“Okay. Love you, too.” She snapped her phone shut then, rolling up her sleeves, proceeded to open the steamed bags of soapy washcloths. Wringing one out, she gently wiped Jason’s face. “Jason. Jason, wake up.”
Unbelievably his eyes fluttered.
“I’m here. It’s me, Lanie’s here.” Taking another warm cloth, she followed the path of the first, then waited. Seeing no reaction, she washed his arms and legs, then opened another bag and wiped his face and neck and upper chest with a fresh soapy cloth.
He drew a deep breath and murmured, “Don’t cry, I’m already dead.”
Her heart stopped. “Jason? Jason, can you hear me?”
His eyes flickered open and searched her face.
Lanie started to cry.
He repeated, “Don’t cry. I’m already dead.”
Lanie shook her head. “No, baby, you’re not dead.”
Jason’s eyes flew to his chest. Then suddenly cognizant of waking from a nightmare in which he’d just been shot, he looked around him in confusion. “Where am I?”
“You’re in Edgewater Hospital. You had an accident and have been unconscious for a week.”
Jason went to touch her, but both hands were bandaged. Under the gauze his slightest movement of his right hand brought a painful twinge. He held both before his eyes. “Accident? What happened?”
“The fuse box electrocuted you.” She carefully lowered his arms. “You’ve third degree burns on your right, and second degree on your left.” Stretching out on the bed next to him, she wrapped her arm across his waist. “You’re going to be okay now.” She kissed his shoulder. Her eyes welled up. “You’re going to be okay.”
He weakly stretched his left arm around her and hugged her close. His muscles were tired but of course they’d feel that way after so many volts of electrical current ran through them. He felt odd, like he’d been somehow torn in two. There was also a vague recollection of time passing, large blocks of time. “Sweetheart?”
Lanie sat up. “What is it? Are you all right? Oh what am I doing? I haven’t called Rakeesh yet.”
He smiled and shook his head. “I’m hungry but that’s not...”
She cut in, “You can’t eat just yet, not until Rakeesh sees you.” Lanie pressed the call button. A moment later the nurse returned.
“Oh!” She said upon seeing Jason awake.
Lanie said, “Julie, please call Dr. Ganjoo and let him know his patient finally woke.”
Grinning from ear to ear, the nurse said, “Right away, Doctor.” Then to Jason she said, “Welcome back, Dr. Bowen.”
Jason smiled. “Thanks.”
The next hour was taken up with the Neurologist’s visit and by listening to his friend Rakeesh and his wife. Jason learned of the severity of the injury that put him in a coma. Tests would be done later that morning, but the general consensus was this preliminary prognosis was good. Jason would fully recover.
Alone once more, Lanie stretched out next to her husband again. In an act more comforting to her than to him, her hand slowly caressed circles over his belly. Yes, Jason would recover. That didn’t negate how close he came to dying, nor her week-long angst. Curious, she asked, “So what was it like?”
“The coma?”
“Mm-hm.”
He took a deep breath trying to find the beginning. “There was a void…”
“A void?” She felt him nod.
“I had the impression of a long period of time passing, and I was alone for the duration.” A thought hit him. “How long have I been unconscious?”
“Eight days if we count today’s ten hours as a day.”
“A long time.” He kissed the top of her head. “You must have been worried.”
“I was, but Rasheed assured me the CT scan showed the injury wasn’t all that bad. He was fairly certain the coma would end soon. If a Neurologist friend has that opinion, then that was good enough for me.” She went on to relate all the family and friends who came to sit and talk or read to him. Between Lex, Ben, and herself, Jason was hardly ever alone. She pointed to the stack of CDs. “And at night, I made sure you had books to listen to.”
Hearing her mention Lexie, a flash from Jason’s dream came forward. “I dreamed of you.” Knowing her like he did, he could feel her smiling rather than saw it for himself. That was confirmed by her tone when she next spoke.
Rising up on her elbow, she faced him. “I was wondering if you were dreaming the whole time.”
“It was strange. I dreamed Lexie was your friend, not your sister. I recall having conversations with her so I must have felt her presence on some level. Ben was in my dream. He must have spent a good deal of time telling me about the progress on the house because that played a large role in my dream, too.”
“He did. He read the newspaper to you, too. It sound like you experienced one long dream with external stimuli embedded in.”
He chuckled. “I think I did. After the void, the dream just took off.”
Lanie lay back down and resumed her belly caress. Perhaps the void Jason referred to was his brain state immediately after electrocution. “What else do you remember?”
