In My Arms You Shall Hide

Chapter 4

Kittie

O ne minute, I watch the stranger fall beneath the car’s shadow, and the next, I wake up on my back. Warmth touches my face. When I open my eyes, I squint against streams of orange light pouring into the room through slits in the metal blinds of a window. A steady beeping permeates the space. Air whooshes into my nose, smelling sterile.

As my eyes adjust, a faint throbbing pulses through my body, like the ghost of pain. Ceiling tiles and panel lights loom overhead. When I glance down, I see my arm on top of a blanket wrapped in gauze. Given the TV bolted to the wall and the machines on either side of me, I know where I’ve ended up.

I don’t have a chance to process what’s happened. A man I don’t recognize sits in one of the stiff-looking hospital chairs at my bedside. Or, at least, I don’t remember him in the seconds after breaching the surface of what feels like a long sleep.

Dorian Ward. His name, the fact that he’s the man I pushed out of the path of that oncoming car, the fact that I was severely injured in the process…all of it’s too much to take in at once.

The delicate string holding up my smile snaps when he leaves the room to find my mom. A panic that I forced down in front of him slowly rises like bile in my throat. My hands shake.

“What did I do?” I whisper as foggy memories of colliding into Dorian filter through my brain.

What did I do? What the heck did I do?

My mom’s counting on me. Who’s going to take care of her if I’m stuck here? I’ve imploded everything. I frantically try to confirm that my memories are intact, but I don’t know what I don’t know . I’m so overwhelmed that I have to force even breaths out to stay calm.

In a split second, I ruined absolutely everything.

My doctor enters my room before my mom and Dorian return. A tall man with thinning hair, he has a look of kindness to him that makes it a little easier to throw on the facade again. I smile throughout his preliminary exams—which consists of flashing a penlight in my eye and asking me about who I am, answering simple math and current events questions, and marking notes down on a clipboard.

After the short round of tests, just as the anxiety ramps up to levels that I struggle hard to control, he informs me I was in a medically-induced coma due to a severe traumatic brain injury. I choke back the urge to vomit.

My mom rushes into the room just as it begins to spin. She nearly barrels into my doctor, tears streaming down her face as she tries to find a safe angle to hug me. She smells like hairspray and strawberry body mist, and the nostalgic, comforting scent has me wiping the corners of my eyes before she pulls away.

“Mom, I can’t believe I was in a coma for two weeks,” I tell her with a forced hiccup of a laugh. I hope poking fun at the situation will help me feel better, but all it does is make me break out into a cold sweat.

“Thirteen days,” my doctor corrects.

“That’s thirteen more days than anyone I know,” I mumble and feel my smile crumble when no one laughs.

When my mom backs away from me, I spot Dorian in the corner of the room, lingering outside my personal space, almost like a spectator.

I try to look at it as a blessing because I don’t feel comfortable having a total breakdown in front of him, and that alone keeps one at bay. I manage to hold myself back from the ledge of hysterics, maintaining a calm, neutral expression as the doctor explains my condition.

According to him, due to the angle of the impact, I had broken several ribs and even punctured a lung. He used the word luckily to describe the fact that I rolled over the car instead of under, but my arms being outstretched to push someone out of the path of the car meant I had nothing to shield my head with.

While my lung and ribs are healing well, he goes on about long-term issues that might stem from TBI, and the gnawing sense of anxiety creeps back in. Amnesia, confusion, difficulty forming new memories, difficulty reading or making decisions; no one will know until we cross that bridge.

Dorian mercifully leaves the hospital room before my doctor gets into the nitty-gritty details. The moment he gets to my risk of depression, my ears begin to ring, and I disassociate, staring numbly at the opposite wall as if I’m someone else entirely. My mom goes from silent to scolding, but she sounds far away.

The doctor departs with the final, somewhat hopeful outlook that no course of action is concrete until they can assess how I heal. I hold onto those words, the sliver of hope, even as my mom gathers me into another awkwardly positioned hug, sending the second jolt of pain in my side since waking up, but I swallow a whimper.

“Oh, I could kill you, Kittie! How could you be so reckless?” She takes in a shaky breath. “I’m not sure how I managed without you.”

I duck a little in her embrace. “I’m sorry,” I croak.

Heaving a sigh before stepping away from me, she presses a hand to the top of my head and surveys the damage to my face.

“How bad is it?” I ask her.

“Remember the time you fell on the track in school?”

Do I remember when I failed my first attempt at running hurdles in gym class, hooked my foot on the bar, slammed my face on the tarmac, and chipped my teeth? Yes, the cackle of my classmates is hard to forget.

