Chapter Two #2
A stab of disappointment pierced me like a dart. I’d guessed wrong. My memory might be sketchy, but I was certain that when the green-eyed man had checked his watch, there’d been no full-sleeve tattoo on his arm.
The nurse was still holding the curtains, like a magician’s assistant about to perform a big reveal. She spoke in a whisper that was no way quiet enough.
‘Actually,’ she said with what appeared to be a last-minute change of heart. ‘Perhaps it might be better to do this another time. I think he’s asleep, anyway.’
‘No, he isn’t,’ said a voice from the bed.
His eyes were just as green as I remembered. At least I hadn’t forgotten that.
‘Rhys.’ His name burst its way past my lips in the manner it had apparently been doing all day.
The man in the bed was bare-chested. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. There was no hospital gown covering his torso, but it was anything but bare. I tore my eyes away from the mesmerising network of fern-like etchings and twisting vines that decorated almost every inch of visible skin.
‘It’s you,’ Rhys said, somewhat artlessly. ‘The girl with the shoes in her hand.’
It was no longer an accurate descriptor, for my shoes were somewhere unknown, presumably with the rest of my clothes, and my feet were currently clad in lurid blue hospital socks.
‘Hi,’ I said, feeling shy in a way I truly don’t think I’d done since I was about sixteen years old. All at once I regretted turning down the offer of a blanket to cover my legs, which suddenly felt horribly exposed in the wheelchair.
‘So, it got you too?’ Rhys asked, his eyes mercifully fixed only on my face.
‘The lightning? Yes, it did.’
The man in the bed nodded, looking as shell-shocked as I felt. ‘It’s pretty surreal, isn’t it?’
‘I can’t get my head around it. The doctor said the odds of being struck are less than one in a million.’
We shared a look that only survivors would recognise.
‘This was a good idea,’ said the nurse, more to herself than either of us. Her glance went from Rhys to me and she gave us a look of encouragement before pushing my chair even closer to his bed.
‘Why don’t I leave the two of you to chat for a minute?
’ She swept the cubicle curtains around my wheelchair, cocooning us in an illusion of privacy as though everything we said couldn’t easily be overheard.
Before either of us had a chance to protest, she slipped through the opening, leaving me alone with a semi-naked man, currently looking just as confused as I was.
‘Does she think that we know each other, or that we’re . . . ?’ I trailed off, leaving my hand, which was flapping in the space between us, to finish that sentence.
‘I think she might,’ Rhys said, immediately on my wavelength in a way that rarely happens between strangers. And yet this man didn’t feel like a stranger. The exact opposite, in fact. ‘Although I’ve no idea why she’d assume that.’
There was no way of stopping the blush. It scorched my cheeks like a flame.
‘Erm . . . that might be my fault. Apparently, I came round murmuring your name. I saw it on your coffee cup before the accident and it’s kind of got stuck in my head. They tell me I’ve been saying it a lot.’
I swear if my face got any hotter, they were going to need a fire extinguisher on it.
I waited for him to reach for the Call button; to have someone evict this clearly deranged person from his cubicle.
Instead, he just smiled, and it was so engaging it took me right back to that moment beneath the oak tree.
‘Why do you think that is?’ he asked.
‘I’ve absolutely no idea.’
His eyes left my face as he looked me over, in a way that made me feel shy again.
‘Were you injured in the strike?’ he asked.
‘Not really. I was unconscious for a minute or two and I’ve got a small burn on my shoulder.
’ I only just caught myself before I pushed the fabric aside to show him.
The fact that I didn’t know this man kept slipping out of my head even faster than everything else I appeared to have forgotten.
‘That’s about it.’ For some reason I didn’t mention the memory loss. ‘I think you got it worse than me.’
‘So they tell me.’
‘In fact, I think your heart might have stopped.’ I gasped at my indiscreet, runaway tongue as I realised too late it wasn’t my place to reveal such devastating news. What the hell was wrong with me? Had the lightning burnt all good sense away?
I must have looked every bit as mortified as I felt, for Rhys lifted one hand and laid it lightly on my forearm, which – even though it had no business being there – had somehow found a place to rest on his mattress.
