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Perry giving me a ride to work in the morning was perfectly normal, these days. It felt like a long time since I had dreamed longingly of riding in the Porsche. Now, whenever we had shifts together, which was more often than not, to be honest, we would ride together.
What was not normal was the way that, on this particular morning, metal crunched against glass and sent us spinning across the road, out of control, into the oncoming traffic. I heard Perry swear fruitfully, I felt my head smash against the side of the car, then I knew only darkness for a long moment.
“JD? JD, open your eyes, kid, please,” Perry’s voice was saying, very close to me, almost begging, he sounded desperate. I could feel a hand on my face, my cheek.
I opened my eyes. His face was close to mine, and he looked anxious. There was blood running down his temple from his hair, trickling down the side of his face, and one hand was clutched against his chest protectively.
“Perry!” I surged forward, seeking the cause of the blood. “Are you alright?” I blinked and looked around. “What happened? You’re bleeding!”
“I’m fine, Newb, take it easy. Just a little blood. Somebody t-boned us and spun us around. Ambulance is on the way.”
I looked around me, seeing what I could only call carnage outside – cars everywhere, strewn at odd angles. Glass and metal scattered across the asphalt. The window of the passenger door beside me was smashed and I could see blood in the shards.
I stared at it for a long moment, wondering how it had happened, and then turned back to Perry, and was alarmed to see blood running down the side of his face from somewhere in his hair.
“Oh, god, you’re bleeding, are you okay?” I reached out to touch him, but he caught my wrist with one hand. His other was cradled to his chest, I noticed, sucking in a gasp. “What happened?”
His eyes watched me for a long moment before he spoke. “I’m fine, kiddo, just a bit of blood. Somebody hit us. How are you feeling?”
“Me? I’m fine.” I rested my head back against the headrest, shutting my eyes. “I wonder if they’ll have pudding in the cafeteria today…I love pudding…”
“I know you do, Newb,” Perry said from beside me, and I looked over at my husband, smiling.
The smile dropped from my face when I saw him. “You’re bleeding!” There was blood running down his face from his hair. “Oh, god, Perry, are you okay? And your wrist…we need to get you looked at…” He was holding one hand very still.
“I’m fine, JD. It’s just some blood. The ambulance should be here any second.”
True enough, I could hear sirens approaching. “What happened?” I breathed.
“Car accident,” he said shortly.
My head snapped round to look at him. “Car accident?!” I asked sharply. “Are you okay? Oh, my god, you’re bleeding!”
“It’s nothing, JD, don’t worry.” He turned as an EMT approached from outside and I rested my head back against the headrest and let my eyes drift closed…god I was tired, and my head was pounding.
“What are you morons doing, letting a concussed man go to sleep?!” My Perry’s furious voice, fairly close to me. He gave a snarl. He sounded irate. I opened my eyes. Lying on a stretcher on the ground. What the hell?
I turned my head and saw Perry. He looked as furious as he sounded – and then I saw the blood running down his head. I sat bolt upright, ignoring the pounding that erupted in my head as I did.
“Perry, oh my god, you’re bleeding!” I tried to jump up from the stretcher – he needed it more than me. “You should be on here, lie down, Perry, you need it more…oh dear…”
The world span wildly around me as I tried to stand, and I lost my balance and stumbled. The floor began to approach my face at alarming speed. Then strong hands – EMT’s hands – caught and steadied me. Not to be distracted, I tried to shrug them off.
“You need…to help Perry…”
“JD, kid, sit down,” Perry ordered, with the tone of someone who’d repeated themselves a few times. But I hadn’t heard him… “I’m fine,” he went on. “Just a bit of blood. Take it steady, sweetheart, you hit your head pretty hard.”
I could only do as I was told, worried about my Perry but not wanting to cause him any more stress than I seemed to be. The EMT helped me lie down, and then I heard Perry scold him for allowing a patient with a head injury to lie down, and they levered me upright once more.
His hand closed around mine, gentle and warm. I turned my head to look at him. He was holding his other arm close to his body, and blood was oozing down the side of his head.
“What happened?” I asked. “You’re hurt.” Who had hurt my man?
