“The hospital entrance is around back. Just follow the driveway as it curves to the left up ahead.”

“Ok ma’am.”

What movie is this? It seems so familiar to me. Have I seen it before? I feel like I know what’s going to happen next, but I don’t remember.

“Room two, down the hall, first door on the right.”

What happened to her? The girl on the stretcher. Her eyes are open but she’s not moving or talking.

“We need to intubate! Stat!”

Intubate? Is that really necessary? They always need to intubate on these TV shows. She looks like she’s breathing fine to me.

“Grab the head! Quick we’re losing her! I can’t get a pulse!”

Can’t get a pulse? But I’m fine. I’m right in front of you with my eyes open. Didn’t you see the part where I was wandering around in this big dark mansion all alone…

I shook my head from side to side and slowly opened my eyes a tiny bit. The light streaming in through the small window was too much for me to take so early, so I closed my eyes again and tried to think for a minute, but my thoughts came slowly, and I felt like my head was in a fog bank.

Ok, where am I? I’m laying in bed…and the light is really bright. Too bright. I don’t remember it ever being this bright before.

I kept my eyes closed tight as I studied the reverse image of slatted lines of light and shadow that were burned into the blackness of my field of view.

Wait, that looks like the pattern of light streaming through venetian blinds. I don’t have venetian blinds in my bedroom. Where the hell am I?

I rubbed my eyes and temples to try and alleviate the dull ache that sat like a hat on top of my head and slowly opened and closed my eyes.

Am I hungover? My god my body is so sore. I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck. What did I do last night. Did I get drunk? I hardly ever get drunk. I’ve been drunk maybe twice in my life! What the hell did I do last night?? Wait. I remember. I watched a movie. Or wait, was it a dream? It was…about a woman…and she was in an ambulance. No a girl? A girl in a nightgown in a big dark mansion…and there was an elk…and a car spinning. What on earth?

I opened my eyes and stared at the millions of holes in the large white tiles in the ceiling and then at the slatted venetian blind shadow on the wall in front of me.

What, am I in a doctor’s office? I feel like I should have my feet up in stirrups or something.

I slowly moved my hands up to the top of my head and winced at the pain in both my arms. I realized that I must have some sort of head injury because when I reached up all I could feel were bandages. I looked at my arms as I brought them back down to my sides and noticed that I had scratches and bruises all over them.

What on earth happened to me?

I looked around the room and tried to figure out where I was. From what I could tell I was in some sort of hospital that apparently hadn’t been renovated since it was built, which looked to me like the 1950s. The walls were covered halfway up with dingy white tiles and the floor with off-white linoleum. Behind the bed and up towards the ceiling was a small, rectangular window where the stripes of light and shadow came from that appeared on the wall in front of me. It was the kind of window that was usually reserved for the basement floor, where the majority of the walls of the room were below ground level. The antiseptic smell from some sort of strong cleaner filled the room, as well as a faint musty scent that made me wonder when this room had been used last. It was sparsely furnished with a very institutional grey and wood veneered side table that stood against the wall to my right with the requisite TV suspended on an arm above it. There were two doors in the room, one directly in front of me and one on the wall to the left. That door stood open and I figured it was probably the bathroom, but I wasn’t capable of getting up to investigate yet, so I hoped I wouldn’t need to use it anytime soon. I looked to my left and noticed a table with a pitcher of water and a glass, as well as a machine on a tall skinny stand that was making green zig zags and beeping out the sound of a heart beat, which I assumed was mine.

What in the hell happened?? Think, Abby! God, it hurts to think. Ok, ok, what the hell did I do last night? I’m pretty sure that stuff about the mansion and the elk was a dream or a movie. But was it? Did I watch a movie last night?

I looked up at the ancient TV on the wall and could easily imagine an old, weird movie set in a hospital mansion playing on the out-dated screen.