“Yes, I remember,” I mutter.

“No worse than that,” she says, kissing me on the part of my forehead devoid of scabs.

I worry I’ll have to uphold my facade for the rest of her visit. The gears inside me practically whine under the strain of my false smile. Mercifully, though, she leaves when visiting hours conclude with a promise to return the next day. And somehow, her absence feels worse than the ache of my fake smiles.

I can only sit in the stillness of the darkened room, flickering with colors from Wheel of Fortune on the overhead TV at a whispering volume. I try to focus on the clatter of the spinning wheel, but I keep replaying the seconds I pushed Dorian out of the way.

I can’t tell if it’s due to the injury or if it’s a valid, honest emotion of grief and fear in me, but I don’t fight it. I sob into my pillow.

I expect Dorian to evaporate from my life. Even when my mom tells me he came every day while I was comatose, I assume it was out of guilt. Now that I’ve made it out on the other side, he’ll vanish behind my wall of hazy memories.

So, when he returns, I all but swallow my tongue in shock.

“Um, hi,” I greet him, fumbling for the remote for the overhead TV and turning down the volume my courtroom drama.

“How are you feeling?” he asks as he strolls closer to the bed.

The first time I saw him was not a fluke; he’s incredibly handsome and well-dressed. Unlike the slacks and cream button-down he wore the day before, he’s in a navy blue suit with a light blue shirt beneath.

I can’t answer his question for a few seconds as my brain short-circuits, processing how he’s styled his soft brown hair and that his faint, musky cologne—especially compared to the sterile hospital environment—smells better than anything I’ve experienced. He stands tall, perhaps a little under six feet, but definitely a few inches taller than me.

In the light, I notice his eyes are silver. They’re a faint gray, like the beginnings of a storm cloud, though not quite ready for thunder or rain.

I glance down at myself and want to wither and die. The nurses helped me bathe in the hospital bed this morning, a humiliating experience that’s left me in desperate want of an actual shower. Standing and walking left me feeling dizzy, so I settled for them scrubbing me with a washcloth. My hair’s still greasy and smells like rubbing alcohol and sweat. The scabs on my face and arms pull my goblin appearance together.

We’re universes apart.

“Um, fine,” I say before my mind catches up with my mouth. I kick my cheery attitude into gear. “I’m great! How are you?”

“Good,” he replies, sinking his hands into his pants pockets. Although his expression remains straight, a glimmer of relief in his eyes tells me he means that. “I’m well, Kittie.”

A second pinch of shock pushes me into a near stupor at the sound of my name in his voice.

Geez.

On the heels of a long spell of silence between us, I gather the courage to ask, “What brings you to these parts?”

“To see how you are.” He speaks so earnestly that I gawk at him, not understanding the joke. He gestures toward the chair next to my bed. His seat , my mom told me. “May I sit?”

I can’t manage the words and settle for a nod, playing with the edges of the stiff hospital blanket as the nervousness dries my mouth.

“So,” he begins as he takes a seat, “are you in any pain? Are they treating you well?”

The subtle, tender way he smiles unleashes butterflies in my stomach, and my kneejerk shame ramps up. If I drool over him any longer, he’ll probably leave out of sheer discomfort.

“Yes, thank you for asking.” I yank my gaze from the curve of his mouth. “Listen, I hope you’re not here because you feel obligated. I’d hate that. So, I’ll tell you now: you don’t owe me a thing. You’re free. You don’t even have to stay to be polite. I’m giving you permission to leave.”

The slight tilt of his head sends a single strand of brown hair across his forehead. “Is that what you want?” he asks, and his soft voice further agitates the already rampant butterflies. A phone in his pocket buzzes, and he touches the side of it through the fabric of his pants, silencing it. “Do you want me to leave?”

And never see him again? I expected that, yet the offer leaves a weird hole in my chest.

Just say no.

I ignore the desperate voice in my head. “You and I are just strangers.”

“Yes,” he allows with half a nod. “But I want to be here. I don’t feel obligated. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

I blink at him. All the words I planned fizzle on my tongue.

Before he continues down a path of thought that would threaten to unleash another torrent of unwanted tears, he folds his hands in his lap. “Has your mother been by yet? I know she told me she typically works first shift.”

“Yeah, she has an office job,” I reply with a frown. I guess Dorian and my mom had a lot to talk about while I was under. Thinking about being under throws me into a rambling panic. “Uh, no, I mean. She hasn’t been by yet. She works as an admin but deals with a lot on her own. I feel bad that she has to clock out and then come all the way here. I wish I could tell her not to worry about it with how tired she is all the time.”

