by Amy Briggs
Dream State
Fairy Tales Reimagined Series
Amy Briggs
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Did you like what you just read?
Fired Up
Jo
Brian
Acknowledgments
Also by Amy Briggs
About the Author
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Dream State
By Amy Briggs
Copyright © 2017 Amy Briggs
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical without the expressed permission of the author.
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Cover Design by Kristen Hope Mazzola
Cover Image: © mimagephotos #46308824 / stock.adobe.com
Editing by Diamond in the Rough
Formatting by Kristen Hope Mazzola
Created with Vellum
Dedication
For all the hopeless romantics; don’t stop believing.
Chapter 1
Jacob
I didn’t miss my ex-wife, but I did miss having someone to come home to who gave a crap about my day. If I’m being completely honest, we never should have gotten married in the first place; we were together through college, and marriage seemed like the next logical step, so I asked, she said yes, and the rest was history. Literally, we’d become buddies or simply companions, you could say; there was no romance at all, and I’d just assumed that was the way everyone felt after being with someone for so long. I had been going through the motions for years, and it turned out so had she.
Fortunately, she did us both a favor and left me. She fell in love with someone she worked with and realized she wanted actual passion in her life, and that wasn’t what we had. As I thought about it while running on the treadmill, I laughed to myself. When I was growing up, my mother always told me not to settle for mediocre in anything, yet I had done just that. We had started out as friends and then fell in love, but we were never a truly romantic couple; we were a couple that made sense on paper. Both from good homes, both college graduates, we were alike in almost all ways. But I come from a long line of overachievers; in work, in life, and in love. So, I’m not sure where exactly I went against the grain and ended up off course and settled. I was relieved that it was over, but I was bored.
We had an amicable divorce. We didn’t have any children, just a house outside the city, and I let her buy me out of it mostly because she could afford it and I certainly didn’t want to continue living in the suburbs as a newly single guy. Truth be told, I’d have let her have it, since she saved me from a lifetime of mediocrity, but she offered. I got myself a decent apartment above a flower shop downtown and settled into single life far more quickly than I’d expected to.
I worked in a hospital as a physician’s assistant; it was a great job, and it was exactly what I wanted to be doing. In the ER, I felt like I was truly able to make a difference, and that’s what I always craved in a job. I got into the medical field to help people. It’s a familiar story. I never wanted to be a doctor, which somehow surprised people. Besides the high cost of school and malpractice insurance, there wasn’t as much flexibility as you’d think, and I loved what I was doing. I did a stint as a paramedic for a while when I was going to school, and while I enjoyed it, I didn’t get to see the progress of my patients’ healing. It was always off to the next emergency, which was exciting but not as fulfilling as treating them, following up with them, and being a part of their recovery in some cases.
My divorce had been final for over a year, which made it feel appropriate to truly move on. While I wasn’t grieving, it was the end of an era, if you will, and I felt like I needed that year to find myself again after so much time with someone I wasn’t in love with anymore. What ended up happening in that time was, I became empty. I stopped looking for things that would bring me any kind of joy, other than helping my patients. I became a workaholic. I took all the extra shifts no one else wanted. I worked on all the holidays, so others could spend time with their loved ones. I threw myself into my work, because I didn’t know what else to do with my time.
I became friends with a lot of the nurses at the hospital, but I knew they wanted to date me. I was fresh hospital meat. A divorcee with no kids and no real baggage who lived walking distance to the hospital was prime real estate for the nurses who were looking to snag a husband with a good job. Only trouble was that I’d already been down that road and didn’t have any interest at all.
When Kendal told me she wanted a divorce and that she’d found someone else, I was in denial and pretended I was heartbroken over it. I was mostly just mad that I hadn’t pulled the trigger and ended it myself, of course. At the time, I wanted to be the victim. It made me feel significant to be left by my wife. And a good number of the nurses wanted to make me as well as themselves feel good by giving me attention, which is what I thought I wanted at the time. Before getting married, I’d never had any trouble with the ladies; it just wasn’t really my bag to sleep with a bunch of different women until I went through that phase briefly. Shitting where you eat is a terrible idea, though, and I quickly stopped dating altogether to avoid that drama.
I’d become that guy who comes and goes, phoning it in along the way, uninspired by anything. The guy who socialized and flirted but always said I was too busy to take you out to dinner or to bang you in the supply closet, whichever your poison was; and I justified it all with my work. It had been a long time since I felt inspired. Until the night she came through my ER. Something changed, a light came on around me, awakening me. I had no idea what was in store.
