The ride is not long. Seven minutes, and she is being wheeled away into the emergency room, and I am not allowed to follow. I find myself standing outside the hospital with the firefighter.
“What’s your name?” He speaks with a gruff tone that immediately puts my back up. I am not in the mood to be hit on right now.
“Oh, fuck off,” I say.
It’s already starting. He’s going to want to know who I am, and then he’s going to want to know if I’m married. I should have worn a fake ring when I went out to get bread.
He gives me a frown.
“I’m not interested,” I tell him.
“I’m not interested either,” he returns in a low growl. “But I need your name.”
“Why?”
“For the incident report.”
“Muffy Hoffbrau,” I say, giving him the name of the girl I didn’t like in kindergarten.
I step past him, intending on storming into the hospital. I did hear them say I couldn’t go in, and should wait in the waiting room for an update on her condition, but fuck literally everything about that. Freya doesn’t have anybody besides me right now, and if anything happens to her I won’t forgive myself.
That same hand from earlier grabs the back of my collar and yanks me back with the force of my own momentum.
“The hell are you doing?” I curse at him for stopping me.
“You’re not allowed to run into the emergency room. You’ll get in the way.”
“What’s your name?”
“Thor,” he says.
“Of course it fucking is,” I curse. “Let me go. I need to be with my sister.”
“They will call you when she’s stable enough to be seen. If you go in there now, you will be underfoot and will make everything worse.”
“She’s pregnant.”
“Exactly,” he says, giving me a slight tug, because he still hasn’t let go of me. I feel like Bjorn must when people are restraining him from one of his many excellent ideas. It’s frustrating as hell. Bjorn screams at the top of his lungs and bites when that happens. I’m actively considering both courses of action myself right now.
“She needs me.”
“She will be sedated,” he says. “She won’t even know you are there. Can I let you go, Muffy, or are you going to keep being a problem?”
“What do you think?”
He snorts.
“Let me go.”
“No.”
I try several methods to make him let me go. I try kicking him. That doesn’t work very well, or indeed, at all. I bite his arm. That makes him grunt.
“You’re a feisty little thing,” he observes accurately.
“Get the fuck out of my way,” I say, pushing past him one more time. This time he’s not stupid enough to grab me again. I haveno interest in being dictated to by a man. He might have saved Freya, and I can apologize to him later if I feel like it. But right now I have to get to my sister.
Nobody in the hospital gets in my way, but they’re not exactly helping either.