Jason was silent as he pieced together the fragments he could recall. There were parts of the dream that were crystal clear, other parts were surreal. “I dreamed I was murdered.”
“Well that qualifies as a nightmare.” The thought of him having a week-long nightmare made Lanie cringe inside.
“Some parts were nightmarish. Other parts were just interesting. I recall the faces of people I knew, but their names and the work they did were different.”
“So, who murdered you? Did you know them, too?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t know the faces. The one who shot me was named Bertha. She was crazy. Freaky crazy.”
Bertha? Lanie blinked. No way. Coma patients heard everything around them. Had Jason’s unconscious mind been influenced by the stories she’d played him the whole time he was in the coma? Would constant exposure to spoken words affect comatose dreaming? Going up on her elbow she stretched a hand to the stack of CD books and turned them so she could read the sides of the cases. “You know most of those titles don’t you? Anything familiar?”
He looked at the sizable stack of fiction. Of the side labels on the cases he could read, he recognized several having heard them before. Realization slipped in. He’d been dreaming fragments of literary fiction. There sat Lanie’s all time favorite love story, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Since med school, he’d heard that one a hundred times at least. Yes, these stories must have contributed to the back story of his dream. He wondered if that was what his wife was implying. “I recognize some from home. Why do you ask?”
Lanie went on to explain the night nurse and her love of Jane Eyre. “You mentioned crazy Bertha, your dream murderer. That’s not a common name. There’s a crazy woman in that story named Bertha. She tries to kill several people and eventually kills herself in a fire.” She laid her head at his shoulder.
“And?”
“I’m thinking perhaps some of the fiction playing continually might have influenced your dreaming. Interesting, no?” She felt his chin against her as he nodded.
Out of the blue he said, “I think I was a ghost.”
She laughed. “A ghost?”
He smiled and kissed the top of her head again, loving the scent of her hair from that floral shampoo she used. “Yes, and I was haunting you.”
Lanie pretended to shiver. “And what else did you do to me?”
“The moment I get you home, I’ll show you.”
Afterword
Seeing that his brother-in-law’s hotdog was a firebrand, Zack called across the fire. “Hey, Kenny. You gonna eat that or use it to march on Frankenstein’s castle?”
The throng erupted in laughter. Chuckling, Kenny blew out the flames then proceeded to lay the blackened sausage on a bun. “What? I like ’em like this. Don’t knock it till you try it.”
Everyone had come to Lanie and
Jason’s bonfire and weenie roast celebration of the much-anticipated renovation of the Bowen carriage house. The building was now the new Edgewater Free Clinic. The guest list included all the doctors and nurses of their acquaintance, as well as the entire adult population of the Danowski clan and their assorted married-in family members.
Many long hours had been spent dreaming up ways to turn the unused carriage house into a clinic where anyone could come for medical attention. The project had been massive, but with the help of careful planning, Ben’s remarkably talented family of tradesmen, and the blessing of Aunt Addy’s sizable estate, the clinic would open its doors in one week’s time. Tonight was a celebration in more ways than one. There’d been no lasting neurological effects from the electrocution and Jason’s hands had completely healed with only a slightly reddened area on the palm of his right hand to show where the wound had been slower to heal.
The house itself had been in the Bowen family since before the Civil War and occupied by Jason’s Aunt Adelaide until three years ago when the dear old lady who raised him passed away. Needless to say he was her pride and joy. In their residency at the time, it wasn’t until Jason and Lanie completed their medical training that the newly wedded doctors moved back to the town where Jason was born and raised. He never entertained the thought of selling and that was good, because his wife fell in love with the old place the instant he pulled into the drive.
It was fortunate that the inside only needed minor repairs. Given Adelaide’s age and Jason’s absence, the gardens had suffered and the atrium was a disaster. Fortunately, landscaping was Ben’s specialty and he threw himself into the work. All of it was simply breathtaking now. Any Victorian would be proud to walk its paths and smell the heirloom roses.
Ben’s father Oscar was beside himself when Jason asked him to play his harmonica. The little old man from Poland was one hell of an American Blues player.
The fire eventually burned down, and the happy revelers went home to find their much-deserved beds. Lexie stayed a little longer to help put food away while Pete and Jason stacked Lexie’s borrowed chairs into the truck. These would go back to the historical society in the morning.