Chapter 2
Jacqueline
I’d been working in my flower shop all afternoon like usual when a basket of fruit was delivered to me. As I pulled the card out of the arrangement, I noticed it didn’t say who it was from. It simply said, Thanks for Handling my Wedding. I couldn’t imagine who had sent it. I had designed quite a few weddings over the last few weeks, but it warmed my heart to receive a thank you. I ran a retail flower shop, but I generally preferred doing events. Putting a grand finale together was exhilarating. Sometimes, working with brides could be challenging, but I loved a challenge, and the majority of brides had a concept but would let me really get creative, which is what drew me to the business anyway. That, and I inherited it. My aunt retired and gave me the shop. I adored working there.
The last thing I remembered clearly was snipping the ends of some daisies that needed to drink and placing them into a large bucket with some flower food, taking note of how closed up they were and knowing that with my care over the next day or so, they’d open up and become bright white. I leaned back against one of the coolers, thinking about the arrangement I’d design with them, and took an apple from the basket.
As I glanced
down at the apple, I noticed how glossy and bright red it was; red apples were my favorite. I took a bite, and as I chewed the flesh slowly, enjoying the crisp flavor, I suddenly became lightheaded. That’s the last thing I could remember.
Chapter 3
Jacob
The first time I saw her, she was brought into my ER unconscious and unresponsive, but no one knew why. She didn’t have any obvious injuries except for a small bump on the head; however, she was not responding to any of the emergency treatments administered by the paramedics.
“Has anyone contacted her family?” I asked the nurse next to me.
“No. She doesn’t have any identification. We don’t know who she is,” she replied, curling her lips downward.
“What?” I asked as I scanned her body looking for more evident signs of trauma than what was apparent in front of me. As I initially assessed her, I didn’t see anything that would lead me to believe she’d been attacked, so it had to be a medical issue. She had a minor contusion, likely from falling or something, leading me to think she might have more serious internal injuries.
“Let’s get X-rays now,” I requested of the nurse as the paramedics rushed her to the curtained-off room in the ER. As the emergency responders barked out the victim’s vitals to me, I mentally prepared for what might be a stabilization and prep for surgery. Once she was transferred from the stretcher to the hospital bed, my team went to work.
Two nurses began putting monitors on the woman, grabbing her pale, thin arms and inserting the customary IV of saline to make sure she was getting fluids right away. While they feverishly completed their normal tasks on a trauma victim, I began assessing the young woman’s abdomen, looking for signs of internal bleeding. I couldn’t find any swelling present, so I had the patient sent for the X-rays. She should have woken up if she didn’t have internal injuries or a more serious condition we couldn’t find yet.
As is typical in an ER situation, I moved on to other patients, but my thoughts continued to drift to her. Although it wasn’t a particularly busy night, we were understaffed just like any other hospital, and there were always plenty of patients to check in on. On an overnight shift, which I typically worked because no one else wanted it, it was kind of a crapshoot. Obviously, weekends were the busiest and almost always brought some interesting shit. Thinking back to my twenties, I realized some of these kids put me to shame in the getting-into-trouble department.
It was a Wednesday, so it wasn’t crazy or anything; all our patients were stabilized, so as families joined their loved ones and patients got prepared to leave or to be admitted, we waited for the unknown girl to get back from her tests, so we could try to figure out why she wasn’t waking up. When the orderly rolled the young lady back in, I got a better look at her and noticed her long brunette hair sprawling across the pillow on the gurney. She seemed so small and frail on the large hospital bed, and her pale face had a sweetness to it that I couldn’t put my finger on.
For a brief moment, I felt a connection. It wasn’t something I could explain at the time, but I was immediately invested in what happed to her. It was as if I bonded to her somehow. At the time, I couldn’t have explained it if I tried, but I suspected that her case was just a new challenge for me to figure out. I didn’t know then that this woman would change my life.
Chapter 4
Jacqueline
Someone was wheeling me somewhere; I could tell that I was in a bed, but when I tried to talk, no one could hear me. My mouth wouldn’t move. I screamed out, but no one could hear me; my lips weren’t moving. Before I started to panic, I heard an almost peaceful voice speaking to me. She was trying to soothe me, as if she knew I was scared.
“It’s going to be okay, sweetheart,” she said softly.
I attempted a reply, but nothing would come out, and I was still quite confused. The woman’s voice continued, “We’ll figure out what’s going on with you and get you fixed right up.”
Even though I probably should have been, I wasn’t frightened. While the woman’s voice was muffled as if she was speaking from the other end of a tunnel, I still found it calming. I took what I thought was a deep breath and tried to recall my day in an effort to figure out how I’d ended up here.
