blinked once, then again, her heart shedding its sluggish rhythm for frantic pounding.
It was no use. His face remained cast in coldness. Instead of the angel she’d thought would do anything to protect her, this was the face of a man who’d stand aside and brood down at her as she drowned.
She stared up at him, something that felt as familiar as a second skin settling about her. Despondence.
It had been an illusion. Whatever she’d thought she’d seen on his face, whatever she’d felt flooding her in waves, had been her disorientation inventing what she wanted to see, to feel.
“It’s clear you can move your head. Can you move everything else? Are you in any pain? Blink if it’s too uncomfortable to talk. Once for yes, twice for no.”
Tears surged into her eyes again. She blinked erratically. A low rumble unfurled from his depths. Must be frustration with her inability to follow such a simple direction.
But she couldn’t help it. She now recognized his questions for what they were. Those asked of anyone whose consciousness had been compromised, as she was now certain hers had been. Ascertaining level of awareness, then sensory and motor functions, then pain level and site. But there was no personal worry behind the questions anymore, just clinical detachment.
She could barely breathe with missing his tenderness and anxiety for her well-being. Even if she’d imagined them.
“Cybele! Keep your eyes open, stay with me.”
The urgency in his voice snapped through her, made her struggle to obey him. “I c-can’t….”
He seemed to grow bigger, his hewn face etched with fierceness, frustration rippling off him. Then he exhaled. “Then just answer my questions, and I’ll leave you to rest.”
“I f-feel numb but.” She concentrated, sent signals to her toes. They wiggled. That meant everything in between them and her brain was in working order. “Seems …motor functions are …intact. Pain—not certain. I feel sore …like I’ve been flattened under a—a brick wall. B-but i-it’s not pain indicating damage.”
Just as the last word was out, all aches seemed to seep from every inch of her body to coalesce in one area. Her left arm.
In seconds she shot beyond the threshold of containable pain into brain-shredding agony.
It spilled from her lips on a butchered keen. “M-my arm.”
She could swear he didn’t move. But she found him beside her again, as if by magic, and cool relief splashed over the hot skewers of pain, putting them out.
She whimpered, realized what he’d done. She had an intravenous line in her right arm. He’d injected a drug—a narcotic analgesic from the instantaneous action—into the saline, flicked the drip to maximum.
“Are you still in pain?” She shook her head. He exhaled heavily. “That’s good enough for now. I’ll come back later….” He started to move away.
“No.” Her good hand shot out without conscious volition, fueled by the dread that he’d disappear and she’d never see him again. This felt instinctive, engrained, the desperation that she could lose him. Or was it the resignation that he was already lost to her?
Her hand tightened around his, as if stronger contact would let her read his mind, reanimate hers, remind her what he’d been to her.
He relinquished her gaze, his incandescent one sweeping downward to where her hand was gripping his. “Your reflexes, motor power and coordination seem to be back to normal. All very good signs you’re recovering better than my expectations.”
From the way he said that, she guessed his expectations had ranged from pessimistic to dismal. “That …should be …a relief.”
“Should be? You’re not glad you’re okay?”
“I am. I guess. Seems …I’m not …all there yet.” The one thing that made her feel anything definite was him. And he could have been a mile away with the distance he’d placed between them. “So …what happened…to me?”
The hand beneath hers lurched. “You don’t remember?” “It’s all a …a blank.”
His own gaze went blank for an endless moment. Then it gradually focused on her face, until she felt it was penetrating her, like an X-ray that would let him scan her, decipher her condition.
“You’re probably suffering from post-traumatic amnesia. It’s common to forget the traumatic episode.”
Spoken like a doctor. Everything he’d said and done so far had pointed to him being one.
Was that all he was to her? Her doctor? Was that how he knew her? He’d been her doctor before the “traumatic episode” and she’d had a crush on him? Or had he just read the vital statistics on her admission papers? Had she formed dependence on and fascination for him when she’d been drifting in and out of consciousness as he’d managed her condition? Had she kissed a man who was here only in his professional capacity? A man who could be in a relationship, maybe married with children?
The pain of her suppositions grew unbearable. And she just had to know. “Wh-who are you?”
The hand beneath hers went still. All of him seemed to become rock, as if her question had a Medusa effect.
When he finally spoke, his voice had dipped an octave lower, a bass, slowed-down rasp, “You don’t know me?”
“Sh-should I?” She squeezed her eyes shut as soon as the words were out. She’d just kissed him. And she was telling him that she had no idea who he was. “I know I should …b-but I can’t r-remember.”
Another protracted moment. Then he muttered, “You’ve forgotten me?”
She gaped up at him, shook her head, as if the movement would slot some comprehension into her mind. “Uh …I may have forgotten …how to speak, too. I had this …distinct belief language skills …are the last to go …e-even in total …memory loss. I thought …saying I can’t remember you …was the same as saying …I forgot who y-you are.”
His gaze lengthened until she thought he wouldn’t speak again. Ever. Then he let out a lung-deflating exhalation, raked his fingers through his gleaming wealth of hair. “I’m the one who’s finding it hard to articulate. Your language skills are in perfect condition. In fact, I’ve never heard you speak that much in one breath.”
“M-many fractured …breaths …you mean.”
He nodded, noting her difficulty, then shook his head, in wonder it seemed. “One word to one short sentence at a time was your norm.”
“So you. do know me. E-extensively, it seems.”
The wings of his thick eyebrows drew closer together. “I wouldn’t label my knowledge of you extensive.”
“I’d label it …en-encyclopedic.”
Another interminable silence. Then another darkest-bass murmur poured from him, thrumming every neuron in her hypersensitive nervous system. “It seems
