Reaction (20 page)

Probably because I wasn’t responding, Nick spoke up, “You remember Mayra Jones, our Creative Writing professor?”

My mind was elsewhere. It was more than not liking her because of her flirtations with Nick, though. She bothered me, but I couldn’t pinpoint why. Like a little itch in the middle of my back that I couldn’t get to. When I got an elbow from Liz, I snapped out of it. “Oh, um, sorry. Yeah, hi. Good to see you again.”

“Is everything okay here,” Mayra asked. “I thought I heard someone say there was a fight going on. Nick?”

“No, Professor. Everything’s fine. We were just leaving.”

I didn’t hear Mayra’s response because I was wondering why Nick had called her professor. Was she a teacher now?

“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “But are you a teacher here now?” She was definitely dressed like one. But how does someone go from annoying student to Professor in a couple of years? Something didn’t mesh.

Mayra looked at me like I had two heads. “Am I a teacher here now? I’ve always taught here—”

“Heather,” Nick interrupted, “Don’t you remember? She taught us both semesters of our Creative Writing class.”

Everyone was waiting. Liz was looking up at me with little wide eyes, Creed was across from me, waiting for his childhood friend to speak up, Peter was looking at me with arched eyebrows as if to say it was my turn to speak, Paige…well she wasn’t really looking at me, but she was waiting too, Mayra was looking, and Nick—believe it or not—looked more confused than anyone.

“You mean the Creative Writing class that Teacher Jerry taught?” I questioned, beginning to clench the edges of my jacket.

“Who’s Teacher Jerry?”

Chapter 9

I dropped my books and sprinted toward his office. I could hear the commotion behind me, Liz yelling my name, Creed too; footsteps trailed after me. But all I cared about was Professor.

When I reached the grassy hill where I took my naps, I froze. For a moment there was nothing secure in the world.

Where had his white office gone? Where had they moved it? Who was playing the joke?

“Heather,” I heard Nick from behind me. “What are you doing?”

“It was there yesterday,” I told him, pointing across the hill at nothing but wide-open space.

“What was?” Creed asked out of breath, catching up to us, with Liz right behind him.

“Professor’s office,” I told them. “I swear.” I put my hands over my face. I was going insane. “Nick,” I turned to him, pleading with my face for him to put my mind at ease. “Our Creative Writing teacher. Professor Jerry. He was our teacher. Not Mayra. Mayra was a student. She was a student in our class.”

His head did exactly what I hoped it wouldn’t, it shook, and mine suddenly filled with a roaring noise.

“How is that possible,” I said to myself, with them listening in. Did he really not remember Teacher Jerry? “Then where is Teacher Jerry?”

“Heath?” Creed moved near me and took my hand. “Who’s Jerry?” He rubbed my hand inside his. “Is he a friend?”

The look on Creed’s face scared me, which must have meant the look on my face had scared him. I shifted that same look to Nick, begging him to know the answer to Creed’s question.

The one thing in my life that had always been certain was my rationale. If I wasn’t the most patient or even-tempered girl, I was always logical, even after the coma.

But here, now, there was suddenly two of me. The “me” standing on the grass going through the experience, and the “me” that was watching the experience from a ways away, trying to make sense of what was happening.

All at once, reality slammed into me, so hard that my lungs squeezed and I thought I might faint.

“She’s insane,” I heard Paige say. And then she laughed from a long, swirling tunnel away. She stopped at a quiet murmur from Nick, turning toward him with a shrugging glance. I watched from afar as it unfolded in slow motion.

Could I tell them to go away and leave me alone to figure this out? I was making a loon of myself. Even so, I was sensible enough to stop talking. At least I would appear to be half sane. If this
was
really happening, I would work it out in my own mind and make sense of it, at least to myself. But how could Teacher Jerry not be real? All our conversations, his understanding, his twinkly smile and wise old eyes….

At some point I must have sat down because I felt someone pick me up.
Leave me alone
, I wanted to say, but then I guess I didn’t want to say it because nothing came out. What I really wanted was my bed. I was exhausted.

Home. I was home on my couch, cuddled like a child in Nick’s embrace. I had no idea why I was crying so hard, other than it kind of made me feel like I was leaping into a cool lake on a scorching day, cleansed and revitalized. I knew he’d carried me from my little grassy hill into the car and taken me home. And here we were.

The deep, dry sound of his voice soothed the dull ache inside; sensual words that closed every space between us.

“Closer,” he urged, and I adjusted in his lap, wrapping my arms tightly around him. I held on as if I were possessed. His hands massaged my back, lulling my sobs away.

Eventually I no longer felt like I was sucking breaths through a small straw. My cries turned into small, occasional, recovering hiccups.

He turned my head and dropped his lips to my cheek, wiping my tears away with calm, chaste kisses.

“Why are you here?” my thoughts turned to words. I couldn’t imagine what he must be thinking.

His lips kissed my swollen eyes, and the side of my eyebrow. I never would have suspected, at such a dismal moment, that I would have wanted this. But his lips were so aware, attentive, and affectionate.

“Because,” he whispered as he moved his lips back to my cheek and kissed me there.

My defenses were completely down, and maybe that’s why his gestures of affection were slowly shifting my mood. It seemed out of place to feel pleasure in his advances when I’d just had an out-of-body, and just recently decided to stay out-of-touch with him. But maybe both of those reasons were why it felt so ruthlessly right. I clung to the way my body warmed with the each gentle press of his lips.

“Because,” he continued, “I need you so bad that I ache with it.” He didn’t pause for a moment as he moved his lips toward mine, kissing half of my mouth in a soft petition. And nothing, nothing could have made me resist. Something otherworldly, basic and elemental, turned my lips into his.

