A Breath of Eyre (22 page)

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Authors: Eve Marie Mont

BOOK: A Breath of Eyre
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I fought madly against the current, swimming with all of my strength away from the open sea that threatened to drown me. I swam and swam toward that single voice, arms burning, breath ragged, until I felt certain I was going to make it. Just a little farther. My mother’s advice came to me again from across the vast distance of that other shore:
You are far stronger than you believe.
It gave me the strength to keep swimming, to fight against the current until a hand reached out for me.
I gripped this hand and let it pull me to safety. A halo of light shone behind the one who had saved me.
I heard the voice again, repeating my name. My true name.
Emma
.
PART 5
C
HAPTER
22
I
woke with my hand inside someone else’s. “Emma?” a familiar voice said. “Emma, wake up.”
I knew I was in a hospital before I even opened my eyes. There is a smell particular to hospitals, a mixture of disinfectant and sterilizer with an undercurrent of illness. But then a warm face came down toward mine, and I smelled something else. Citrus and spice. The beach at nighttime. I peeled my eyes open, and they fell on Gray’s face, blurry at first and surrounded by a circle of light, then clear and miraculous—his haunted eyes and usually sarcastic lip, now grim with worry.
“Emma?” he said when he saw my eyes open, felt my hand stir beneath his. His voice was deep and trembling.
“Gray,” I mumbled. I could speak! He leaned over and touched my face tenderly. “Where am I?”
“Hopkins General.” They’d taken me to the local hospital this time, not the children’s hospital in Boston. That was a good sign.
“What happened?” I asked, my voice weak.
“There was a fire. The stables. I found you, but you wouldn’t wake up.”
“How long?” I muttered. “How long was I out?”
“Three days.”
Only three days. Not three weeks. “And the horses? Curry?” I said, trying to sit up and nearly falling out of the bed.
“Calm down,” he said. “They’re fine. They all escaped, but they were rounded up and put in temporary housing. You saved them. You saved them all.”
I slumped back down on my pillow, relieved. Gray stood up and moved toward the door.
“No!” I said. “Don’t go.”
“I’m just getting the doctor. I’ll be right back, I promise.” He came back and squeezed my arm. The pressure was so reassuring it warmed my entire body.
I tried moving my arms, my legs, my head. They all responded obediently. After a few moments, Gray returned with a doctor I didn’t recognize. He was young and mild-looking, and he smiled as soon as he saw me.
“Well, hello,” he said. “I’m Dr. Richter.” I watched as my own hand rose to meet his. “Oh, good,” he said. “Everything seems to be in working order.”
“What’s wrong with me?” I said. “Why do I keep blacking out?”
“We’re not sure yet,” the doctor said. “We spoke to your doctor at Children’s Hospital. She says it may be a residual effect of the lightning strike. The fact is, we just don’t know that much about lightning-strike survivors. We’re going to have to run a few more tests.”
“Great,” I said sarcastically.
The doctor laughed. “Well, you’re definitely lucid,” he said.
Gray returned to my side, and I tried to sit up again. “Is it okay if I raise the bed?”
“That should be fine,” the doctor said. Gray used the buttons on my bed to raise me up halfway.
“Where’s my dad?” I asked.
“I told him I’d stay with you,” Gray said. “He hadn’t slept in two days. And it’s after midnight.”
I remembered the nurses at Children’s Hospital being kind of strict about visiting hours. “Aren’t visiting hours over?” I asked him.
“What, you want me to go home?” Gray said.
“No, I just—”
“Sometimes we allow parents, spouses, and significant others to stay after visiting hours,” the doctor said. “If they promise to behave.” He winked at Gray. “I’m going to go call your parents and tell them the good news. You two hang tight.”
He left the room, and Gray leaned in close. “I had to tell them I was your boyfriend. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No,” I said. How could I mind? And then because it was all so astonishing and wonderful, I laughed. The sensation felt utterly foreign to me. I realized I had not laughed much during the past few weeks.
Thornfield had not been a happy place. I recalled Rochester’s proposal, the shopping trip to Millcote, the discovery of my mother in the attic, our escape to the moors, the fire at Thornfield. It all felt like it had taken place over many weeks, but Gray said it had only been three days. The expression on Gray’s face was entirely new to me. If I had to describe it, I’d say it was grateful. I felt grateful, too.
“Your voice pulled me out,” I said, feeling woozy.
“What?”
“I heard you calling my name,” I said. “While I was under, you were saying my name, weren’t you?” He bit his cheek, and then Gray Newman actually blushed. “It worked,” I said. “I could hear you somehow. I swam toward your voice.”
“You swam toward my voice? What are you talking about, Emma?”
“Nothing. Never mind. I’m a little out of it.” Because that was impossible, right? I couldn’t have heard Gray’s voice while I was unconscious. And yet, I was pretty sure I had.
“You sure you’re okay?” he said. “You did bump your head pretty bad.”
“I’m fine.” I lifted my hand to my temple and felt the bandage that covered my wound. “I’ve really only been here for three days?”
“Yep.”
“It felt like so much longer.”
He stared into my eyes, a crease forming over his brow. “I know. I’ve been here every night.”
I fell silent. Gray Newman had kept vigil by my bedside for three nights in a row? “Why?” I said.
“I was worried about you. After you left the dance that night, I went down to the stables and found you passed out on the ground.”
“What happened with Elise?”
“Elise?”
“And that guy Dan? Who is he? And what happened with ... ?” I desperately wanted to ask him all these questions, to try and understand the events of that night, but I felt so tired I could barely hold my head up.
“Relax,” he said, taking my hand in his. “We can talk about all this later.”
I allowed myself to fall back against the pillow while Gray stretched his hand over my forehead, gently pushing some hair off my face. I must have drifted back to sleep because when I opened my eyes, my father and Barbara were there. My dad had circles under his eyes, and his hair was sticking up in all directions.
