Conflict of Interest

Chapter Twenty Five

Jenn

For the first hour, I assume it was touch-and-go. Unfortunately, when I was lucid I could barely remember my name and when I was sleeping I was no closer to getting back to work. All I could make sense of when I was awake was Carrie's constant nagging, which seemed to be the one thing that remained constant while I was sitting in a hospital room for reasons I couldn't quite remember. I felt drugs in my system, but other than "Blah blah be so stupid" and "Blah blah could have been killed" I was getting few to no clues. 

"She told me she was going to take care of herself and now look where we are, Kim. I'm sitting here when I should be working. You're sitting here when you could be working. Jennifer's concussed for reasons we don't even know, and she was hauled in here with a dead guy and an almost-dead guy. What is it about me that attracts situations where everything becomes utterly fucked up?"

"The fact that you could even find a way to make this about you is really frightening."

"Yeah, what the hell," I tried saying out loud. "I'm lying here in a hospital bed and I wake up to hear you talking shit."

Carrie's gaze snapped to me then, and she breathed a sigh of what sounded like relief but couldn't have been, because she probably wasn't concerned in the first place.

"I'm sorry," she said, but I wasn't sure she was. "How are you feeling?"

"What's going on?" I asked, ignoring her apology and her question because neither one struck me as genuine. The truth was I had missed her, but she could be such a bitch that it was sometimes hard to conjure affection that I knew wouldn't be returned.

"I'll...give you two a moment," Kim decided before getting up and leaving the room. The way she said it, it almost sounded as though I was the one interrupting their personal moment, rather than the reverse. I'd been awake for all of twenty seconds, and already I wasn't too into reality.

Carrie nodded without saying a word, and moved to sit at the foot of my bed. She was careful, I noticed, not to sit on my feet, or upset my balance, or push me out of the way, and for some reason it drove me insane. I don't know why I wished that she would just throw herself down casually, recline there and kick me by accident and not care, but I did. I wanted her to be comfortable with me instead of worrying about upsetting me. It seemed like she never cared about upsetting me except when I wanted her to. But maybe I was just being unreasonable.

"Don't be mad at me," was the first thing I decided to say.

"I'm not mad at you," she said. "I'm concerned."

"I'm fine," I reminded her.

"Well, you're sitting in a hospital bed with four broken ribs, having almost slipped into a coma," she decided to detail for me. "So, if you don't mind my saying so, you're not fine, and you're beginning to sound like me."

"Okay," I acquiesced. "Then in that case, I'm not fine. I have four broken ribs and almost slipped into a coma. But I'm pretty sure I'm on heavy drugs right now, so I feel fine."

She smiled only briefly, and it was almost a sad one, before she put her serious face back on.

"What are you wearing?" I wondered out loud.

"Wow, okay. Thanks. You look great too."

"You know you look great," I challenged. "Too great for the office."

"I wasn't at the office, okay, Mom?"

"You not at the office?"

"I had the night off."