That explained the accent.
She definitely wasn’t from around here.
“Where are you from?” Eddy asked, looking nervously at the floor where she was about to be standing.
I helped her swing her legs over the edge of the bed while keeping my hand firmly planted in the middle of her back to keep her upright.
I could feel the raised wounds on her back through the gauze, and my stomach plummeted. “I’m sorry, does it hurt?”
“Not where your hand is touching, no,” she admitted, sounding hoarse. “You never said where you’re from, Sage.”
Sage was back, all bubbly and happy and cheerleader-like.
“I’m from Arkansas.” She smiled. “Born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas.”
“What made you start travel nursing?” Eddy asked when Sage caught her by the hips and lightly drug her toward the edge of the bed.
“My husband died,” she murmured, her broken heart leaching into her voice. “I couldn’t stay anymore. Everything reminded me of him.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Eddy hissed in a breath when her feet touched the floor. “That’s awful, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Sage said. “I just couldn’t take the small-town life anymore. Everyone knew me. Everyone knew what happened to my husband. And let’s be honest, it was suffocating to see all the pity in their eyes day after day. I felt like I was just hanging on by a thread there. So I left. Haven’t been back since.” She got down onto one knee. “Okay, so here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to bend down here like so…” She held out her hands. “And you’re going to stand up. Your hubby to be is going to catch you by the hips and help you stand. Your ribs are going to hurt like the dickens, but it won’t kill you, okay?”
My stomach ached at the thought of Eddy in pain.
“I can do it,” she said, taking a shallow breath.
“That’s also going to be a problem,” she said. “You keep taking shallow breaths like that. You need to take deep breaths. Nice and deep. Slow. It hurts, but you have to keep those lungs inflated. We don’t want pneumonia, okay?”
Eddy’s next breath was deeper, and it was only then that I realized just how shallow Eddy had been breathing all this time.
“Ouch,” she groaned.
“Keep taking them,” Sage urged. “All right, we’re going to stand in one, two, three.”
I helped Eddy to stand, and my heart literally lurched inside my chest when she went completely white.
“You’re probably not going to be able to stand straight for a while thanks to all the stitches. But what we don’t want you to do is list to one side. We want you as straight as possible so we don’t start relying a little too much on that one side.”
Sage talked as we shuffled Eddy ever so slowly across the floor to the shower area.
“Since a few of your stitches around your face need to come out anyway, we’re going to shower and get nice and clean. Then we’re going to get them taken out after we’re done, okay?”
“Okay.” Eddy’s voice was rough and shallow.
Only when she was in the bathroom and sitting on the chair in the shower did Sage leave to go grab some warm towels.
“Okay?” I asked her.
She had a sheen of sweat on her face that reminded me of the last time I’d noticed that moisture there.
“You have sex in your eyes,” she panted.
“The last time I saw this.” I wiped my thumb across her brow. “You were falling into the washer.”
She scoffed ever so softly. “I wasn’t falling into anything.”
I winked at her.