It was the first time he kissed me fully, and I felt every nerve in my lips pulsate. His mouth stayed where it was, purposeful and pressing, warm and supple, breathing air and life back into me, sending my body soaring.

I tried not to think of what happened earlier. Let my thoughts fly away with the rest of me, I told myself. There was nothing but him. I needed him, and he’d just said he needed me….

“Even though I’m crazy?” I asked between kisses.

He chuckled against my lips and then lightly kissed them. I opened my eyes and saw a mocking curve of a smile. “What’s new? You’ve always been crazy.”

Crazy, maybe. Psychotic, no.

“I’ve done research,” he said, sweeping his lips across my cheekbone. “If dreaming up an imaginary teacher is your worst side effect, your doing pretty well.”

The way he trivialized my problems was therapeutic. But the real therapy came in his touch. He was my very own personal, prescription drug. His hands gathered me into him, our arms tangling together as his mouth again began to drag over mine, sensual and deliberate, and so potent that it slowed my thoughts, exactly what I wanted it to do.

He seemed to know precisely when my brain clicked off because his kisses lost all subtlety. A blistering flame rocked through me as his mouth worked mine in a greedy, savage way. He knew exactly what I needed, how to awaken my body, as if I were instructing him aloud. Kiss me here, now there, longer, harder. He picked me up and straddled me onto him, capturing my mouth again with a fierceness that engulfed me like a heat. My lips were throbbing from the pressure, swollen from the force of his.

If this was paradise, I wanted to bask in it forever.

And he was correct at the banquet, he knew just how to make me moan. Before long he was pushing me down to the couch, taking me in a crushing embrace. His hands eagerly wandered lower down my back, and then he pressed my body into his. The intimate moment was getting heavy.

He groaned. “We have to stop.”

“Why?”

“For one, I’m uncontrollably aroused.”

Being wrapped around his solid, heated body was ecstatically familiar, and that must have been why I spoke my mind. “Do we have to?”

A long, recovering breath pulled from Nick’s chest. “Heather, if we keep going…I don’t want to do something we might regret.”

We lay fused together for a few more moments, breathing each other’s air, extending our kisses till the last possible tipping point. It wasn’t near long enough.

When the blanket of his warmth lifted off, my body rebelled, shivering.

“I called Doctor Adams,” he said while walking into the kitchen. “You have an appointment to see him tonight.”

“Yeah, I know. I heard you talking to him earlier.” It took a moment to return from wonderland and remember where I was. My little lamp in the corner, my jewelry on the round table, the couch vinyl underneath my hands, all helped remind me. “Where is everyone?’

“What?”

“Creed and Liz? Are they freaking out?”

“They know you’re okay. That’s what matters.” He walked out of my little kitchen biting on a piece of licorice. “I better leave so you can get to your appointment, and I can cool off.”

His words made me smile inside. “Do you need me to drive you home?”

“No, my car’s outside.”

Was it happening again? Another reaction? Because I was almost certain we drove in my car. “I could have sworn we rode in my car,” I spoke up. No, I was positive. I remembered it took a few tries to get her to start.

“We did.” He was standing in front of me now, calling for my hands. I placed them in his and he lifted me up, moving the long piece of licorice to the side of his mouth so he could kiss my forehead. “Paige dropped off my car here, she had a friend follow her and take her home.”

“Paige drove your car here?”

“Whatever qualities she lacks, loyalty isn’t one of them.”

“Shouldn’t you have gone back with her?”

“I’m not with her, Heather. The engagement is on hold for now. I told her a few days ago that I needed a break. I need to spend time with you. It’s useless to fight it.

“And she deserves my honesty.”

*******

“You’ve heard of the expression ‘In my mind’s eye’?” Doc asked. “That’s the best way I can describe it. It was in your mind’s eye that you were functioning from.”

“I get the part about Professor being a part of my reflection-dreams. It’s like any dream where you make up a supporting cast.”

“Exactly,” Doc agreed.

“But how did I make him part of my reality? How could I have made that mistake? I don’t think a sane person’s brain would have allowed that.”

“You are not insane; you are very normal. Though it probably feels to you like a psychological complication, it’s not, unless of course you make it one. It’s more physiological. And once the brain snaps back into full working mode, that’s really all it takes. It’s all part of the process of your recovery.”

“But how did it happen to begin with?”

“Let me explain it to you in terms of physiology. Your accident left you with some intracranial hemorrhaging and damage to your cerebellum, which is a part of your brain in the back area of your head.” He reached out and briefly patted my scar. “Without getting too technical, the back of the brain relays information between the peripheral nerves and the spinal chord to the upper areas of the brain. Now, the cerebellum, in particular, works a little different than other areas of the brain. The signals in that area are unidirectional, or what we call ‘feed forward’. It’s a lot like reflexes. You don’t have to think in reflexive responses. If your knee is hit in
the lower, patella area, it automatically contracts. Same with information that moves through the cerebellum. It bypasses the thinking part and causes an automatic response.

“Reactions have a similar effect on the body. Normally, when you are dreaming, the thoughts are forwarded to your brain, and then when you wake up, your brain forwards back the message that those thoughts were only dreams. A reaction happens when there’s a blockage in that system, in this case stemming from the damage to your cerebellum, triggering that area. The dreams you had and continued to have about a particular friendship, forwarded to your brain, but your brain never responded back that the thoughts were only that, thoughts.

“This isn’t exclusive to brain complications in PRS comas, either. Haven’t you ever remembered something about your past, and then one day you couldn’t decide if it was a dream or if it really happened? On a small scale, it’s the same thing. Everyone has brain glitches. Your coma triggered one on a larger scale. But as far as long-term effects go, it’s not that big of a deal.”