Page 214 of Sexting His Assistant

23

NINA

By the second morning in the hospital, I hate the room so much that I start taking it personally.

The walls are too pale. The curtains are too clean. The machines make soft little sounds that somehow become louder the longer I listen to them. Nurses come in with kind smiles and questions I have answered already. Pain level? Dizziness? Nausea? Blurry vision? Can I sit up? Can I follow the finger? Do I know my name, date, and where I’m?

Yes, unfortunately, I know exactly where I am.

I’m in a private hospital room with a concussion, a lump at the back of my head, and a life that seems to have become impossible the moment I accidentally sexted my boss.

I lie against the pillows with my phone in my hand and call Misha for the eighth time.

It rings. And rings. And rings.

Then voicemail.

I end the call before his recorded voice can start because I cannot hear it again without wanting to throw the phone across the room.

For two days, nothing.

No call. No visit. No furious lecture about how I should have let Luka walk me upstairs.

It doesn’t make any sense.

Misha is annoying, overprotective, secretive, and impossible, but he’s not careless with me. Even when we fight, even when he thinks I’m making terrible decisions, even when he disappears into work and pretends everything is fine, he always comes back. He checks. He calls. He sends food I did not ask for and then gets offended if I don’t eat it.

Now I’m in the hospital because someone attacked me inside my own apartment, and my brother has not answered once.

I press call again. No answer.

My throat tightens. “Pick up,” I whisper, as if saying it out loud will make him hear me.

He doesn’t.

I lower the phone to my lap and stare at the screen.

I should call my parents.

The thought comes and goes in waves.

They don’t live in the city anymore. If I call and say I’m in the hospital, my mother will panic before I finish the sentence, and my father will start arranging tickets while pretending to sound calm. They will ask where Misha is. They will ask why he is not with me. They will ask what happened, and I don’t have an answer that does not sound like the beginning of a crime documentary.

I cannot scare them with half information. Not yet.

Maybe that is selfish. Maybe it’s stupid. Maybe I’m doing exactly what everyone around me keeps doing, holding back the truth because I have decided other people cannot handle it.

I open my contacts and scroll without meaning to.

There are names, of course. Work people. Old classmates. Women I used to get coffee with and then stopped calling when work became too much. A cousin who will immediately tell my mother. Two friends who live in other cities and know me mostly through birthday messages and forwarded memes now.

I have people.

I just don’t have many people I would call from a hospital bed.

That’s a lonely thing to learn at eight in the morning under fluorescent lights.

My phone shows a missed call from Meredith.