Then he moved, bending down to gather me up in his arms.
He didn’t do it gently.
Didn’t try to handle me with care.
Which satisfied me, even with the spear of pain that radiated from my ankle upward. I welcomed the pain. It meant I must’ve been alive.
Was I happy about that?
His jacket smelled like leather.
Smoke.
He was still wearing it, hadn’t covered me from the biting cold creeping in with the pain.
Branches crunched underneath his steady, purposeful step. He wasn’t rushing, but he wasn’t dawdling either.
He was looking straight ahead, not even glancing at me. Then again, a wandering eye and mind was what got me here in the first place, so I should’ve been glad he was keeping his attention on not tripping.
Not that this was a man that would trip over anything.
He barely even stuttered a step carrying a fully-grown woman through the forest. To be fair, this woman was most definitely underweight and this guy had arms like tree trunks.
I only got the view of his neck. Chin. Upward.
My eyes were still full of that grit. Mind cloudy with pain, disorientation. It was frustrating, that I could tell he had the shape of a man, a strong one, but I couldn’t decipher any features.
It frustrated me even more that this was happening at all. Here I was, living up to every fucking stereotype. The woman lost in the woods, being carried to safety by a man. I may as well have been wearing a bright red hood. Maybe he was really a wolf underneath.
“Saint,” the man spoke abruptly.
“What?”
“My name.”
“Saint,” I repeated. “You seem like more of a sinner to me.”
He grunted in what I thought might’ve been agreement.
We walked in silence for a little while longer. I didn’t know how long it would take to get to where we were going. I didn’t know where we were going.
“You told me your name,” I blurted.
Again, he didn’t look down. Didn’t answer either.
“Does that mean you’re going to kill me?” My voice held no panic, no pleading, just curiosity. I had been accepting of the fact that Mother Nature was about to kill me, what was the difference if it were a man?
I didn’t remember passing out.
No one remembers passing out.
It’s a weak plot device—one I’d used many times—saying something along the lines of “and then I passed out.” Fade to black. New chapter. New scene. New point of view.
That’s not how it worked.
You don’t remember the exact moment. Everything is a jumble of sounds, images, confusion. You’re not quite sure about what’s real or what’s not.
It’s like when you lay down for a nap at two in the afternoon and you wake up in the middle of the night, wondering what year it was and if you’d slept through the apocalypse and you were the last person on earth.
Which was what I was wondering right now.
I was lying down.
The room smelled like cleaning products. Perfume.
He hadn’t killed me.
He’d taken me to what I guessed was a doctor’s office and the doctor was a woman.
I felt like shit.
What else did I expect to feel?
But I was somewhere where they store narcotics. Where was my cotton mouth, the floating feeling morphine was meant to give me?
“You’re awake.”
I jerked at the noise. The world was not yet in focus and I had no instincts to grasp on to. I didn’t even know there was anyone in the room. In addition to that, I had no idea where I was.
But using logic, I would say I was in some kind of medical facility. That thought was reinforced by the woman in a white coat and a friendly smile coming to stand beside my bed.
Whenever I first met a person, a word always came to my mind. It was different with every person, obviously. It was my first impression of someone, all packaged into a single word. Their appearance, their clothes, whether their eyes smiled with their mouth, whether they walked slow or fast, shook my hand, or just nodded.
It was a culmination of it all.
As a writer, I understood this quirk now as part of my weird creative brain, but I had been doing it ever since I could remember.
This doctor, her word was Escape. That’s what I thought about her. Whether she was looking for escape, or offered escape, I didn’t know. The words didn’t always make sense, and obviously I never uttered them, but they were just there, always, until I got to know them better and the words either faded into obscurity or strengthened.
She wasn’t pretty.
She didn’t try to be either. Her skin was bare of makeup. Pale in a way a lot of people around here tended to be, low sunlight hours and all that. Her features were spread just a little too far out on her face, even with it scrunched up slightly like it was right now.
“You gave us a little start there,” she said, voice husky, sultry. Somehow that tied it together, her pale face, odd features, dark hair. She still wasn’t beautiful, but interesting.
Probably an odd thing to notice about someone at this juncture of my life, but that was me—odd and obsessed with appearance.
“Us?”
The doctor nodded to the corner of the room.
My eyes followed her nod. Slower. Even moving my eyeballs seemed like an effort. How I hadn’t noticed him first was beyond me. But then again, as big of a presence he was, if he didn’t want you to see him, then you weren’t going to see him.
Or maybe I was on some weird drugs.
He didn’t speak, didn’t ask me how I was feeling, demand payment for my rescue, nothing. Just stared.
It would’ve unnerved a lot of people. Especially when they were waking up after almost dying. But I was not a lot of people. And even though my instincts were indeed rusty, I was not about to blanche at his stare. No matter how penetrating.
His eyes were vibrant green. Forest green. Apt, since this forest damn near killed me and this man looked much like he could do the same.
“Your ankle isn’t broken,” the doctor said, stepping into my field of vision. “But you’ve got a pretty nasty sprain. You have a case of mild hypothermia, but I don’t see any complications from a young, otherwise healthy woman.”
“Well, luckily, I’m only mentally unhealthy,” I said, my voice little more than a rasp. I tried to push myself up in the bed, uncomfortable with the power dynamics just lying here. It was too vulnerable.
The process itself was not easy. And with a sharp look to the doctor that moved to help me, it was something I did alone.
I wasn’t used to my body feeling weak. The entire reason I trained as hard as I did at the gym five times a week was to turn my body into something other than an object men could gaze at, take if they thought they were strong enough. Sure, my insane diet and obsession with my weight made it so there were limits to my strength, but I was no weakling either.
Until right now.
My stomach curled with that fact. Having an audience for it.
“I’m Carrie.”
The doctor spoke just as I was contemplating whether I was going to vomit or not.
Carrie. A cheerful, ridiculous name that was made famous by a show both Katy and I despised and did nothing for women of New York or women in general.
“I’m the town doctor,” she continued when I didn’t say anything.