Chapter Five
Five
She woke up, groggy and disoriented, with sunlight blasting directly into her eyes. Squinting against the glare, she considered whether she’d be able to convince her body to fall back asleep if she put a pillow over her head. She had no idea what time it was, but it felt too early to be awake.
“What the fuck!”
The panicked male shout had Emmy shooting out of bed, adrenaline pushing her from drowsy to wide-awake in the span of a second. She whirled around to see an enormous dude, wearing nothing but a pair of plaid boxers, gaping at her.
“What the fuck?” he repeated, with a slightly more interrogative inflection.
“Who the hell are you?” Emmy asked in response, trying to tamp down her panic.
Her head swiveled as she took in her surroundings and absorbed the fact that the unfamiliar man came paired with an unfamiliar room.
“Where am I? Did you…” She paused, swallowed, and took a small step back.
This was bad. Really bad. “Did you drug me?”
“Are you kidding me?” the guy demanded. He ran his hands through his hair in pure agitation. “Jesus, no I didn’t drug you. You’re the one who showed up in my house. You don’t get to make any accusations here.”
“Okay, hold on. Hold on. Just for a second.” Emmy put up both hands, palms out, as if she could press pause on life. Her brain whirled. She wished this were a dream, but knew without a doubt that she was awake. Awake but… possibly losing her memory. Or her mind.
Then her eyes tracked back down to the guy’s boxers.
Plaid boxers.
“Um…” he said, clearing his throat. He didn’t say “What the fuck” a third time, but his expression did. She watched him grab a pair of sweats out of his dresser and slip them on. He’d had them neatly folded, she noted. Who folded sweatpants?
Focus, Emmy, she ordered herself. Then she remembered the book. What about plaid boxers made her think of the book?
Wearing nothing but a pair of plaid boxers, Will flopped into bed and… something, something, something.
She’d read those words recently, more or less. She hadn’t memorized the damn book. But this one detail sure was sticking out at the moment.
“Plaid boxers,” Emmy whispered, and she could feel the blood draining out of her face.
“What?”
Emmy swallowed, looked back up at the guy.
Movie star handsome. Clearly worked out—a rigidly defined six pack was on full display and she’d seen the way his biceps bulged when he ran his hands through his hair.
Over six feet tall. Tousled brown hair, tan skin, and…
he was too far away to tell for sure, but she was starting to think his eyes might be hazel.
“What’s your name?”
She barely recognized the sound of her own voice. Was that buzzing in her ears an auditory symptom of panic?
He looked like he wasn’t going to answer, but something on her face must have demonstrated the importance of the question. “Will.”
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
Emmy rushed out of the room, found a bathroom, locked herself inside.
She pulled her hair back and leaned over the sink, maintaining that position until she was sure that her stomach wasn’t going to turn inside out.
Then she looked into the mirror. Yep. She was still her.
Still wearing ducky pajamas. Apparently, she had completely departed from reality.
Was she still in her apartment and hallucinating the book character guy?
Or was her apartment just another layer of the delusion?
Maybe she’d never been sane. Except… hallucinations weren’t supposed to be this real, were they?
How could she know? Feeling her hands tremble, Emmy reached out to grip the edge of the sink.
She needed to focus. Follow the logic. She could do this.
Sure, it seemed like logic had abandoned her, but she could bring it back.
She could find it. There had to be a reasonable explanation. There had to be. She was not in a book.
“You’re not in a book,” she said to her reflection.
Her stomach threatened to heave again, and she ruthlessly swallowed the nerves back down.
“You’re not in a book,” she repeated, forcing strength into her thready voice.
“And you’re not leaving this bathroom until you figure out what’s really going on.
” Her shell-shocked expression stared back at her, and she cursed under her breath.
“I’m going to be in this bathroom for a long time. ”
While she was in the bathroom, Will pulled on a shirt and tried not to panic.
He’d gone to bed alone the night before.
It wasn’t like he’d gone on a drug and alcohol binge after a fourteen-hour shift and brought someone home.
He’d been lucid… or as lucid as a sleep-deprived person can be.
So where the hell had the woman come from?
The fact that she was just as uncertain about that as he was made him uneasy.
More uneasy. When the door creaked open and she emerged from the bathroom, he took in her appearance.
