“Oh my god, my pills!” I exclaimed and ran to my purse. I’d left it on my desk when we left the night before. Inside was my missed dosage. I flipped the container open, dropped them into my mouth, and drown them in water before I swallowed.
“How do I turn it off?” Alexander asked.
I rushed past him to the alarm on my nightstand, slammed my hand down on the top button, and the silence was immediate.
“What does that mean?” Alexander asked, grabbing my arm and pulling me towards him. “What do we need to watch for?”
“I don’t know,” I moaned. “Fuck, I hope I didn’t just cause my own death by being so stupid. My parents said it might cause brain swelling or a stroke.”
“I’ll stay here with you and make sure you’re okay,” Alexander said. “I won’t leave you unless we know you’re going to be okay. I won’t abandon you again, Willow. I won’t let any harm come to you this time.”
He helped me undress, taking in my body with the cold, clinical analysis of a medical worker and not a lustful fiancée.
“Do you feel okay?” he asked and helped me towards my bed. “You seem shaky. You’re vibrating.”
“I don’t know,” I replied, slipping into my comfy pajama pants and pulling a Crimson Academy tee-shirt over my head. “I feel weird, but it’s probably the drinking.”
“You should have stopped a couple hours ago,” he said and put the back of his hand on my forehead. “You feel hot.”
“I just need to sleep,” I said, climbing under the blanket. Alexander held it up to pull over me, but then he paused.
“I think there’s something wrong with you,” he said, and his concern was alarming. There was an edge of fear in his voice that sent a shock wave through my head.
I sat up and looked down. “What is it?”
“You’re—” he said, breaking off in mid-sentence. “It’s like you’re glitching. You’re fuzzy around the edges.”
“It’s probably your eyes,” I replied, looking down. But what I saw was horrifying. He was right. There was something wrong with the way I looked like my body was fading in and out. The edge of my body, my skin, it wavered and broke into tiny watery waves of color. I couldn’t focus on it, and my vision grew black as it tunneled towards the center.
“Alexander!” I cried out as the darkness took over. “What’s happening to me?”
The last thing I remembered was the way his arms felt around me, holding me tight as he told me he was going to take care of me.
It felt nice.
And as I lost consciousness, I realized it finally felt right.
* * *
“There she is,”Dr. Norris said in a bright voice as my eyelids pushed up. It was an effort to force them over my eyes so I could finally see the light.
I was in another room, not quite a hospital room but one like the treatment room but with a bed and monitors in it. There were no windows and one tall door with a thin pane of glass at the top of it.
The walls were all white, Norris was wearing white scrubs, and Flora was there, also in white.
“You’re back,” Flora said with a smile. “We’re going to perform a few small tests and then put you in treatment for another couple of hours before we can let Alexander come see you.”
“You have three young men waiting for you,” Norris said, his bushy eyebrows folding into disapproval. “I told Alexander to send the other two away, but he said it was up to you.”
Flora joined his look of disapproval and said, “That’s very unconventional. I wouldn’t be so quick to have your future husband giving you that much freedom.”
“What happened to me?” I asked, ignoring their idiotic advice. They weren’t even telling me that from a place of kindness and concern. They were simply worried that I would upset their previous status quo.
“I think you had a mid-sized seizure,” Norris said. “Alexander indicated that you didn’t take your late-night dose of medication, and this set off a chain reaction in your brain that led to your problem.”
“Is there anything wrong now?” I asked, struggling to sit up, but I couldn’t move. I looked down and realized my body was covered with the familiar metallic sheet, and I was strapped to the bed underneath. I struggled harder to break free, but nothing loosened. “Why can’t I move?”
“Your seizure put you in a dangerous position,” Norris told me. “You were flailing around and were likely going to hurt yourself. We have you strapped down for your own safety.”