He patted my arm reassuringly, and it was strangely comforting to know that we were both guilty of crossing personal boundaries.
We were behaving like old friends, rather than two people whose sum total acquaintance amounted to less than ten minutes in each other’s company.
‘It’s okay. I already knew.’
I gazed down at his hand, which was still resting on me. The strange tattoo markings even extended to his fingers, and I had to squash a totally inappropriate urge to trace the curious vine-like trail across his knuckles.
Someone drew in a sharp breath, and I truly don’t know if it was him or me.
‘But you’re okay now, though?’ My question sounded more anxious than I’d expected.
‘I’m fine.’ Rhys gave a small rueful laugh that took me by surprise. ‘It’s been a good day . . . apart from the unexpected cardiac arrest and the full-body tattoo markings that certainly weren’t there when I woke up this morning.’
‘The lightning did that?’
Rhys nodded.
‘My mates all got tattoos when we were eighteen, but I was too chicken to go through with it. I’ve got this thing about needles. Getting struck by lightning I can cope with, but I almost passed out when they put this drip in. And having these marks now . . . this is a lot.’
My gaze followed the pattern that began at the base of his throat, covered the skin of both shoulders, his entire chest, and travelled the length of one arm, right down to his fingertips. The other arm was tanned and, bizarrely, totally unmarked.
It was a visual and sobering wake-up call of what we’d experienced.
‘We could have died,’ I said, my voice scarcely more than a whisper.
‘But we didn’t,’ Rhys said, and I suspected that even before the lightning struck, he was a glass-half-full kind of person. ‘Someone up there must have been looking out for us.’ He flicked a quick glance towards the ceiling, but I doubted he was referring to the medics on the next floor up.
His words made me shiver. I’d always been fiercely pragmatic and level-headed, never believing in anything remotely woo-woo or spiritual.
In fact, with years of friendship between us, it had been the only red-flag topic between Mel and me.
Our views on the subject were polar opposites.
She’d filled our shared university house with healing crystals and incense to cleanse our auras, while I’d maintained the only thing that legitimately needed cleansing was the drains.
In the end we’d agreed to differ, but even now, any conversation that steered towards things other-worldly made me distinctly uncomfortable.
‘Are you okay?’ Rhys asked, leaning in close enough for me to smell a warm, woodsy aftershave above the pervading hospital antiseptic. ‘You kind of drifted away there for a moment.’
‘I’m good,’ I said, not entirely sure if that was true.
There was a sound of a chair scraping across the floor from beyond the cubicle, and I shot an anxious look over my shoulder. ‘I think I’m about to be taken back.’ The regret in my voice was embarrassing.
‘We should have said we were a couple. Maybe then they’d have let you stay.’ It was a totally inappropriate suggestion that felt completely right.
‘What? Lie, you mean?’
He nodded.
‘I’m an estate agent. I never lie,’ I said with a grin, pleased to see a matching one break out across his face.
‘Are you a good one?’
‘Excellent,’ I said, but the usual pride in my voice sounded strangely forced.
‘I’m sorry,’ said a disembodied head as it popped through the gap in the curtains, ‘but I really do need to take you back now.’
‘Okay.’ I tried to ignore the immediate feeling of disappointment sweeping through me.
‘I’m glad you’re going to be alright,’ I said to Rhys, feeling oddly shy in front of the nurse, which was daft because she’d probably heard every word of our conversation from her sentry position outside the cubicle.
She was looking decidedly twitchy now, and I wondered how many hospital rules she’d broken in bringing me to my fellow victim’s bedside.
But her instincts had been good. I didn’t understand why, but seeing Rhys and knowing we’d both survived this incredible one-in-a-million experience really had helped.
‘Ditto. It was nice meeting you, Shoe Girl, even if it was in the weirdest possible circumstances.’
I was being wheeled slowly backwards, away from his bed, away from him, and that was just as it should be.
So why did it seem so wrong? I’d felt so much better when this total stranger had been next to me, and there really was no explanation for that.
Nor was there for the way I impulsively asked the nurse to stop.
She halted the wheelchair in a squeak of rubber wheels on lino. Rhys was still staring at me from his hospital bed.
‘My name is Ellie. Ellie Harker. You can find me on Insta.’