Pale. Too pale. But beautiful. God he wished he could ignore that, but he had eyes, didn’t he?
Her hair, dark brown with hints of caramel highlights, fell in soft waves down her back.
Eyes that were wide and dark. Lips that were perfectly full, slightly parted now as she breathed slowly in through her nose and out through her mouth.
No, he couldn’t deny he found her appealing on a physical level.
But that didn’t change the fact that she wasn’t supposed to be in his house.
“Okay,” she said, and her voice was strained. “There are only two possibilities here.”
“I think there are more than two.”
She shook her head, dismissing his interjection. Then she met his gaze. Her eyes were… haunted, if he had to pick a word. “I need to tell you what I know. It’s going to sound insane, but this whole situation is insane. I just need you to listen to me.”
Will was trying to recall everything he could about mental disorders from his courses in college.
It was clear this woman needed help, but he wasn’t the man for the job.
He was a nurse in the pediatric wing for fuck’s sake.
He knew all the names of the Paw Patrol dogs, could recite trivia about Thomas the Tank Engine as if he had created the series.
He’d seen so many of Blippi’s videos that he might as well consider the suspender-clad show host a close personal friend.
None of that helped him in this situation.
How was he supposed to talk this woman down from what was clearly a psychotic break?
Humor her, he decided. Humor her until a better solution came along.
“What do you need to tell me?” he asked, keeping his voice as calm and gentle as he could manage.
It sounded like he was talking to a wounded animal. Emmy tried not to feel offended as she organized her thoughts. She would probably have reacted the same way if the roles were reversed.
“Last night… I fell asleep reading a book,” she began.
“The main character in that book was named Will Barrett.” She saw Will’s eyebrows wing up, and the look in his eyes gave her the impression he was deciding between fight or flight.
Seeing no other recourse, she plowed on.
“Sometime in the first few chapters, Will Barrett fell asleep wearing only a pair of plaid boxers. I fell asleep last night in my apartment—in my bed—in suburban Minnesota, and I woke up this morning in your bed.” She paused to take a breath, then let it out slowly.
“Either I have gone deeply and irrevocably insane and you are a hallucination, or I am somehow… in that book.”
Insane was right. Will wanted to take a step back, but the woman posed no real threat. She didn’t have a weapon, and she was… dainty. He was pretty sure he could take her if it came to a hand-to-hand fight.
“I’m not a hallucination,” he said, trying for calm and rational.
She arched an eyebrow. “So you’re a book character, huh?”
“No, I’m going to go with option three.”
When he didn’t expound, Emmy gestured for him to continue. He shrugged. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s definitely more logical than me being a book character.”
She nodded. “Right. I can hope for that. And, for what it’s worth… I’m sorry. However I ended up here, I didn’t mean to, and I’m sorry I scared you. As soon as I figure out how, I’ll get out of your hair.”
“I could drive you home.”
“To Minnesota?”
“No, not to Minnesota.” This was a truly surreal conversation.
What was he supposed to say to her? If she was having a mental break, there was no point in trying to be rational.
Weirdly enough, other than telling him a truly wild story about him being in a book, she wasn’t acting like she’d dissociated.
Her gaze was clear and direct. Her speech wasn’t slurred.
She responded to him and to the situation in an appropriate way, or as appropriate as was possible given the circumstances.
There were no physical tics, no nervous gestures.
He didn’t see any indication of self-harm in the form of scars, cuts, missing hair, chewed lips.
“Are you sure you live in Minnesota?” he tried.
“Yes, of course. I…” Emmy paused, realizing that she was not going to be able to reach into her pocket, grab her wallet, and show him her driver’s license. She didn’t make a habit of putting her wallet in her pajama pants. “I’m… in my pajamas.”
“Yes, you are.”
She looked down at herself. “I’m not wearing a bra.”
“No comment.”
“Fantastic.”
“No comment again.”
“I wasn’t talking about my tits.”
To her surprise, he smiled. The sheer sex appeal in the expression—Lord, he had a dimple in his left cheek—actually made her mouth go dry.
“How can you look at me like that and not believe you’re a character in a romance novel?”
“It was a romance novel?” His disgust was evident, the sexy smile wiped clean as if it had never been.