“Emma,” he cried, running to my side and hugging me.
Barbara was crying, too. “Oh, sweetie, we were so worried.”
“Dad, it’s okay. I’m okay.”
“You can talk!” he said. “Oh, thank God.”
He kept saying my name over and over again while Barbara stood next to him looking overwrought. After about ten minutes, Gray said he was going to leave. I didn’t want him to, but I’m sure he felt awkward standing there while my parents showered me with attention. We wouldn’t be able to talk anymore anyway.
As he was about to leave, I called his name, and he stopped in the doorway. “Thank you,” I said. “For everything.”
He smiled modestly. “You’re welcome, Emma.” He lingered for a moment, and I tried to memorize the look in his eyes, the sound of his voice when he’d said my name. And then he was gone.
Dr. Richter returned the next day, and I had to undergo another battery of tests. Just like last time, my tests came back normal. He said they wanted to keep me a few days longer for observation, but if all went well, I’d be released by the weekend.
Gray visited several nights that week, and he always brought games for us to play—Battleship and Boggle, Mastermind and Sorry. A strange hush came over the hospital at night. Hardly any doctors and nurses were bustling around, the lights in the hallway were dim, and it felt almost intimate in the room, like the normal rules of life no longer applied.
On Friday night, Gray set up his laptop with some good music (he’d complained earlier about the crappy AM-FM radio in the room), and he took out some playing cards for poker. I’d never played poker before, but Gray taught me the rules for five-card stud and daytime and nighttime baseball.
“In daytime baseball, most of your cards are out in the open for your opponent to see,” he said. “But in nighttime, your hand is only revealed at the very end. Which do you want to play?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. This seemed like a test. “Daytime,” I said, and he laughed as if he’d expected as much.
“What’s so funny?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“You prefer nighttime baseball, don’t you?”
He flashed a sexy smile. “I don’t like to give my secrets away.” He shuffled dexterously and dealt us three cards each. “Threes and nines are wild,” he said.
“Wild?”
“It means they can be any card you want them to be.”
I studied my hand. Two nines and a king. My lip curled ever so slightly, and I realized I was a terrible poker player already. Gray dealt us each a fourth card, face-up. Mine was an eight; his was a jack.
“Let’s play for questions. The winner gets to ask questions of the loser, and the loser has to answer honestly.”
“Oh, like in Truth or Dare.”
“Exactly. Except it’ll just be Truth. Poker Polygraph.”
He lay down another card for us both. By the third round, Gray’s hand looked pretty pathetic. But he kept raising the bet anyway. We were already up to five questions. When he tried to raise the bet to seven questions, I folded.
Then came time for the reveal. He was grinning, and I didn’t know why. When he fanned his cards out, I didn’t see any discernible pattern. Then I realized that was exactly the point.
“You jerk,” I said. “You have nothing!”
“Yeah, well, sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand,” he said, doing a fairly decent
Cool Hand Luke
impersonation.
“I thought you had something really good.”
“It’s called bluffing, Emma. You should try it some time.”
“I’m terrible at this,” I whined, tossing my cards back at him.
“No, you just have too many tells.”
“Tells?”
“Things you do that give you away. Like, when you got those nines, the right side of your mouth went up, and I knew you had a good hand. Then when I tried to up the stakes, you tugged on your necklace, and I knew you were going to fold.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, you always tug your necklace when you’re nervous.”
“Great, you know everything about me, and I know nothing about you.”
“And now I get to learn even more about you by asking five very personal questions,” he said, raising his eyebrows up and down. He slid his chair very close to my side and rested his arms on the bed. One of his hands brushed mine, and I couldn’t believe how much this thrilled me.
“First question,” he said. “What’s the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to you?”
I only had to think for a moment. “Kissing you when I was five and getting a bloody nose in return.” He snorted an amused
ha!
“Next question?”
His eyes drifted up to the ceiling. “Okay,” he said, “if you could be any inanimate object, what would you be?”
Aside from your T-shirt?
I repressed a smile. “I guess I’d want to be someone’s favorite book.”
“Why?”
“Because I love words. But I also need human companionship. If I were someone’s favorite book, someone might pick me up off the shelf every night and flip through me.”
He laughed a little, and all his features softened like something inside him had just melted. “What book would you want to be?”
“You realize that counts as another question.”
“I know.”
“Jane Eyre,”
I said.
“That’s the book my mom gave you for your birthday, right?” he said.
“You remember?”
“Of course I remember. She made me wrap the present.”
I laughed. “I ended up writing an essay about it for school.”
“I usually hate books I have to read for school.”
“I know what you mean, but this book’s sort of ... special.”
I wanted to tell him about the dream I’d had, to remind him he’d been one of the reasons I’d fought so hard to pull myself out of it, but I didn’t want him to think I was crazy. Gray began playing with the edge of my blanket, twisting a few loose threads in his hand.
“Two more questions, right?” he said.
“We could be here all night.”
“That’s okay. I don’t sleep.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Hey, I’m the one asking the questions here,” he said, leaning back in his chair and putting his arms behind his head in an exaggerated show of relaxation.
“This is a great song,” I said as Coldplay’s “Speed of Sound” came on.
“You like Coldplay?”
“I love them.”
“What other music do you like?”
“If you reach down and grab my bag, you can find my iPod and see for yourself.”
He found my bag on the floor, and I retrieved my iPod and handed it to him, letting him scroll through my songs. He shuffled through the list approvingly. “Barcelona, Embrace, the Perishers, Thirteen Senses,” he said. “Good stuff.”

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