Page 54 of Ours Later

“Please sit on the chair,” the doctor says, his eyes heavy on me as I sit down. “Now, I want to measure how you react to the stimuli I’m going to play on the screen in front of you. Nurse Naylor is going to put electrodes on your head to measure your brain waves. If there’s no sign of the recognition pattern I’m looking for, nothing will happen.”

Nurse Naylor steps into the room with a cart and the items she’ll need for the exercise. She prepares my scalp with a gritty cream and scrubs as I wince but remain still for her. The nurse grunts to herself, but continues working, and the electrodes are soon taped to my scalp.

Honestly, I’d rather her grunt and mutter to herself than call me a graceless and ungrateful whore. This nurse doesn’t like me, and enjoys hurting me.

The dull hum of the machine sounds in the room, and Dr. Kind turns on a projector. I remember the pain connected to this type of “test” and I stiffen slightly as Nurse Naylor’s hands hold me still in the chair.

“Every time we see a recognition pattern that we don’t want to see, there will be a negative response applied,” Dr. Kind says, showing me what appears to be a pen.

However, I know there has to be pain involved if he’s holding it so nonchalantly.

“Hold out your arm,” he commands.

He’s not an alpha. There’s nothing he can do to force me to do as he says, but I do as he says, offering him my inner arm.

“Very good,” he purrs, flicking a button on the pen and pressing it to my skin.

The pain is immediate and my body jolts as I scream. I’m vaguely aware of Riley stepping into the room and the door shutting. He doesn’t say anything though, and my body feels as if it’s on fire. Such a small fucking thing to hurt so much.

“There we go,” Dr. Kind says in a creepy sing-song voice. Pocketing the pen, he picks up the projector’s remote as if he didn’t just fry my nerve endings.

Dropping my arm into my lap, I breathe through the pain. Fuck, the other stun wand shit they’ve used on me didn’t hurt as much as that pen did. I refuse to touch the spot that’s red and angry on my inner arm, I simply force myself to gaze at the projector screen.

I’ve never wanted to get something correct so badly in my entire life. I’m tired of being hurt day in and day out, and for some reason, I’m docile as I wait for the next step.

“Here are rainbow colors,” Dr. Kind says.

I stare at it without anything coming to mind, and the nursegrunts. That must have been enough for the doctor, because he nods and clicks to the next image.

A classroom fills the screen, and I sigh because I miss school. The nurse grunts again, and the doctor clicks the remote again.

I sit until my ass goes numb and my tailbone tingles with pins and needles without complaint as he has me watch his version of a slideshow, without a single zap from his pen.

“Good, good,” he murmurs with a nod. “Let’s move on then.”

A part of me feels as if I shouldn’t have passed this with flying colors, not when they typically torture the fuck out of me. Everything feels wrong as the nurse peels off the tape from the electrodes and scrubs at my scalp.

It continues to feel as if I’m living in an alternate universe day after day at Weeping Willow as I suffer through their tests and therapy, until my mother comes to visit me in the garden outside.

I know what I look like. I’m bald, too thin, and my pants and shirt issued hospital clothing hang from my body.

My mother’s lips thin as she sits across from me, gazing at my appearance with her baby blue eyes, cold and calculating.

“Who is Cooper Thornefield to you, Nina?” she asks.

Why is she asking me that? I haven’t heard that name in years.

There’s a dull sense of deja vu, but I shake my head in confusion.

“My ex step-father,” I murmur, my mind spiralling at such a random question. “Why are you asking me about him? Did you run into him or something?”

“No,” she says coolly. “Did you know that he’s living in Minneapolis?”

“I didn’t,” I say. “Why does that matter to me?”

“I suppose it doesn’t, I’m just making conversation,” she says, shrugging. “I suppose you’ve been here so long that you don’t remember how to do that. We’re going to have to work onit, and you’ll need to attend etiquette classes so you don’t embarrass me.”

“Where will I be that anyone will see me, Mom?” I ask. My skin feels too tight as I sit across from her, my feet in the first pair of shoes in months, even though they’re slippers.

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