go look. Go see. I was in… a place with a curtain. Changing area.” Like she couldn’t think of the word. Like she was trying to hang on, and it was getting too hard.
“Modesty cubicle,” Jennifer said. “And absolutely not. You are not going into the women’s locker room,” she snapped at Jace, even though he hadn’t gone anywhere. He was still holding onto Lily.
Charlotte, who’d actually, miracle of miracles, gone back to the desk and made the call, was still standing there. Jace said, “Towel,” and she brought it back to Jace without a word. He wrapped it around Lily’s waist over the T-shirt, and she finally let go of her thigh and put her uninjured arm through the sleeve. Jace asked Jennifer, “Where’s the closest hospital?”
“Kalispell.” She gave him directions. He thought about what Lily had said, and told Jennifer, “Go clear everybody out of that locker room, and check it for anything out of place. Anything unusual, especially near the cubicle where she was. Call the police and tell them somebody attacked Lily. Find out what happened with the lights.”
Jennifer made absolutely no move to do any of it. “Shefell.Obviously she fell.”
Lily was headed for the door again, practically dragging Jace along. “Get me out of here,” she said again.
He handed her to Charlotte, said, “Hang onto her,” and went for his locker. He’d grab his things, and he’d call the cops on the way.
It was half an hour to Kalispell, Paige told her fuzzy brain over and over when Jace had lifted her into his truck, tucked his jacket around her, cranked up the heat, and swung onto the highway. A half hour was fine. This wasn’t that bad. She needed the cops, that was all. Because next time, this could be Lily. It couldn’t be Lily.
Jace was driving, talking on the phone, hooked into the car’s sound system. Talking to 911. “I’m bringing her into Kalispell Medical Center,” he was saying. “Have the police meet us there. She was attacked.”
“I’ve informed the police,” came the woman’s voice. Soothing, like 911 dispatchers always were. Paige thought it, and knew the thought didn’t matter. It was an attempt to focus on now, to stay centered. She needed to keep on doing that.
“How are you doing?” Jace asked. “Stay with me here.”
He said it again, and she realized he was talking to her. “Sorry,” she said. “I thought you were still on the phone.” Her teeth were trying to chatter, and she pressed them more tightly together, even though it hurt. She’d cut her cheek, obviously. That didn’t matter either. Mouths healed fast.
“How are you doing?” Jace asked again.
“I’m OK. My shoulder’s got some damage, that’s all. My arm. My back. I don’t think anything’s broken. It hurts to move, but I can. A concussion, maybe. Not bad.”
“What the hell do you mean, not bad?”
“I mean not bad. But I did get hit.”
“I know.”
The rest of it was what you’d expect. The drive. The ER. Jace helping her out of the truck again, and she had to set her teeth again against the pain, or she’d have cried out. The lights too bright, people’s voices too loud.
But nobody had died. This would be over, she thought when she was in a room without Jace, when the nurse pulled the shirt over her body and jostled her shoulder too much, and she did make a sound.
It wasn’t that bad. It was just pain.
By the time she was in a gown, under a blanket, lying on her side and breathing through her mouth after a half hour she’d rather not repeat in an MRI machine, she’d had plenty of time to revisit her insistence on Jace not waiting for the EMTs, and to be sure that she’d been right.I’m Lily.I need to be Lily.She didn’t think anybody at the gym would have noticed her scars. She’d covered the front one, and when you were naked, people didn’t tend to check your body for scars. Nobody would have seen. She hoped.
The doctor, a good-looking guy in his early forties, came in, did some poking and testing of her shoulder and arm that also felt about as good as she’d have expected, then had her roll onto her stomach, where he repeated the process on her back.
Short term. Over soon. Breathe it out.
“Pain level?” he asked. “One to ten?”
“Five.”
“You sure about that? Your breathing feels more like an eight.”
“I’m sure. It’s not an eight. It’s a five.”
