Cowboy Villain Damsel Duel

by Ginger Scott

  I’ve felt it coming all day, almost a twitching sensation in my eyelids, like a butterfly breaking out of its cocoon. The feeling so far has only been imagined, but the intensity of it has grown. Every few minutes I begin the process over, and the last few times, I’ve seen rays of pale light break through.

  Concentrate on Justin’s sound.

  Breathe in, breathe out—with him.

  My lungs are full. I am doing this on my own. The machine is gone.

  I realize It’s a series of reminders I need to tell myself. My brain has been tricked so much that it’s not sure what real is anymore. I have to find the things that are different.

  Feel the things that are human.

  Several attempts ago, I realized that making my eyes open first was asking my body to do too much. So, while the butterflies beg me to work hard at my lids, I send every bit of my focus to my right hand. Specifically, my right thumb. Justin fell asleep with our hands woven together. I can feel his pulse, and if I can convince my arm to obey and pass the message down to my hand and then my fingers, I’ll be able to stroke his skin. He’ll feel it, and his response will fuel me.

  “Move your thumb, Dom. Move. Your. Thumb.” My inner voice is demanding, patience growing thin. I’ve been at this for days.

  I yell at my thumb in my mind, begging it to demonstrate its value. “Come on, thumb!” And without warning, it makes a trembling path along the skin on the inside of Justin’s wrist. I feel the rise and fall of a vein, like a speed bump, the noticeable soft spots between bones, and a reactionary jerk from being tickled. He hasn’t woken yet, but he feels me. I need to make it move again, faster this time.

  The tremors are slighter now, and I focus on the pressure I’m applying, tracing my way back over bone, then softness and veins, then bone again. There’s a harder jerk this time, and suddenly his hand leaves mine, gone to be scratched, the sensation compartmentalized by his sleeping thoughts. I’m defeated for a moment, then his hand weaves its way back to its place, and springs creak as if from his weight as he shifts his position on the cot.

  “Dom,” he whispers. His breath is warm on my face. He’s close.

  “I’m here!” The shouting resumes in my head.

  I send my strength back to my thumb. It’s hard to start again, but I feel it on the edge of wanting to move. Justin is patient, and I wonder if he’s staring at my eyes or watching our hands. He’s keeping everything the same, the way I taught him in science. You can’t change the controls, and this thumb—it’s the fucking control.

  Almost a full minute passes. I know because I count in my head—one, Omaha; two, Omaha; three . . .

  And then there’s movement. My thumb makes a rapid, uncontrolled swipe. Justin shifts and grasps my hand.

  “Holy shit!” He responds with the same stroke of his own fingers along my skin. I soak in the sensation of every touch, every cell of my skin firing awake with feeling. My thumb moves again, more naturally this time, and he squeezes me.

  “Yes, I can feel you. Keep fighting. Keep going!”

  More of my fingers begin to twitch.

  Justin kisses the back of my hand and rubs my forearm, as if he’s working whatever magic made its way into my fingertips down my arm and to the rest of me. His lips land on my forehead, and I fight to convince myself to tip my chin up, to open my mouth. None of that happens, but my fingers move more freely, and the motion spreads to my other hand.

  A sound hits my ears, and it’s awful at first, until I realize that the noise, it’s me. My groaning is stifled, as though I’m trapped in some far-off place, trying to break through a dimension. I am trapped, I guess—trapped in my own head.

  “What is it, Dom? Water? Are you in pain? Tell me,” he pleads.

  I force my fingers to flex, and push every bit of my strength up my chest to power my lungs. My scream leaves my mouth at the same time my eyes open, and the reality that hits me feels like a punch in the face. I’m going to vomit.

  I roll to my side and throw up on what I think is the floor. I’m not yet sure what is up and what is down. I do know that leaving the cocoon is a harsh entry. I wonder if this is what it’s like being born.

  “She’s awake! I need someone!” Justin’s left the cot, and he’s in full urgency mode. I’d tell him to give me time, but I still haven’t figured out how to do anything with my mouth other than form grunts and moans.