Ok, if I’m in a hospital room then maybe the car spinning and the ambulance and the ER were all real. So, if those parts weren’t a dream then maybe the mansion stuff was real too? Ugh. Don’t be silly, Abby. You’re not in a hospital mansion. This isn’t one of your far-fetched storylines where a woman gets rescued from a madman in a mansion by a handsome stranger. But, seriously, where the hell am I?

I rubbed my temples, pretty much the only unbandaged part of my head, and closed my eyes again.

Ok. Ok…just calm down. I kind of remember now. I was with Jake earlier last night…

* * *

“Jake,” I said as the door opened in front of me. I threw my arms around his neck and smiled as he picked me up by my waist and carried me through the doorway, closing the door to his house with a flick of his foot. That’s one of the things I loved about Jake. He was an incredibly sweet guy and kindness was on the top of my list of what I wanted in a man, but he could also be so smooth and sexy and that made me want him even more. He set me on my feet and brushed a stray hair out of my eyes, smiling down at me like he always did, as if he knew some wonderful secret about the two of us that I didn’t, and it always took my breath away.

“Abby. You look absolutely beautiful.”

I smiled up at him but quickly looked away. I knew what I was going to have to do that night, what I had planned to do, and I wasn’t very happy about it. Jake lifted my chin then grabbed the sides of my head with both hands and gently touched his lips to mine. They lingered on the surface of my skin for just a moment, then pressed into me, his tongue darting into my mouth and tickling mine as he pulled me hard against his body and held me in a mesmerizing embrace. My legs turned to jelly as the kiss became more passionate and intense and I used my grip on his neck to hold myself steady. I was starting to question my motives for breaking up with him, but I had come to this decision after a lot of thought. Not that I truly bought any of my own arguments as to why I would be better off alone, though. In fact, the more I thought about it, and the longer I let Jake kiss me, the more ridiculous my motives all sounded. But the insecure, anxiety-ridden part of me always won these internal discussions and my mind was made up. And this kiss was definitely not helping my thought process, so I summoned all my strength and somehow cut the kiss short, then gently push him back a little.

“Jake, we need to talk.”

“Ok, but I have a surprise for you,” he said with a sly smile as he turned me around and nudged me towards the dining room. He had a modern home that was tastefully decorated in earth tones and black leather furniture. It wasn’t my taste, but it suited his strong, confident demeanor very well. I tentatively walked ahead of him through the double door entry of his dining room that was now filled with dark pink peonies and was lit by candlelight in every corner of the room. I clasped my hands in front of me and stood there, my eyes filling with tears as I felt Jake’s hands wrap around my waist.

“Happy Anniversary, Abby,” he whispered in my ear as he buried his face in my hair.

No! No! Don’t do this to me, Jake! I thought as I forced the tears back and clutched my tightening throat. Everything in my peripheral vision started to turn to black as it narrowed down to a small tunnel in front of me.

“Anniversary?” I asked with a shaky voice. This wasn’t going as smoothly as I had pictured last night when I cooked up that silly fantasy about us hugging and parting as good friends.

“Yeah, I know it’s not a real anniversary, but we’ve been together six whole months. Maybe I’m a total sap, or maybe I just wanted an excuse to celebrate…with you,” he said as his lips met the inner curve of my neck and shoulder. Tears were streaming down my cheeks now, but I didn’t want Jake to see that I was crying. The thing is, though, the tears were falling for more than one reason. I knew that I loved him and I knew that he was the most wonderful man I had ever known, but I also knew that I was terrified and the only thing that made sense to my crazy brain at that moment was to get out of there as quickly as possible. I wiped the tears off my cheeks and wheeled around, pushing Jake away from me.

“I can’t do this anymore, Jake.”

* * *

One of the doors in the room opened and a nurse walked in carrying a metal tray.

“Good morning, Ms. Scott. How are you feeling?” She set the tray down on a side table near the head of the bed and took a thermometer off the tray. I hadn’t been in a hospital since I broke my ankle playing soccer in grade school, so I didn’t really know what nurses were wearing these days, but I was a bit startled at how archaic this woman’s uniform looked. Like something out of an old movie…Like my dream about that movie last night in that old hospital mansion place, I thought as I stared at her white dress and the little winged hat perched on top of her head.

