Hotline Fling

36: The Dirty Doctor

Juneau's POV

"I think she's coming..." a familiar male voice filtered down over me. "...to."

My limbs weighed down like someone pumped lead into my veins. Chilling waves of uncertainty gripped me in darkness. I struggled to open my eyes. They were so heavy. Dull aches of pain and stiffness on the left side of my chest froze my movements and I groaned.

All I could do was lay still and figure out what the fuck happened through a physical checklist. The most obvious discomfort was how I'd wrapped a brillo pad with sandpaper, deep-throated it, and it had gotten lodged into my throat. Vibrations pounded in my head worse than any sidewalk construction jackhammer and the exhaustion sagged in my body ached as if I'd been run over by a tank. I reached my hands up to my head, but my fingers brushed a soft cloth that surrounded my forehead and tucked under the nape of my neck. Flinching my fingers into my palms burst pain through my left arm. Confusion urged me to open my eyes again, to no avail.

"Hey." A nasally female voice, familiar yet like a distant memory, murmured. "Wake up, Sweetie."

Since my hands were a lost cause, I attempted some leg movement. My toes curled against a soft, warm texture. They were bare. Both my knees throbbed with pain when I bent them but nothing like the sharp stabs that bit into my left shoulder. Soreness radiated down my left arm, all the way into my palm. The pads of my fingers tingled.

When I clenched my stomach and sat up, large, soft hands stopped my right shoulder with insistent, firm pressure. I groaned and fought against the heaviness in my eyelids and cracked them open.

"Do you remember your full name?" The first voice, a male one, asked as a white light blinded my blurry view. From the soft probes into each eye socket, they were pried open with gloved fingers.

"Juneau Corrine Olstead." I coughed more than spoke. My throat screamed as if I gargled shards of glass.

"Good start," the male voice encouraged.

"Get her some water, Doctor Ford," the female said.

A cool, soft plastic pressed against my lips. Water splashed a welcome douse into my mouth, and I swore my tongue sighed with relief. A few drops tickled over the edge of my lips and each swallow tugged a thread of pain on the left side of my neck, but I slurped the cup to empty. Each blink of my eyes was slow and heavy. The brightness streaming through my lashes was preferable to the perpetual darkness. Blink after blink, a white tiled ceiling came into focus.

"Better." The nasal voice was attached to a set of familiar brown eyes. They crinkled into half-moon shapes, edged with crow's feet wrinkles in the corners. Her short, bulbous nose that I was glad I didn't inherit came into view over a smile more relieved than happy to see me. "Hi, Juney."

The ease away of her concerned wrinkles coupled with a burst of warmth in my chest. "Aunt Margaret."

The spotlight flicked off with a click, and a handsome face appeared. A tall, broad figure stepped between me and the concerned look etched all over my aunt's face. The most muscular, attractive doctor I'd ever seen came into focus, with spiked brown hair, a square jaw, and concern in his brown eyes. Light blue scrubs peeked out under his chiseled clavicle under a white lab coat and a stethoscope haphazardly hung around his thick neck.

"I'm Doctor Ford," he said from the right side of my bed. Aunt Margaret drooled at him on my left, squeezing my hand numb. My lips parted at the first doctor I'd seen who wasn't a seasoned, older man. His voice was so familiar, and yet I couldn't place a single handsome detail. The way it didn't seem to match his appearance wasn't helping. "I came from the ICU to see how you're doing."