“Delilah, I’m Doctor McNall. You have just woken up from a coma,” he said with urgency. “I’m going to inject you with this sedative to calm you, your heart is very fragile.”
“NOOOOOOOO!!! I hurt everywhere—PLEASE, NOOOO!!!” More alarms and machines went off as I struggled.
“Go get ten milligrams of Flexeral, now!” the doctor shouted, voice sharp with urgency, and the nurse’s shoes squeaked as she bolted. He pushed sedative into my I.V., and the medication burned as it entered my bloodstream, a hot sting threading up my arm, but I was too weak to do anything except shake.
The nurse hurried in with another syringe and the doctor injected it next. The pain slowly melted away, and I felt like I could take the first full breath since I woke up.
Oh fuck—Titus. He was going to be so…was…I… Confusion and drugs made my mind twist and bend. Did I dream everything?
A man came rushing into the room. “Jared?” I whispered.
He dropped the bag he was holding and raced to my side, dropping to his knees. He delicately held my frail hand, andit felt like a lifetime since I’d seen him last, and my heart swelled at the sight of him now. My breath hitched and my heart skipped.
“You’re awake, thank God you are awake! I thought I lost you,” he cried as he kissed my hand several times.
I studied the finer details of his face, the ones I had so quickly forgotten while… I was away—where, I wasn’t sure. He was so handsome, so alive and beautiful and still young, he had time to make a life with someone else. My heart bottomed out in my stomach at the thought of him loving someone else, but wasn’t that what I had just done, even if only in my dream?
But how could it be a dream when it all felt so real? It felt like I lived a whole entire lifetime and then suddenly came back here.
The question haunted me—how could everything I experienced have just been a dream when each moment was so vivid and tangible? It was as if I had truly lived an entire lifetime somewhere else, only to be pulled back abruptly into this reality. The memories clung to me with a weight that dreams shouldn't possess, and the confusion between what was real and what wasn't left my mind spinning.
I looked at the way our skin tones contrasted each other on our conjoined hands, him, and his olive skin tone warm and vibrant over strong muscle and dark flecks of hair, next to my sickly pale skin with a tinge of yellow, gaunt, and boney, my hand looked like it belonged to a ninety-year-old woman.
All I could do was cry. What a sick tease it had been to be strong and healthy again only to be shoved back into this fucking prison of a body. The pain never went away even with the strongest medications, it always remained, and the jagged movements of my chest from crying caused more pain which caused more crying.
I didn’t know what was worse—leaving Titus the night before our wedding if he was real, or him not being real altogether.
“What’s wrong, my love?” Jared asked so sweetly, drying my tears with the sleeve of his shirt.
“What…happened?” I asked, so confused, drugged, and sad, so fucking sad.
“Baby…” he paused, then gulped and said, “there was a complication during the surgery, you were dead for three minutes, and then Doctor McNall was able to bring you back, but you’ve been asleep for a while, my love.”
I died—just like Titus had said.You died in your realm and progressed to the next.Then the words of the bound soul in Mount Orid rose in my mind,The laws of natural progression don’t apply to you, child of ancient blood.Then I recalled Titus’s explanation of time, time affects all the realms differently.
I pieced it together the best I could in the dizzying haze I was in. I died for three minutes here, but I was there for what…a month? How could any of this be possible? I looked at Jared’s loving gaze and felt his finger brush my greasy hair from off my face and around my ear, and I knew…it wasn’t possible. The entire thing was just an elaborate dream. But this man right here was real, and so was his love. I swallowed hard and forced myself to anchor to the warmth of his hand in mine. Whatever I had lived through—whatever it had felt like—it belonged to sleep and dying imagination. I let the other life fade, piece by piece, like a dream slipping through my fingers at dawn. I could not chase something that didn’t exist. I would walk back into this life— the fragile, painful, mortal one—and love the man who had never left my side.
And for the second time… I would bury Danny.
“Did they get the tumor?” I asked.
He let out a staggering breath, and his throat bobbed. He squeezed my hand tighter and replied, “No, my love. Your heart gave out before they could get to it.”
Tears flowed freely down his face because I knew what this meant, and he did too. Back to square one. I was going to die from cancer.
“You should have just let me go,” I whispered.
He became slightly irritated and said, “What? Why?! You could still pull through! Dr. McNall said that in a few months when you are stronger, we can try the surgery ag—”
I interrupted. “I’m not going to make it a few months, Jared. I don’t even think I have a few weeks. This is the weakest I’ve ever felt…I’m in so much pain,” I whimpered, because “pain” was the only word big enough, even when it wasn’t precise—grinding, stabbing, electric, all of it.
“Don’t talk like that, you just woke up, the pain will get better,” he pleaded.
“No, it won’t. It never gets better,” I replied.
“You’re starting to sound like you want to die, Delilah,” he said, irritation cracking at the edges of his grief, tears clinging to his lashes.
I tried to swallow the words back down. I tried to be the kind of woman who fought harder just because she was loved, but my eyes dropped to my withered arms and the truth slipped out anyway, quiet, and ugly. “Maybe I do, Jared,” I said.