“I’m just going to get a few vitals right now, dear. I’ll bring in some breakfast in a little while, but you’ll be needing a lot of rest after your accident,” she said as she plunged the thermometer into my mouth. I tried to ask her what happened to me, but she shushed me and proceeded to wrap a blood pressure cuff around my arm. I was still in a fog and was still contemplating, and cringing over, everything that happened the last time I saw Jake, so by the time I remembered to ask any questions the nurse was already out the door. I looked around my bed and found nothing to call her back with.

“What the hell kind of hospital is this?” I said out loud as I tried to sit up and look around, hoping to find a cord with a call button somewhere near the bed. My head was pounding and the room started to spin a little so even though I had barely lifted my head off the pillow, I sank back down into the soothing softness and closed my eyes.

I’ll ask her where I am when she brings my breakfast, I thought as I drifted back into a fitful sleep where dreams were interspersed with half-awake memories that all blurred together. I vaguely remembered a conversation on the telephone. One of those old telephones shaped like a handle with the big round parts you listen to and talk into, and a long dark hall. There was a voice on the phone and it was talking to me. At first, the voice was very far away, and every time I strained to hear what it was saying it slipped further and further away into the darkness.

When I finally opened my eyes and looked around the room again it was completely dark except for the faint slatted shadow and light pattern on the opposite wall that the moonlight cast through the venetian blinds. I must have slept all day, or maybe even longer. I had no way of knowing since there was no clock in the room or any way for me to tell how many days I had been there. I wondered if the nurse would be back in anytime soon. I wasn’t hungry yet, but my throat and mouth were incredibly dry and I remembered the pitcher of water I had seen the last time I was awake. The water was still there on the table next to the head of the bed, thank God, but the machine that was measuring my pulse was gone. I guess that meant I was doing ok, but how long ago had they taken it away? I also noticed that the bandages I’d had on my head were gone too, and I didn’t know if I had been in here longer than I realized or if my injuries were not as bad as I had imagined. I just wished someone would tell me where the hell I was, and how I got there.

I closed my eyes and let the cool water rush down my throat as I thought about Jake again, about the way he held me in his arms right before I pushed him away and walked out on him. He was always so incredibly gentle and patient with me and I felt terrible for doing what I had done. Tears fell from my eyes again as I felt a crushing sense of doom sweep over me; that familiar feeling that would always come in the middle of the night and was impossible to shake. The feeling that I had done something terribly wrong and there was no way it would ever be made right again. I wondered for a moment what would have happened if I had decided to stay with him. I wondered if Jake would have been patient enough to deal with my ridiculous insecurities, or if he would have gotten as fed up with me as I was with myself at that moment. But it was no use wondering because I had left him and I doubted he would even want me back.

As I lay there in a foggy haze, thoughts about Jake kept creeping back into my brain, and one thing I couldn’t stop thinking about was his amazing ability to taking things slow. His patience was something that had always struck me and was something that had made its way into my head every time I’d thought about running away. He almost seemed inhuman in his ability to wait for sex. And I don’t mean fooling around, I’m talking about full-on intercourse. He always seemed fine, more than fine really, with just touching me, or looking at me, or watching me. In fact, he really seemed to love watching me. He would ask me to undress in front of him and pleasure myself in front of him and most of the time he never even touched himself. He said he was happy to just watch me, or to take things into his own hands and give me pleasure himself. I had never been with a man like that before, someone so forcefully giving. He always put my needs and desires before his and made sure that I was beyond satisfied. But eventually, what I wanted more than anything was for our naked, sweating bodies to be pressed against each other after whatever had gone on. And I don’t know why, but he never seemed comfortable with that. The two times we did wind up with our clothes all the way off and with him inside me, it was…different. It was still very good, but it wasn’t quite what I had expected. I’m sure sex between us would have continued to get more and more amazing, but I was just too scared to stick around and find out.

