Bright cursed and swerved, but that only made him spin out of control.
The front right fender of his cruiser hit the car in front of us that was in the process of turning.
Before we’d started to flip, I witnessed the car in front of us do the same.
And then all I knew was disorientation, pain, and finally, nothing else.
I woke up sometime later, hanging upside down.
My gaze was on the metal grate that used to be separating the back seat from the front seat.
Now, that grate lay on the ground, fully embedded into the dirt so that it stuck up straight as if someone had forced it there.
I blinked, staring at it for a long time.
Then finally, I turned my head, my gaze a little everywhere all at once, trying to take things in.
Where was I, and how did I get where I was?
And, since we were on the whole figuring out hard questions…why couldn’t I remember my own name?
“Simi!” I heard someone calling, but I didn’t turn toward the sound of the tortured voice.
Instead, I started to count the holes in the grate in front of me.
I was at fifty-two when a man appeared in front of me.
A very large, very sexy, very tattooed man.
A man that looked tortured from where I was hanging upside down.
“Oh, fuck, Sim,” he growled as he dropped to his knees beside me. “Are you okay?”
Was I okay?
That was a great question.
One I didn’t have an answer to.
“I don’t know,” I admitted to the sexy man. “I do know that this is quite disorienting. Can you cut me loose from this seat belt?”
He was nodding before I’d even finished the question.
“Simi!” I heard that name called again.
I twisted to find another handsome man dropping down into the dirt beside the first man, this one in handcuffs.
“Oh, fuck. You’re bleeding!” he cried out.
Was I?
It was more than obvious that I was this “Simi” person, too. Both men were looking at me as they bombarded me with a ton of questions, a lot of which I didn’t have an answer to at the moment.
“Yes,” I paused. “I think that’s why my face feels wet.”
“The car around her is destroyed,” the second man said. “How the fuck is she going to get out of this?”
I wished I had an answer to that.
I also wished that I wasn’t hanging upside down.
“The ambulance is coming,” I heard someone say. But my head wouldn’t turn far enough in that direction to see who it’d been. “They’ll cut her out when they get here.”
“Who is that?” I wondered.
The man in beige nicely came into my line of sight, and I saw his gold badge on his shirt.
I squinted my eyes to try to see past the blood.
“Don’t touch her,” the first man ordered when the second man reached out to try to wipe the blood free. “I don’t want to fuck her up.”
“The sheriff is fucked,” I heard someone say. “He’s saying that she attacked him.”
The first man rolled his eyes so hard that I was surprised he wasn’t dizzy afterward.
“There’s no fuckin’ way on earth that she attacked him,” the second man said. “Not to mention there was a fuckin’ grate between them.” He paused. “There’s still a fuckin’ grate between them!”
That’s when I looked beyond the grate to see that there was half an SUV on its side in front of that grate as if some great force had taken it in its hands and ripped it clean down the middle.
“He’s losing his shit,” the deputy with us said. “He needs to have his head evaluated.”
“Agreed,” the first man said. “Why are you looking at us so oddly?”
I blinked. “Why would you think that?”
Other than I was?
And who the hell was this man? He was awfully attentive and persistent…and he paid a lot of attention to me. In a way that made my heart rate skyrocket.
He knew me. I knew him.
But we knew each other in ways that I knew weren’t completely platonic.
Was he my boyfriend?
A loud brrrrerrrup announced the ambulance’s arrival, and then everyone was pushed out of the way as I was not only cut from the vehicle I was hanging from but then placed onto the gurney next to it.
Seconds after I made it onto the gurney, I was rolling right out.
They put me into the ambulance, but since there were four medics on the truck, they wouldn’t allow anyone to ride with me.
But as soon as I got into the ambulance, the bright lights above me made my eyes hurt and my head throb, so I closed them.
And didn’t reopen them again until there was a man standing over me in a white coat, announcing that he was a doctor.
“How are you, Ms. Singh?” he asked me.
How was I? I guess I was alive. There was always that, right?
“Good,” I murmured instead of voicing my entire inner monologue.
“Do you know where you are?” he asked.
By deductive reasoning, based solely on what was in front of me and around me, and him being in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck, I could accurately guess. “Hospital.”
He nodded, then someone handed him a sheet of paper.
“Your pregnancy, Ms. Singh,” he said. “Do you know how far along you are?”
I opened my mouth and then closed it.
Pregnant? Me?
What?
“Um, no,” I answered, hoping to hide my astonishment.
I wasn’t sure why I felt that needed to be kept hidden, but I chose to do it. To pretend that everything was okay.
“All right then,” he nodded. “That changes what we’re about to…”
I closed my eyes again as something cold and soothing rolled through my veins.
When I next opened them, I was in a quiet room, and there were no harsh lights above me.
A hospital room.
With two men sitting next to me.
The same two men from earlier in the woods were talking quietly at my bedside.
One man next to me with his hip leaning against the side of my bed, so close to me that he could reach out and touch me if he wanted to. The other was across the room, next to the windows, also standing.
I must’ve made a move of some sort because the man at my bedside shifted, then looked down at me with his blue eyes shining.
“You’re awake,” he said, stating the obvious.
I studied his face hard as if only studying it would help me remember who he was to me.
I sensed that he was someone important, though. No memories required.
“You’re looking at me like you don’t know who I am, like you’re trying to figure it out…” he trailed off. “Simi?”
Our conversation from earlier, when I’d woken up in that wreckage, came back to me.
“What are you…” the second man said. “Do you think she doesn’t know who we are?”
My eyes must’ve given me away because the first man said, “You really don’t remember. Do the nurses and doctors know you don’t remember?”
I bit my lip before saying, “Not exactly.”
“Fuck,” the second man said.
“So, do you want to help me out by putting names to your faces? Or should I just keep calling y’all First Man and Second Man?” I wondered aloud.