Chapter 5
Jacob
Through the night, we continued to monitor the Jane Doe with no changes. As night turned into early morning and the entire ER became eerily quiet, I stepped back into her makeshift room. I leaned against the wall with her chart in my hand and read over her vitals, which hadn’t changed. Her heart rate was normal, her levels all stayed within the appropriate ranges. The neurologist who came by did a quick evaluation, stating that she’d probably wake up soon.
I loved my job; I really did. But there were days when I wanted to choke the doctors I was working under. The neurologist’s half-assed assessment couldn’t determine if she was just taking a nap. I’m guessing that’s probably because the only thing he did was flash his pen light in her pupils. Yes, that will tell you if the nerves and transmitters are telling the pupils to dilate or constrict, but it won’t tell you why a patient isn’t waking up. He said he’d come back and check on her again, but after a few hours, I certainly hadn’t seen him. We’d determined she had no serious internal injuries, no swelling of the brain; so there was no reason she hadn’t woken up, if even for a short time.
I ran my hand along my jaw, sighing deeply as I carefully rubbed at the stubble forming from a long day. As I studied her small frame on the large bed, I noticed that her skin was so pale it almost matched the white sheets and blankets tucked around her. As I crossed my arms, taking stock of each of her features, one of the nurses flew in from behind the curtain, startling us both.
“Oh, my God, doctor, you scared me!” she exclaimed.
“I’m sorry, Ruth.” I righted my posture and smiled at her.
“Is everything okay here? I was just coming in to get her vitals again.” She reached her hand out to take the chart I was holding.
“Yes, yes, of course.” I paused. “Well, I mean, we haven’t figured out why she hasn’t woken up. I guess time will tell. Has anyone found her family?” I asked.
“No, it seems no one is missing her just yet,” Ruth replied, a dismayed tone in her voice.
“Well, she looks like a lovely girl. I’m sure someone is missing her,” I said quietly, taking in the physical beauty I couldn’t help but notice. Even under the hospital’s harsh lighting, her pale skin was just slightly offset by her rosy cheeks and pink lips. Her long hair had been tamed a bit from the last time I saw her, one of the nurturing characteristics of the nurses on my shift.
I’d asked Ruth once why they spent that extra time with a patient for purely superficial reasons. It wasn’t that I thought it was a waste of time or anything of the sort; it just took me by surprise and gave me pause when I noticed. She told me that she wanted the people in her care to look better than they had when they were brought in, regardless if they were on the mend or not. She and her colleagues over the years had all decided that little touches like fixing a patient’s hair would make their loved ones feel more at ease when they found them in our hospital.
I watched Ruth take the mystery girl’s vitals and found myself staring. That feeling of connection wafted over me again. Drawn to her, I stepped close to Ruth, gently taking the file back so I could look at her results myself. No changes. It had been about six hours since she’d been brought in. At that point, I really didn’t have anything to contribute to her case other than checking in now and again. Until the neurologist eventually came back and ran his tests, she would be in the makeshift room made of curtains in my ER.
Gazing at her on my way out of the room, I felt loss. I wanted to spend the rest of my shift watching over her.
Chapter 6
Jacqueline
I figured out that I was in the hospital shortly after I’d been wheeled around and continued to hear that nice woman’s voice. She knew everyone and talked to me a
lot, even though I couldn’t respond. What I can tell you is that people aren’t as careful with these rolling beds as they should be. I felt like I’d been jostled and banged into a hundred times. The saving grace to my frustration was the woman named Ruth. She was taking care of me, it seemed, but no one told me what had happened to me yet. All I knew was I wasn’t well.
After what seemed like an eternity of being carted around and what sounded like X-rays being taken, I was brought somewhere where’d I’d been still, presumably a room. I’d been left by myself for quite some time when I realized someone was watching me. They didn’t say anything, but I sensed it. When Ruth came back in to check on me again, I could hear her talking to someone else, a man. This man had been watching over me for what seemed like quite some time.
Chapter 7
Jacob
Throughout the night, I checked in on Snow White, which we’d nicknamed her. With her dark hair, pale skin, and unexplained slumber, it was as if she were under a spell. Her vitals hadn’t budged; in fact, her blood pressure, pulse, and heart rate were identical the last three times they were taken, and they were completely normal. I had even checked them myself, which was rare. I wasn’t an elitist or anything; it’s just that my nurses were on point and always had it handled. I wanted to check for myself, though; see if something was missing.