Many of the nights we would spend together consisted of dinner alone at his house where we would talk and kiss and eventually get worked up to the point where he would bury his face in my hair and whisper incredibly sexy things into my ear. Sometimes he would be laying on top of me when we were on the couch together, all sweaty and out of breath, and he would hold my wrists down and graze his lips across the sensitive skin of my ear, then slowly go over each and every one of my body parts, one at a time, and describe what he liked about them and what he wanted to do to them. His descriptions always involved his tongue and his lips and always drove me to the brink of insanity, leaving me soaking wet.

Other times he would stand behind me, just like the last time I saw him, and as I would lean back against him, his arms wrapped around me and my head resting on his shoulder, he would tell me what he wanted me to do to him. He would whisper everything in detail into my ear. The way he wanted to look at me across the room and watch me remove my clothes, turning around when I removed my panties so that he could watch as my ass cheeks spread in front of him when I touched my hands to the ground, revealing everything that was hidden between my legs to him. He would tell me that he wanted to watch me get on my knees in front of him and look up into his eyes as I removed his hard cock from his pants, then slowly slide it into my mouth. And every time he would tell me these things it would send wave after wave of intense tingling through my entire body. Then he would watch me make myself come with those deep dark eyes that looked like they could never get enough of me. Everything he did made my head spin, even when he wasn’t even touching me.

I shook my head and snapped out of the memory trance that I had just drifted off into. I sullenly looked around the room slowly remembering where I was. In a dark hospital that was dead silent and very creepy at night. I realized as I set the glass back down on the side table that I hadn’t recalled hearing a single sound the entire time I’d been there, other than the nurse talking to me briefly while she took my blood pressure, and the infernal beep of the heart rate machine that was now gone. I got up out of the bed and shuffled over to the door I had seen the nurse come in. I was still very shaky and had to hold onto the bed and the table under the TV as I made my way the short distance across the room, and when I opened the door enough to poke my head out all I saw was a long dark hall. I shivered as I shut the door again and groped my way back to the bed, sinking in and pulling the covers up over my head as quickly as possible to recapture some warmth.

This place is more like a mausoleum than a hospital, I thought as I rubbed my feet together under the covers, willing them to stop resembling ice cubes. As I lay there I thought about the dream with the phone call and Jake whispering into my ear and was surprised by how similar the two events felt when I thought about them together. I suppose the memory of Jake’s overwhelming effect on me was just really strong in my subconscious right now and that’s probably what caused the dream. But for some reason, the dream reminded me of something else that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Something from a long time ago.

I drifted in and out of consciousness with thoughts, or dreams, of Jake whispering in my ear, that then turned into Jake calling me on an old fashioned phone and telling me all the things he would do to me when I got better and got out of the hospital. He told me he liked to watch me walk around the big dark house in my nightgown and that he was always watching me, even when he was talking to me on the phone.

I woke up the next day to the sound of the nurse setting a domed tray down on a rolling table next to the bed. It was one of those hospital tables with legs on only one side that pushed across the bed in front of me so that I could eat where I was sitting. She used a button on the side of the bed to move the head up, then moved my pillows around behind me so that I straightened up.

“Where am I?” I asked, taking the cover off the tray in front of me and revealing a cup of coffee, a glass of orange juice, scrambled eggs and toast.

“You’re in the hospital, young lady. You were involved in a bad accident and you’ve been asleep for days.” She still had the old fashioned nurses uniform on and wore an old lady scowl with it.

“I’ve been asleep for days? How many? What happened to me? In the accident, I mean?”

“You were brought here in the middle of the night, oh it’s been 5…no, 6 days now. I can’t tell you anything about what happened before you got here, though. That would be something to talk to the doctor about.”

“The doctor? When will I see him?”

