The moment caught and held, and again, I saw the depths of Thea Hughes. Miles instead of minutes.
“Jim?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re staring at me.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I don’t mind being stared at by you. You have kind eyes.”
Déjà vu to the fucking extreme.
I felt my skin burn hot and redirected my own damn self away from her. I craned a little lower to read one of the word chains comprising a slope of her pyramid.
Carried buried bury born torn mourn moan loan alone lone lonely lonely lonely
“What do these mean?” I asked, tapping a finger over the words. “If you don’t mind…?”
Thea cocked her head at the words as if they were foreign to her. “I don’t know. I wrote them before the accident. Two years ago.”
“You drew this two years ago?” I felt I was on shaky ground, testing the limits of her understanding and possibly setting her off.
She nodded. “I must have. But now that I’m back, I can finish it.”
“Okay,” I said.
Thea’s brows furrowed, and she tucked a lock of blond hair behind her ear as if puzzled by her own words. “It sounds strange, doesn’t it? I’ve been away for a long time.”
“It’s what happened.”
Her smile was grateful. “That’s a good way to put it. I feel like…”
“Like what?”
“Like there’s more to it, but whenever I try to remember more, there’s nothing. I don’t even remember how I got here, to this table. With you.”
I had no words that could help her understand. I hardly understood her situation myself.
“But I know the doctors are working on my case,” she said. “I’ll let them worry about it. I’m just happy to be back.”
“Me too.”
Thea’s smile grew more brilliant, and she picked up her ballpoint pen again. “Tell me about yourself, Jim. And sit down, for crying out loud. You’re hovering.”
I glanced around for Alonzo, but he was nowhere in sight. I sat down across from Thea, telling myself I was only doing my job.
“That’s better,” Thea said, beaming. “What do you do?”
“I’m an orderly.”
“Oh, yeah? Where at?”
Alonzo might tear me a new one for talking to Thea mere seconds after telling me not to fuck up and say the wrong thing. The rising anxiety brought out the damn stutter.
“At the B-B-Blue Ridge Sanitarium.”
Shit.
Thea glanced sharply at me, then her gaze softened. “Do you have a stutter, Jim?”
No one had asked me in years, I’d kept it hidden so well. Humiliation dug deep claws into me as I inhaled and exhaled. “Sometimes. It shows up when I get n-nervous. Or pissed off.”
“You don’t look pissed off.” Her brows rose and her smile turned sly. “Do I make you nervous?”
Christ, was she flirting with me?
Thea patted my hand. “Don’t be. I don’t bite… hard.”
A flush of heat on my skin where her soft fingers touched me quickly became a jolt that surged through my arm, my spine, down to my groin.
She’s a resident, for fuck’s sake.
I gently pulled my hand away.
“I heard that line somewhere. A movie, maybe.” She cocked her head. “You don’t talk much, do you?”
“Not much.”
“Because of the stutter?”
I nodded.
“My sister says I never shut up.” She laughed and shrugged. “Guilty as charged. I say what I mean because life’s too short, right?”
Now she leaned closer to me. The scent of plain, industrial soap wafted from her warm skin.
“I’m just going to come out and say I have a feeling your stutter is not the most interesting thing about you, Jim Whelan.”
I stared. No one had said anything like that to me before. This girl was a magnet of push and pull—drawing me in, though I had to keep a professional distance. She was direct as hell but smiled at me as if there was a secret between us that only we knew. She was here, but any minute now, she’d be gone.
And this moment, right here, right now, never happened.
I cleared my throat. “I wouldn’t call it interesting.”
Thea rested her chin on her hand. “Did you have a hard time with it growing up?”
“You could say that.”
“I’m sorry. You probably don’t want to talk about it. I only brought it up because I don’t care.”
“Don’t care?”
“If you stutter. We all have something, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We do.”
“Don’t let it stop you from talking to me. I like talking to you, Jim.”
“I like talking to you too, Thea.”
Her name came so easy to me. An inhale, and then a soft exhale with my tongue behind my teeth. No effort. No force. No stutter.
The moment grew warm and long, then shattered like glass as the rec room door opened behind me. Thea glanced over my shoulder and her beautiful smile collapsed. Her expression turned blank and her entire body stiffened, her hands trembling slightly. The ballpoint fell out of her fingers and rolled toward the end of the table. When it clattered to the floor, Thea snapped out of the rigidity, and a jubilant smile broke over her face.
“Delia!” She jumped up from her chair and ran past me.
I let out the air trapped in my lungs and got to my feet. A woman in a navy suit with dark hair pulled into a severe bun had walked in with Nurse Rita. Thea threw her arms around the woman’s neck, nearly knocking her off her feet. Delia’s lips pressed together hard. Over Thea’s shoulder, the woman’s eyes met mine and I quickly busied myself gathering Thea’s pen off the floor.
“You’re here,” Thea said. “I’m so happy to see you. How long has it been? Where are Mom and Dad?”
“It’s been two years,” Delia said. “Mom and Dad are on their way.” Her tone was weary, as if she’d answered these questions a thousand times. She probably had.
“Let’s sit,” she said, moving her sister back to the table.
I stood frozen, waiting for Thea to see me and remember we’d been having a conversation. She had to remember. No one had amnesia this badly. Alonzo had told me a bunch of bullshit. This was a prank on the rookie. Initiation for all new orderlies.
Thea finally tore her adoring gaze from her sister and looked at me with polite curiosity.
“Oh, hi,” she said, her gaze darting to my nametag. “Jim? This is my sister, Delia.”
I stared.
Gone. It’s all gone.
Just like our conversation in the foyer the other day. Vanished. Like it never happened.
Delia cleared her throat, a hard sound that yanked my attention. “Can I help you, Jim?”
“Jim Whelan is our newest orderly,” Rita said, moving to stand next to me.
Delia looked me up and down with shrewd, dark eyes. She was the exact opposite of Thea in every way—stiff, cold, and tight-lipped, with a stony dark stare. Though she likely wasn’t more than a few years older than me, something had stolen the vitality out of Delia, so she looked like someone who’d aged a decade in two years.