Chapter Eighteen

Recipe: Blueberry Caramel Tart

From ‘Dessert Person’

Though it was cliché, it was the beeping and the smell that woke me up.

The hospital smell. Strong chemicals, antiseptic and sickness. Scratchy sheets against my skin. Cotton in my mouth. My brain fuzzy and eyes full of grit.

I knew a lot of people hated hospitals, and though I’d never say this out loud—lest I sound even more eccentric and weird than I was—I actually liked them. They made me feel safe. This was a whole building of people who were trained to deal with injuries and illnesses. If my insurance covered such things, I’d get a full body MRI framed just so I could see that there were no dark masses, and stop worrying about them. I’d even toyed with the idea of studying medicine for the sole purpose of making myself more capable at diagnosing myself, and more importantly, ruling out whatever sickness I’d otherwise find on the internet.

But blood grossed me out.

And I liked sugar.

Those thoughts all swirled through a cloudy and muddled mind, likely because of whatever drugs I was on.

It took a long time to open my eyes, to get my thoughts to catch up with me. The last clear thing I remembered was having an argument with Rowan. Or at least the tail end of the argument.

I’d decided to believe him, forgive him for the Kaitlyn incident. Not that there was anything to forgive. I’d jumped to conclusions and been somewhat dramatic.

What followed was somewhat jumbled. Rowan had caught me when I collapsed, of course. This was a man waiting for a bullet to jump in front of whenever we were together.

But there was no bullet, so I could only imagine how helpless that man of mine felt when there was no one to protect me from.

There were a lot of blurry images after that, and I did remember yelling. Him yelling. At paramedics. Doctors.

I remembered the fear in his voice, the desperation mingling with the searing pain in my body. I’d wanted to open my arms, comfort him, tell him that I was going to be okay, that I was just imagining it. Except even I couldn’t imagine myself into that situation. Then there were a whole bunch of jumbled things: bright lights, foreign hands. And then there was nothing at all.

My room was small, private, with all the things you would expect from a hospital room. Monitors, IV bags. There was a man sitting in a chair pulled up as close as physically possible to my bed. His hand was grasping mine. His eyes were focused on me, sitting ramrod straight, face creased with worry.

“Thank fuck,” he hissed when he came into focus.

Rowan leaned forward, clasping my hand in both of his, pressing his forehead to it.

“You scared the absolute shit out of me, Nora.”

It surprised me, the fear on his face. Naked. All-encompassing.

He hadn’t hidden how much he cared about me in the time we’d been together. Not even a little.