Dorian’s gaze turns heavy; it dawns on me halfway through my explanation that his undivided attention is totally unfamiliar. He listens so closely and carefully that I want to squirm beneath his eyes, dying for him to cut me off so I can just shut up.

“You shouldn’t feel bad,” he tells me after my words trail off. “She’s your mother; worrying about you can’t be helped.”

I lower my eyes. “Yeah, but that’s not how it’s supposed to be with us. We’re supposed to be equals now.”

A soft, goosebump-inducing laugh rolls out of him. “Trust me, I think she’d worry regardless. My mother certainly did.”

“Did?” Another rumble of his phone in his pocket catches my attention. “Shouldn’t you answer that?”

“Hm? The phone? No, it can wait.” He settles back into the chair and folds his hands together again. As he moves, his sleeve pulls back enough for me to glimpse a blue-faced silver watch on his left wrist. Something else to add another level between us. Money.

“You said did ,” I press.

Dorian nods once, not giving an ounce of thought to his following words. “She passed away when I was thirteen.”

An empathetic stab of pain causes me to bite my lip. “I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine.”

“I appreciate that. It’s an old wound.” Dorian pauses, glancing off into the corner of the room, processing something. Slowly, he murmurs, “Were she here now, I suspect she’d want to meet you.”

“Why’s that?”

An emotion shimmers in his eyes when he looks at me again—not fully pain or sorrow but something parallel. As if it’s a realization, a conclusion, an answer to a question I hadn’t heard.

“To thank you.”

Dorian’s words slam into me, stealing all the air from my lungs, so my only response is to stare at him.

No , I want to say, desperate to duck out from beneath what feels like gratitude or debt. But a twist in my heart won’t let me ignore the deliberate step into the road, images of an older woman with eyes like his weeping over his hospital bed.

Like a fish out of water, I open and shut my mouth a few times, trying to start one line of thought before another takes its place. Nothing sticks. All the words are insufficient. One question plagues me that I don’t dare ask.

If your mom is watching over you, did she see what you did? How much is her heart breaking right now?

Eventually, maybe through the miracle of Dorian’s patience in waiting for the words to get traction, a thought leaves me. “I…meant what I said before. I’m always here if you want to talk about what happened.”

Although his face remains soft, something locks up within him. Warmth drains from his eyes so quickly I’m terrified I said the wrong thing. “Of course. I appreciate that.”

I scramble, sitting up straight in a panic and causing a brief thump of pain to echo in my torso; my healing ribs protest against my sudden movement. I hiss through the pain, “I’m sorry, it’s none of my business! I—”

A cool touch centers me. I glance down, astonished at how his hand eclipses mine. The texture of his skin is much softer than I expected.

I’m so transfixed by the notion that he’s touching me that I ignore his expression. The warmth seeps back into his words. “Don’t apologize, Kittie. Let’s just say that I’m not as worried about me as I am about you.”

I dare to peek up at him. Those soft, hazel eyes wipe my slate clean. I can only get out a single syllable. “But…”

Dorian’s fingers coil gingerly around mine, mindful of the IV taped to the back of my hand. The light squeeze makes my heart thump irregularly. His eyes pierce through mine, allowing the rest of the room to fall away. Nothing else exists, not my appearance, the pain, the room, or the circumstances that brought us here.

“Being here is what I need right now…if you’ll have me.”

I manage a nod, lost in a silver sea.

Then, too soon, he takes his hand from me.

“That’s better,” he says, and satisfaction broadens his smile. He reaches further down the bed and grabs the remote, gazing up at the screen. “Now, what were you watching?”

My brain lags a second too long. When he turns up the volume just in time for the judge to proclaim that the plaintiff is the father, I squeak in terror.

“Oh no! It’s all that was on!” I cry, nearly ripping the plastic out of his hands. “I promise I have more refined tastes in entertainment.”

Dorian pops an eyebrow, and I find his amused grin much more intoxicating than his tender smile. “Oh really? If it’s your guilty pleasure, you can just say so.”

My face flushes with heat, and the rest of the world finally bleeds back into my reality. The hushed conversations outside the room, the aches in my body, the insecurity that my blush probably makes me look even worse…

And despite all of it, Dorian pulls a little smile out of me.

“I’ll never tell,” I tell him in a half laugh.

As I frantically search for something more appropriate to watch, Dorian settles further into his chair, offering commentary and opinions as I argue the merits of trashy daytime TV. It seems he plans to stay a while, and I can’t imagine a pleasure that riddles me with more guilt than that.