Page 99 of Until You Found Me

“Just put her in there with him. They’re both gonna hurt themselves. I hate this damn shift,” someone mutters.

Logan’s precariously close to flopping right off the bed onto the floor like a struggling fish, so he can drag his way over to Tessa when a bed is wheeled into his room. He gets a stern warning not to stress her, whatever the hell that means, or they’ll be separated again for their own good.

The staff are just doing their job, but he’s ready to punch someone’s teeth out at the sight of her hands strapped to the safety bars.

“Do not unstrap her. She’s having a bad reaction. She needs to be coherent first, or she’ll run through this building and bleed out from that open wound. Do you understand?” he’s told.

An alarm sounds even further down the hall before he can agree and the nurses disappear to tend to someone in even worse condition.

He’s never seen Tessa so distraught. Noteven when he first found her on the road. She is gasping for breath like water fills her lungs even though she’s safe and dry beside him. His name is a desperate plea for help while her arms twist in the fabric shackles, keeping her from hurting herself.

“It’s me, it’s me, I’m here,” he says quickly, reaching between the two beds to take her hand in his own, but she hardly hears him. “You’re at the hospital, you’re safe. You gave me your kidney, remember?”

“I can’t breathe,” she gasps. “Help! Help me! Logan!”

He doesn’t know how to help her, or why she’s stuck in this memory. The effects of the medication still have him feeling sluggish and scrambled, but her reaction is far worse.

“Squeeze my hand, sweetheart.” He feathers a thumb across her knuckles, wincing at the raw skin under the strap. “He’s not here. It’s just me and you.”

“I see his face, he’s holding me down.”

“He’s dead. Gone over the cliff, remember?”

“Then I’m on the floor in the living room and he’s strangling me. It hurts, I can’t breathe. I can’t get him off me. I feel sick. My brain won’t work, oh god…Logan!”

“Look at me.” She hasn’t locked eyes with him once, too lost in her head, glazed over with drugs. He squeezes her hand a little harder, tugging at it until she turns her head to face him.

“Are you with me?” he whispers.

It takes longer than he hoped it would. Her pupils repeatedly dilate and contract, sending shivers down his spine. Looks far too much like what could have happened the day her husband tried to kill her, but then her focus shifts, and recognition finally blooms.

She exhales hard with an audible whoosh of relief. “Are you okay?”

“Am I okay?” He half chuckles at her sudden worry for him. “Yeah, yeah I’m good. You know where you are?”

She looks around for a moment, noticing that she can’t move her arms, and her heart rate monitor spikes all over again.

“I’ll take them off. Hold on.” He ignores the instructions from the nurses. There’s not a chance in hell he can leave her tied up. She seems more lucid now, less likely to run off or hurt herself, so he pops the buckle on the closest one and she does the other. “You were having a hard time coming out of the anesthesia. They didn’t want you hurting yourself.”

“I’m at the hospital,” she replies evenly.

“Mhmm.”

“My brain is broken, Logan. All the thoughts are suctioning to each other. Pulling at each other. The puzzle pieces are in a blender.”

“It’s the drugs. You’ll feel better soon.”

“Will I? Or will the bees in my lungs live there forever? They’re giving me little hugs under my skin.”

Oh, she’s definitely reacting to the meds way worse than he is. She shivers like it’s below zero in this heated room. The bed shakes hard and the guard rails clatter against the frame, so he lets go of her hand to drag up a blanket to her shoulders.

She gasps as if he walked out the door and left, flailing an arm out to find him again so he laces their fingers together at a semi-awkward angle.

“He killed me. Wanted it to look like I did it myself, but I woke up and then—” She rolls her head against the pillow to face him. “Are we dead together?”

“No, we’re alive together.”

The pills, the bathtub, the struggle that came after.Everything she told him through fractured recollections is coming together. He has a feeling that he’ll know every detail of what happened sooner rather than later, but right now isn’t the time for it. He’s only glad that asshole is at the bottom of the cliff already or he’d put him there again.

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