A while later, finding themselves alone, Jason took her by the hand.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Always the nosy one. Close your eyes.” He chuckled. As long as he’d known her, her well-ordered, analytical mind fascinated him. They’d met during their residency, and for him it was love at first sight. Small wonder his coma had called dreams of her to the fore. Lanie was his anchor in this world or the next.
Around the back of the house, he opened the atrium door and led her inside. She could smell the loamy scent of soil and greenery as she followed him into the darkness. When they’d gone off path to the moss bed he pulled her into his arms and kissed her hard. “I’ve wanted to do that in here for the longest time.”
She breathed at her ear. “Mmm, why didn’t you?” Wrapping her arms around his neck, she laced her fingers behind his head.
“I didn’t think you’d appreciate the stinking plant hormones and rotted manure Ben dumped in here.”
Laughing, she bit his earlobe. “Well we’re here now and it’s no longer stinky…”
He lowered to his knees. Looking up past belly and breast he said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you about my dreaming of being a ghost.” His words were followed by hands that glided up her bare legs and thumbs that pulled her panties down.
His questing fingers caused her breath to come short. She knew exactly what ghost Jason did to her in his dreams. In fact, his live version showed her several times. “Oh that dream…”
Coaxing her down on the moss bed, he kissed her again. “Oh, yes. I find I’m drawn to your warmth even when I’m not dreaming.” His hand glided up her leg.
“Any warm place in particular?” Her hand unbuckled his belt, his zipper followed.
He moved over her and his mouth and fingers showed her exactly where.
“Mmm, oh, there…”
THE END
WWW.CALLIOPESWRITINGTABLET.COM
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I started kindergarten already knowing how to read, and this was curious as no one in my family recalled teaching me how. I loved words from the very beginning because words described everything down to the smallest detail and added color to the world. Aside from loving the evocative potential of words, I also love that they describe how things work. I literally devour any and all informational reading materials from cookbooks to books on quantum physics and seeking to feed that hunger, eventually tackled an entire World Book Encyclopedia. Before long a husband joined his life to mine, and a son and daughter followed. I didn’t even contemplate expressing my imagination through words until the Internet came into my life.
When room-sized computers became personal and the Internet was no longer the purview of the geek, it was then that, quite by accident, I discovered the theatrical world of online role play. And what a stage it was! Often misspelled words hastily typed out in the chat rooms described scenes and appearances equivalent to anything played at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. At any given hour of any given day one might converse with a shape-shifting shaman, a knight of the realm, or a barbarian slave girl with jingling bells on her ankles. It was a world where cyber lovers gave sensual caresses through intimate verbs, where warriors carried sharpened blades, wizards held fireballs in their hands, and shape shifters went from man to beast with a few well-chosen words. Word lover that I am, I found I had a knack for crafting detailed fantasy worlds. At my husband’s urging I entered a contest for erotic fiction. I never expected it to go anywhere, but I did like to dazzle my mate so I gave it my best. To my surprise, I won first place.
Being the informational reader, it wasn’t until I borrowed a historical romance novel to read on a long train ride that I seriously considered fiction. Up to that point I read very few novels. Part of a series, the book had me hooked by the time the train pulled into the station. More than once I mentally rewrote a scene by adding suspense, additional dialog, or expanding a love scene that should have been longer.
Today my active imagination has me writing everything from children’s stories to historical fiction. My current magnum opus is a modern day fantasy tale of the ultimate battle between the dark and the light. Possessing that entire range of shadow myself, when the inevitable writer’s block seizes me, I turn to writing erotic romance for it is here where the colors are the most vivid. The steamy imagery and fluid scenes unfolding in my mind’s eye challenge me as a writer and more often than not, help to blast through any writer’s block where my larger work is concerned.
I hope my erotic imagery transports the reader to a time and place where, through the magic and power of words, they’re able to be inside the mind of the characters. Often from this intimate vantage point, the reader experiences the seductive transformation that will eventually send the hero and heroine hurtling toward the precipice. Come be the voyeur to their printed lives. Open yourself and allow my words to take you there. Draw close as coals ignite and feel the climax build as if you yourself are there being plied with firm hands and soft kisses. And when all is absorbed and endured and nerves are strung bow tight, release this most cerebral orgasm and free fall to earth. When the last page is turned and the lovers roll into each others’ arms truly spent, know that I may have another ember tucked away to warm your senses.
Also by Rose Anderson
Siren Classic: Hermes Online
Available at
BOOKSTRAND.COM
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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Dreamscape Page 23