His eyes closed momentarily. “We got in a car accident, sweetheart,” he murmured. “But don’t worry, we’re both gonna be fine, just need a bit of patching up. They need to go now, JD, I’ll see you at the hospital, okay? Don’t go to sleep, now.”
He pressed a very gentle kiss to my forehead, and then he was gone, and the doors of the ambulance were shutting, and we were roaring off.
Everything went away from me a bit, then, like I wasn’t really there. It all felt strangely distant. As if it were all happening to someone else, not to me. I was just a kind of…bystander, watching on. I felt cold. I remembered I mustn’t go to sleep, though. Perry had said not go to sleep, so it must be important. I continued watching from my detached viewpoint, and ignored the sleepiness tugging at me.
At the hospital, they took me to radiology to run scans, and cleaned me up a bit, and I started to come back to myself as a nurse swabbed blood from my face. Memories began to return, blossoming open in my head, accompanied by a dizzying headache, which, when mentioned, I was given pain relief for.
Car accident. Perry. Blood. Confusion. And then…then there were hazy bits that I couldn’t find, like how I got out of the car, or what had happened to Perry.
I had to trust he would make sure he was taken care of, though. He’d said he’d see me at the hospital. He would find me eventually, I was sure.
They were bandaging a wound on my upper arm that I hadn’t even noticed, hadn’t even felt until then, when he walked into the room.
He looked better – the blood was gone now, the only sign anything had happened was the bandaging round his wrist. He looked anxious, though, as he approached.
“How you doin’, kid?” he asked, sounding wary. His eyes were strained, and oddly guarded. The nurse who had been dressing my arm slipped out of the room, her patient all patched up, and we were left alone.
“I’m fine,” I said. “They got me on the good stuff for my head. How ‘bout you?”
He looked mighty relieved. “Me? I’m dandy, just bashed my wrist a bit.” He glanced away, then back at me. “You, er…you remember what happened?”
“Bits,” I admitted. “Car accident…I hit my head…you were bleeding…then the ambulance came and you were shouting at them…”
“Heh, yeah, morons let you go to sleep,” he muttered, then puffed out a huge breath, and some of the tension seemed to leave his body. His eyes were clearer when he looked at me again. He ran a hand through his curls. “You had a touch of anterograde amnesia back there, JD. You freaked out about a half dozen times that I was bleeding. Scared the hell out of me, I can tell you that much. I’ll thank you not to do that again.”
I felt sheepish. “I’m sorry.” I remembered feeling worried about him, but not over and over and over. “I was just…” Worried about him. I guess he’d got that part. “I didn’t go to sleep though,” I added brightly. That had been the last thing he’d told me. “I did feel pretty rough in the ambulance, but I remembered you’d said not to go to sleep so I didn’t. And once we got here, I kinda came back to myself. The radiologist said a mild concussion is all…just told me to rest. How’s your wrist? And your head? No more bleeding?”
His eyes lingered on me darkly for a long moment before he answered. “No, no more bleeding.” He seemed to sag a little. “That’s…that’s what you kept asking me about. Over and over, you saw I was bleeding and panicked.” He shook himself a little. “My wrist’ll be fine in a few days if I rest it.” He shrugged. His good hand came up toward me, almost hesitantly. His fingers brushed over my cheekbone. I reached up and caught them, holding them to my face.
I watched him take a couple of breaths, hold and then slowly release them, while he gazed intently at my face. I drew our hands down until they were resting, still entwined, in my lap.
“Hey,” I murmured. “I’m sorry I scared you.”
“Yeah,” he whispered, a little weakly. “You can say that again.”
Wow, it must have been bad. I untangled our hands, carefully took hold of his face – minding the patch of skin where there had been blood, unsure where the damage was – and pressed my lips softly to his.
“I love you,” I breathed, almost into his mouth.
His hand had come back to my own face, and his thumb stroked me.
“Love you,” he responded. “So much, kid.” His hand found the wedding ring on my left hand, stroking at it.
“We off for the rest of the day?” I asked.
“Yeah, the rest of the week, more like,” he grunted. “Between your concussion and my wrist, we’re not in much state to work, Newb.”
Good. “Then…take me home?”
He huffed a laugh against my forehead. “Sweetheart, I’d love nothing more.”