But she didn’t remember how much she loved me, either. She didn’t know that she’d told Jason to back off because she wanted a life with me.
“Good. That’s good,” I finally said.
“The nature of her injuries is going to make it hard. I take it she’s going to go home with you?”
I nodded again. At home, in my bed, that was where she belonged. “I can take care of her.”
The doctor nodded. I scrutinized his face, tried to see what was going on under that mask he wore, but he was professional and nothing showed. He gave me nothing other than facts.
“She’s going to struggle. Confusion, headaches, mood swings, it’s all part of it. We’re going to prepare her, tell her what she needs to know, but you need to know that as well if you’re going to be looking after her. It can be very disconcerting. It’s going to feel like a personality change for a while.”
“For how long?” I asked.
“It’s impossible to say. It could be a few days, a few weeks, months. It depends on how quickly her memories return, and if they return at all.”
I nodded, leaned my elbows on my knees, laced my fingers through each other. Nurses shuffled past, on their way to other patients. I could see through the crack of her door, see the blanket tent over her feet. She hadn’t moved in a while.
“It’s very important that you keep her stable. If she suffers a blow to the head in any way now, it might be exponentially worse for her. She needs to be very careful. She might have dizzy spells, and she’ll need someone to watch her.”
“I’ll get her a nurse,” I said. “Anything she needs. Money isn’t an object.”
“Yes, you mentioned that,” Doctor Stein said. I’d made it clear that I could pay for everything she needed and the best of it the moment they wheeled her through the emergency doors. The doctor stood and glanced at his clipboard then his wristwatch.
“If she’s stable tomorrow, we can send her home the day after. We’ll see how things go.”
I nodded again. Agree, that’s what I had to do. Agree with everyone, no friction, until I could get her out of here. They’d been quick to get me out of her room when I’d gotten angry the first time, just after she’d woken up.
But she asked for Justin. I’d been there with her every moment since the accident, since they’d pried her body from the twisted heap of metal, and she’d wanted him when she’d opened her eyes. I felt like I could break something and they’d removed me. So it was easy. No temper until she was mine again. No anger around here because they were going to take me away from her. And we couldn’t have that. I couldn’t lose her, not now. It had been so close before.
I stood up and went to the door, opened it a bit more so that I could see her face. Her eye wasn’t as swollen as it had been the first day, but the purple spread across her cheek bone and around to her temple. The cut in her lip was just a thin line of dried blood now. Not so swollen and puffy. I sighed and turned around.
Justin walked down the corridor toward the room. The hell he was getting in to see her again.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. He looked at me and his eyes were tired. His hair was loose, irritating.
“I just wanted to make sure she’s okay,” he said. His voice was weary.
“She’s fine. She’s sleeping. Doctor says she can leave soon.”
He nodded slowly, glanced at the crack in the door. I grabbed the handle and pulled the door closed so that he couldn’t see her. Not even her feet. She was mine.
“I’d like to talk to her when she wakes up,” he said.
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. They gave her a pretty strong sedative after you left the last time. She was pretty upset. I don’t want her going through that again. She’s been through enough as it is.”
“I’m sure she has,” Justin said, and it rubbed me the wrong way.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, stepping closer to him. He was a lot taller than me, but I didn’t have to be tall to be dominant.
“She was in an accident. She has amnesia. It’s a lot,” Justin said, and I felt the tension ease out of my shoulders. I was overreacting. I nodded and took a step back. Agree, that was what I’d decided. Keep it calm. As soon as she was out of here, I could relax.
“Is she going home with you?” Justin asked.
“Who else would she go with? She needs someone to look after her.”
“I don’t think she should go home with you, though,” he said and I could feel myself getting angry again. It was like an itch in my chest that I couldn’t scratch. I swallowed hard and focused on not balling my fists. I was way too uptight. Calm, I had to be calm.
“She needs to be in an environment she knows. One of the nurses told me it’s the easiest way for her to regain her memories, if she falls back into her old routine.”
“I just don’t think she’d be safe in the environment she knows,” he said. He took a step back the moment he said it, like he knew I’d want to hook him for it. A nurse shuffled past and I glared at her for being there when I wanted to break this guy’s nose. Instead I clenched my jaw and counted to ten. When I trusted myself to speak, I forced my voice to stay low.
“She’s going to be just fine. Thank you for stopping by. We have it under control.”
Justin looked like he wanted to say something, but instead he just nodded, backed up a couple of steps like he didn’t think it was wise to turn his back on me and then he walked away. Good man.
I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. I would straighten this out in the morning.
Morning came, and with the first rays that fell in through the crack in the curtains in stripes across her bed, she woke up. A part of me was relieved. Since the accident, I’d been scared something would go wrong. Scared that she wouldn’t ever remember the choices she’d made, which man she’d ended up with.
Scared that she would remember it all.
When she opened her eyes I sat forward, inching to the edge of my seat. I’d spent most of the night in the damn hospital chair and it hadn’t been comfortable. The nurses had told me I could go home but I didn’t want to leave her. I’d nearly lost her once, I wasn’t letting anything get between us again.
“Hello, my darling,” I said softly and she turned her head slowly to me, blinking sleep away from her eyes. The corners of her mouth curled into a smile and it lit up her face. It made the bruise around her eye seem harsher somehow, and something inside me contracted.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“I’m okay,” she said, and pulled a face that made me think she wasn’t okay at all.
“Can I get you anything? I can ask one of the nurses, what do you need?”
She chuckled without any expressions on her face.
“I’m okay, Elijah. Really.”
Her calling me by name stung. I knew that she didn’t mean it in a bad way. But before the accident, every time we’d fought she would stop calling me by pet names and call me Elijah. Like my name in itself had become an insult. What was it now? A reminder that she just didn’t know where we’d come to before.
That was an insult, too.
“The doctor said you’ll be ready to get out of here by tomorrow. Then I can take you home, make sure you have the best of anything.”
“Home,” she said softly, like the word was foreign. “That’s not the first time I hear that home is with you now.”
I frowned. We hadn’t been living together long, but it had been something.
“Come on, honey. It’s going to be just fine. I’m going to get you a nurse and you’ll be taken care of when I need to go out to the meetings.”
“You don’t need me there?” she asked. I shook my head. I could deal without her for a while. She looked down at her hands, her brow creased and her lips pursed.
“I would really prefer to get back to work. I just need something… normal. Something that I know.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I started but she shook her head until I kept quiet just so she would stop shaking it. She’d already had a terrible blow to the head.
“I just don’t see how it would be better to go home…” she swallowed, like the word was a difficult one to have in her mouth, and continued, “…with you. I don’t know that. That, to me, isn’t home.”
I opened my mouth to say something, closed it, opened it again. And I still didn’t know how to say what I was thinking. That if she slipped out of my fingers now, I was scared I would never get her back.
“You have nowhere else to go,” I said instead, and my voice sounded hard. She frowned slightly at me, all traces of that first smile gone, and I wanted it back. I didn’t like it when she looked at me that way. I’d seen too much of it.
“I can go home,” she said but she made it a question. I shook my head, laced my fingers through each other. I would give anything for a stiff drink right now. The cafeteria didn’t sell whiskey, I checked.