"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.