  It’s night. Either that, or I have no windows in this place and the lights are always off. It remains dark as people rush in; the first bright thing I see is a bulb lit mere inches from my eye. Someone lifts my lids, and someone else sticks sensors to various places on my body. My skin is cold, and I think maybe . . . oh, my God! I’m naked.

  “I’m right here,” Justin says. My body isn’t anything new to him, but this view, it’s not what a girl hopes for.

  “I . . . can . . .” Holy shit, I’m forming words!

  Justin is next to me at the scratching sound of my voice. One hand takes mine, and I feel another run through my hair. “Stay with me, Dom. Your dad is coming. He’s just down the hall, but he’s coming. They went to tell him.”

  Justin’s crying, and I want to reach my hand to his face to feel the wetness on his cheeks. But that’s asking too much right out of the gate. I need to talk, to be heard!

  “I . . . can . . . hear you,” I croak out.

  “Dominica?” My father’s voice booms from the opposite direction. Justin steps back, and I focus on the blurry world around me that slowly grows brighter and more defined. Lights have been turned on, and carts brought in. I think the last number someone shouted out was my blood pressure. At least, I hope it was; one-twenty would be a really high temperature.

  “Daddy,” I say, only half of the word producing sound. My father’s large hand lands on half my face, and the form of his head takes shape. There are dark circles where his eyes and mouth are, and a fuzziness around the big circle; I think that’s his hair. He’s wearing the sweater I bought him for Christmas. It’s the only red thing he owns, and the color strikes my eyes. I fight to lift my arm to touch it, and when I’m able to raise my hand enough to reach him, it falls flat on his chest.

  “Baby girl,” he says through sobs.

  “You hate . . . that sweater,” I breathe out. Talking exhausts me. Though it’s worth it to hear my father’s laugh and feel it rattle inside his chest.

  “I do,” he says, never able to lie. “I thought maybe it would be lucky.”

  I rub my hand slowly along the fabric, searching for the beat of his heart underneath my touch. I can’t find it, but it doesn’t mean he isn’t alive. I see him, and I feel him—he’s alive and so am I.

  “Well, now . . . it’s lucky, so . . . you have to . . . keep it . . . forever,” I joke. He laughs through more tears, and as the doctor on my left backs away, I feel a new hand move to stroke my hair. I turn my head and find warm brown eyes waiting. It’s the second color I see, besides the abrasive red that I forced my father into.

  “Hey,” I hum. My voice is thin, and I worry that it’s changed forever to this weak version of itself. I don’t care. I’ll take it, whatever I have of it. To be able to speak to these men, to say my name out loud. “Dominica.” I test it out.

  “This isn’t a dream. I promise,” Justin says, running the back of his hand down the side of my face. He’s here with my dad, and that they are so close and not at odds is perhaps the greatest “welcome home, you’re alive” present I could ask for.

  “The funny thing . . . is I lost . . . at senior assassin,” I say, laughing at my own joke. It hurts my chest, though, so I don’t pat myself on the back for long. Justin laughs for me, the only person in the room who understands why this is what I said, why it’s ironic.

  “You were out the first day,” he says, the smile that is my home breaking through the worry on his face. I lift my unsteady hand to touch it. He helps me along the way, ultimately kissing my knuckles and then holding my hand to the side of his face.
/>   “You shaved,” I eek out.

  His eyes flash with realization. “You could hear me.”

  I nod, and pet the place on his face that was once overgrown with whiskers.

  “Felt you . . . too,” I say.

  A softness takes over his expression, his eyes dropping to my mouth, then slowly tracing every feature of my face. When our eyes meet again, he closes the distance between us, leaning in so we’re inches apart, stopping before his lips reach mine.

  “My beard was terrible. Be glad you missed it.” His mouth stretches wide, and he winks. My heart beats hard enough that I’m finally aware it’s there.

  “He’s right, you know. His beard was awful,” my father adds.