“Oh, he’s very busy. You’ll be seeing him soon, I’m sure. But what you need to do right now is rest. Go ahead and eat your breakfast and when you’re done I’ll be back in to get the tray.”

“But how will I let you know that I’m done? I can’t find a call button.”

“I’ll know,” she said as she slipped back out into the hallway. I sat there for a moment staring at the door. I had asked her all the questions I had intended to, but I still didn’t know a goddamned thing about where I was or how I got there. I pushed the rolling table away from the bed and tried, once again, to go out into the hall and find out where I was. I got myself into a sitting position, but after a few seconds of woozy swaying and a feeble attempt at standing, I got back under the covers.

Maybe I’m worse off than I realized, I thought as I inched my way back into bed and covered myself up. I pulled the rolling food table back over the bed and decided to give the eggs a try. They weren’t bad, especially when shoveled onto the buttered toast, and the coffee was actually pretty decent. I ate everything in the eerie silence I was getting used to, then put the cover back on the tray and pushed the table away from the bed. My eyes started to get heavy and my head fell back and to the side. I closed my eyes, thinking it would just be a few minutes until the nurse came back and that I would just rest them a bit. I wanted to ask her more questions and see if I could, at least, turn the TV on and break the overbearing silence for a little while.

The next thing I knew I was laying on my back again and the nurse was standing over me.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Scott. How are you feeling today?”

“Today?” I asked, rubbing my eyes and trying to get the face in front of me to come into focus.

“But I saw you this morning. I ate breakfast and…”

“That was yesterday, dear. You fell asleep after breakfast and haven’t been up since.”

“What? I slept for a whole day? What time is it?”

“It’s just after one o’clock, dear. You must be hungry by now. I’ll bring in a tray of lunch for you.”

“Wait. When can I see the doctor?”

“Oh, he’s already been in to see you today, dear. He was in yesterday afternoon as well. He took all your vitals and said you’re recovering very well. You just need your rest and you’ll be fine,” she said with an awkward smile that looked like it took a bit more effort than it was worth.

“Can’t he come back in so I can talk to him? I’d really like to know what happened and when I can expect to leave here.”

“I’ll put a call in to him and let him know that you’d like to see him. I can’t promise anything, though. He’s a very busy man. And I wouldn’t be worrying too much about leaving here anytime soon if I were you. What you need to be concerning yourself with right now is eating and resting and getting yourself good and healthy. I’ll be back with your lunch in a bit.”

And before I could get another question out she was gone. I just lay there, staring at the thousands of holes in the ceiling and wondering how it was that an old lady like that could get in and out of this room so goddamned fast. Maybe she has roller skates on that I can’t see, I thought as I fought the foggy feeling in my brain.

I had drifted off again but woke to the sound of the metal food tray being set down next to me. The nurse elevated my head and pushed the food table in front of me like before, and managed to make it out the door again before I even had a chance to collect my thoughts and find out what hospital I was at.

I picked up the domed lid and set it to the side of the tray. The shiny metal lid somehow felt heavier today than it had yesterday on the breakfast tray. I didn’t see how I could be weaker today though and thought I really should talk to the doctor and find out what, if anything, was wrong with me. But I also figured I should probably just eat and rest like the nurse had suggested, even though I wasn’t very hungry. Lunch was a brothy soup and a ground meat sandwich of some kind, which seemed like tuna, but didn’t have any kind of tuna flavor. I ate slower than usual partly because I wasn’t very hungry, and partly because I wasn’t particularly excited to put the unidentifiable sandwich meat in my mouth. About halfway through lunch, I started to feel extremely tired again. I was even having a hard time getting my hand up to my mouth and that’s when I started to wonder if my food was being drugged. It wasn’t even a normal tired feeling where you think maybe you’ll close your eyes for a minute or two and rest. It was a full on, room-tilting, eyes-closing-against-my-will tired that I had only ever felt since I had been in this crazy hospital.

But that’s preposterous, I thought as my eyes started to close. Why on earth would my food be drugged…