“Yeah? Well how many of them killed someone in their car crash?” The sharpness in my tone startled me as it echoed back.
Gemma wasn’t fazed. “More than you’d think.”
“Well, they’re different than me.”
She didn’t argue, but she stood from her seat beside my bed. “You’re right, they are different. I have to go make my rounds. Call if you need anything, okay?”
“When can I get out of here?” I growled at her retreating form.
“Probably another twenty-four hours.”
I grunted my acknowledgment and she disappeared from the room, leaving me to stew in my self-loathing.
16
“Aaron! Help!” Talia’s screams wailed through the space between our seats like an air raid alarm. “Aaron!”
I jerked my head to look at her and my stomach plummeted at the panic in her dark eyes. She clawed her hands up my arm, clinging for a handhold, but just as she latched on, the side of the plane hit the bluff and split open and she was sucked right from her seat, falling into the dark night.
Her screams echoed through my mind.
“Aaron!”
The voice changed. It sounded far away now. And…softer.
“Aaron.”
A bright light flashed and I jolted awake. My eyes squeezed closed until the light faded.
“What the fuck!”
“Sorry.”
It was Gemma.
I opened my eyes again, this time finding the room around me softly lit with only the light from the bedside lamp on the wall. “Where am I?”
The answer came back to me before Gemma could explain. My head throbbed and my body was slick with sweat. I hadn’t been able to shower since the crash and I’d never felt grimier in my life. And that included the months overseas in the desert.
“Are you okay? Your heart rate and spiked and triggered the alarm on your monitor,” Gemma explained, her eyes studying the numbers on the screens for a moment longer, before dropping back to meet mine.
I sucked in a deep breath, willing things to stabilize. “I’m okay. I was dreaming. Well…nightmaring…to be more accurate.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
I pinched my eyes closed. “Can I get some aspirin or something? My head’s killing me.”
“Yes. I can get you something.”
Gemma’s footsteps faded from the room and I got myself back under control in her brief absence. The dream had been so real and vivid. The only other time I’d had a dream that clear had been after I’d witnessed a street market bombing overseas. A suicide bomber had detonated his vest in the middle of a busy market. I hadn’t even been on the ground. I’d watched the whole thing from the feed a drone was providing over the site. But even then…it had stuck with me as though I’d been standing among the bodies and rubble. It had taken months to stop those terrors from coming for me at night.
“Here you go. “I opened my eyes to find Gemma holding out a couple of small, white pills. “It’s ibuprofen+. They won’t interact with anything else you’re taking.”
I nodded my thanks and took them with the small paper cup of water she held out in her other hand.
“You want to talk about it?” Gemma asked, sitting beside me.
“Not really.”
She nodded and folded her hands in her lap. “What do you want to talk about?”
I sighed. “I have no idea. You got any cracking ideas?”
Gemma smiled. “I think I’ve been brain dead for the last two hours.”
“That’s comforting,” I said, an edge of teasing in my voice.
She laughed softly. “It’s been a crazy day. Or, at least, crazier than most of the ones I’ve seen here.”
“Fair enough. I’ve got a question.”
“What’s that?”
“Do you live here in the hospital?” I asked.
She laughed softly. “Sometimes it feels like it. I’m actually off duty. I was using the gym.” At her comment, I looked over and realized that she wasn't wearing her scrubs with the white coat that she'd been wearing every other time she’d visited my room.
Instead, she was wearing a pair of tight black shorts, a white tank top, and a black athletic jacket, with long sleeves held over her hands with loops on each thumb. Before I could stop myself, my eyes roved down her shapely thighs, and I wondered how the hell I’d missed the fact that she was practically half-naked sitting beside me on the bed.
"Feeling better?" she asked, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips as she watched my wandering gaze slide back up her thighs.
"Much," I replied, feeling more myself since the crash.
"You know, I'm not sure that ogling my legs is really an official therapy, but hey, whatever works.”
I laughed, her joke in stark contrast to all the other interactions we'd had so far. Gemma had always been polite and very attentive, but I hadn't picked up on the lighter side of her personality up until that point. And definitely not any flirtation.
Unlike several of the other nurses, who had paraded in and out of my room like it had a revolving door. There were two nurses in particular who’d made it their point to check on me—at least during my waking hours—every half an hour. They always came in as a pair and judging by some of their comments, I'd concluded that they did other things in a pair as well—and that was fine by me.