  Justin rolls his eyes, but I don’t laugh. I am still sad I missed it.

  Both my father and Justin are asked to step back for a few minutes while the doctor, the one with the southern accent that made me imagine him as Matthew McConaughey, listens to my heart. He’s about twenty years too young to be Matthew, and about two feet too short. He’s still a rock star.

  People work me over for what feels like another hour, but eventually, I’m left alone in my room between two men who were once so far at odds with each other that I ran away. It took a nightmare or seven to get them on the same page, and I’m still not entirely sure they are for real. Regardless, things are different between them. Things are different for all of us. There’s no way they couldn’t be.

  We spend the next twenty minutes on simple questions with short answers that I can manage. I try to ask some of my own, but before I get through more than a couple of them, my vocal cords grow too tired to project. I fight to keep my eyes open, because seeing their faces—seeing the world—is precious. I’m terrified that I’ll lose this again.

  “You need some rest.” My father finally relents. He stands above me, bending at his waist to bring a kiss to the top of my head. It makes me feel like a little girl, and I cherish it. His eyes linger on Justin, who hasn’t moved from the cot he dragged back into place when the medical team left. He’s been sitting on it, facing me and holding my hand this entire time, and I brace myself for a fight between the two of them. I don’t think he’s going to leave me now—not when I’ve finally come back to him.

  “He can stay, Daddy.” I speak in a whisper, and my father flinches at my words. It probably stings that I want someone who isn’t him to take care of me through the night, but after everything, I hope he knows he can trust Justin.

  My dad’s glare relaxes but he maintains a look of warning as he points to Justin. “I’m trusting you. She’s awake now, and you will respect her.”

  I blush, but Justin simply responds with, “Yes, sir.”

  My dad juts his finger forward one more time for emphasis, then kisses the tips of his fingers and blows it in my direction.

  “Sweet dreams, baby girl,” he says. He has no idea how much I hope I never dream again.

  I settle in on my side, only a single monitor left on my body. My heart is under surveillance, due to the great amount of stress it was under. The doctors said they will switch me to a more mobile one in the morning, and it will be with me for a while, but for now, I get the nodes taped to my chest and the screen that draws tiny green mountains over and over again. I love those mountains—they mean I’m alive.

  “You came home,” Justin says, settling in on his side so he can face me. He’s pushed his cot as close to my hospital bed as it can go and dropped the rail so there aren’t any walls between us.

  “You came and . . . got me,” I say.

  “Shh,” he hushes through a soft smile, eyes roaming my face with an adoring expression. Careful fingers reach up to brush through my hair. I open my mouth to talk, but he presses two fingers to my lips and then holds one up to his own.

  “You’ve talked enough. Save your words. Give yourself a break; you’ve been in a battle.” His gaze lands hard on mine, a deep sense of truth in what he just said that resonates with my journey more than he knows.

  I nod, and a tear escapes the careful traps I tried to set on my eyes. He dashes it away with his thumb.

  “How about I’ll tell you what you missed, and I’ll try to keep the questions to yes or no?”

  I nod in response, and he laughs.

  “Good start,” he says. I smile and test the feeling of laughter. It still hurts a little, but not as much.

  “Kellen and I found your clue, in my locker at school,” he says, pausing for me to acknowledge that I understand. I nod and breathe out in relief. I know that time has passed, and I’m already where I am, but knowing that what I did worked is still satisfying.

  “I stole the tablet from a cabinet in the bathroom of one of the unused rooms. The layout of the neuro ward is—”

  “Like . . . school,” I break in. He admonishes me sweetly, hushing me again but chuckling at my inability to be quiet and follow his advice.

  “Yes, like school,” he says through smiling lips before continuing. “Kell helped me before he was discharged, and we practiced every scenario—Esher never coming in again, her coming in and denying everything, her owning up to it and then punishing me. The best possible way things could go was if your father was there to hear it.”

  He’s silent for a few seconds, letting that quiet acknowledgement sink in. Justin is grateful for my dad. He trusted him; they trusted each other.

  I lift my hand and rub my fingers together, a makeshift sign for cash. It takes Justin a bit to put it together, but when he does, he laughs loud enough that it breaks through the severe quiet beyond my door. The nurse on call pops her head in to make sure we’re all right.

  “She made a joke,” Justin says.

  The nurse gives us a wry smile and reminds him I’m supposed to be resting. She doesn’t understand that when Sleeping Beauty woke up, the last thing she wanted to do was go back to sleep.

  “You mean money, right? Yeah, Morpheus is going to pay, through the nose.” The greedy smirk he gets when he falls into cash paints his lips. I like it less than his other expressions—it reminds me too much of his dark side—but he’s not wrong to want compensation, and to celebrate it. More than lawsuits, which I’m sure my dad already has rolling, I want to see Morpheus disappear. I want to be certain the magic pills they promise, or whatever else they tested on us since we weren’t supposed to survive the injuries from the crash, never find their way to pharmacies and shelves.

  “I know,” Justin says. I snap to and realize I must have been off in a distance. “You want them to face justice. They will. Your dad will not let up. But Dom, there’s no reason we can’t get a little justice of our own.”

  I think about the cash I thought I was getting when I signed up for some test in my dream. I was so desperate for ten grand. The kind of money Justin is talking about, though—it’s way beyond that. Maybe we do deserve that.

  Beyond.

  I nod with closed lips, and move close enough to touch my face against his chest where our beds meet. His arm holds me close, and his hand draws slow hearts on my spine. I rest, as I promised I would. I don’t sleep, though. And Justin never makes me.

  40

  Cowboy

  (Kellen)

  Ever since the crash, I haven’t much yearned driving. I promised Justin and Dominica that I’d be here, though, for their graduation. It’s not really about the cap and gown shit; Justin said he has a surprise, and he wants me to be a part of it. And because I hate flying more than driving and dreaming, I got in the pickup and made the extremely slow trip to Chicago.

  Daytime driving in the spring is a lot better than wee hours in the ice.

  Graduation ceremonies are a little different here. I had mine last week and it was fairly unceremonious since my graduating class held only eleven people. And since nine of us were dudes, there wasn’t much to party about. That’s the one thing I think I miss about living in the Morpheus-induced place—a better dating pool to pick from. I’ve been thinking about going to County Community i
n the fall, though, for business. Maybe I’ll find my Damsel there, someone to save. Dom would punch me if she heard me say that because, “Girls don’t need saving.” I guess trying is in my nature though, I don’t know.

  By the time I get out of this graduation ceremony, I might be too old to save a puppy. The school brought in extra bleachers and filled half the football field with chairs for this thing. I’ve heard at least eight hundred names called, and none of them have been my friends’.

  I find them in the crowd, the next line to make it to the stage. Seems they broke the alphabetical rule to be close to one another. We all deserve to break a few rules, I think. I stand along with Dominica’s family, Sal, and Justin’s sister, Gia. I’m glad she got to come. Things with his parents have been even worse now that there’s lawsuit money coming our way. After writing him off at eighteen, all of a sudden they decided he was unfit to not have guardians. They hired a criminal lawyer from some poster taped up at the bar they frequent. Shockingly, their case was dismissed.

  As for the three of us, we all decided to settle. It wasn’t really because of the amount, though a few million split between the three of us did make the decision a little easier. We took the offer more to end the game we all felt trapped in. Dominica put up the biggest protests, but she’s kinda the reason Justin and I most want to see this end. She hasn’t slept right ever since she woke in that hospital. She’s on a lot of meds, and still wakes up with night terrors. Dragging her through two years of trials and appeals troubled her family, and us. And the odds of us shutting down a big pharma giant like Morpheus are slim.

  So we caved, and big pharma lives on. But Dominica, she’s always watching. We made a pact that if we ever catch wind that they’re putting people in fishbowls to study, the hard drive we copied from the tablet Justin took finds its way to the press. Dominica gets to be in charge of that.