‘Who?’ I asked, but I think part of me already knew the answer.
My heart, which had been beating perfectly satisfactorily – according to the monitors – suddenly picked up its pace. The tingling in my arms intensified, and I saw the fine downy hair covering them was standing on end, as though electricity was once again travelling through my body. The air certainly felt charged as the nurse reached for the curtains. Through a gap in the fabric I saw a bare arm, attached to a drip. But it wasn’t the medical paraphernalia that caught my attention. It was the intricate and detailed tattoo that was etched onto the skin of the man’s arm.
A stab of disappointment pierced me like a dart. I’d guessed wrong. My memory might be sketchy, but I was certain that when the green-eyed man had checked his watch, there’d been no full-sleeve tattoo on his arm.
The nurse was still holding the curtains, like a magician’s assistant about to perform a big reveal. She spoke in a whisper that was no way quiet enough.
‘Actually,’ she said with what appeared to be a last-minute change of heart. ‘Perhaps it might be better to do this another time. I think he’s asleep, anyway.’
‘No, he isn’t,’ said a voice from the bed.
His eyes were just as green as I remembered. At least I hadn’t forgotten that.
‘Rhys.’ His name burst its way past my lips in the manner it had apparently been doing all day.
The man in the bed was bare-chested. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. There was no hospital gown covering his torso, but it was anything but bare. I tore my eyes away from the mesmerising network of fern-like etchings and twisting vines that decorated almost every inch of visible skin.
‘It’s you,’ Rhys said, somewhat artlessly. ‘The girl with the shoes in her hand.’
It was no longer an accurate descriptor, for my shoes were somewhere unknown, presumably with the rest of my clothes, and my feet were currently clad in lurid blue hospital socks.
‘Hi,’ I said, feeling shy in a way I truly don’t think I’d done since I was about sixteen years old. All at once I regretted turning down the offer of a blanket to cover my legs, which suddenly felt horribly exposed in the wheelchair.
‘So, it got you too?’ Rhys asked, his eyes mercifully fixed only on my face.
‘The lightning? Yes, it did.’
The man in the bed nodded, looking as shell-shocked as I felt. ‘It’s pretty surreal, isn’t it?’
‘I can’t get my head around it. The doctor said the odds of being struck are less than one in a million.’
We shared a look that only survivors would recognise.
‘This was a good idea,’ said the nurse, more to herself than either of us. Her glance went from Rhys to me and she gave usa look of encouragement before pushing my chair even closer to his bed.
‘Why don’t I leave the two of you to chat for a minute?’ She swept the cubicle curtains around my wheelchair, cocooning us in an illusion of privacy as though everything we said couldn’t easily be overheard. Before either of us had a chance to protest, she slipped through the opening, leaving me alone with a semi-naked man, currently looking just as confused as I was.
‘Does she think that we know each other, or that we’re...?’ I trailed off, leaving my hand, which was flapping in the space between us, to finish that sentence.
‘I think she might,’ Rhys said, immediately on my wavelength in a way that rarely happens between strangers. And yet this man didn’t feel like a stranger. The exact opposite, in fact. ‘Although I’ve no idea why she’d assume that.’
There was no way of stopping the blush. It scorched my cheeks like a flame.
‘Erm... that might be my fault. Apparently, I came round murmuring your name. I saw it on your coffee cup before the accident and it’s kind of got stuck in my head. They tell me I’ve been saying it a lot.’
I swear if my face got any hotter, they were going to need a fire extinguisher on it. I waited for him to reach for the Call button; to have someone evict this clearly deranged person from his cubicle. Instead, he just smiled, and it was so engaging it took me right back to that moment beneath the oak tree.
‘Why do you think that is?’ he asked.
‘I’ve absolutely no idea.’
His eyes left my face as he looked me over, in a way that made me feel shy again.
‘Were you injured in the strike?’ he asked.
‘Not really. I was unconscious for a minute or two and I’ve got a small burn on my shoulder.’ I only just caught myself before I pushed the fabric aside to show him. The fact that I didn’t know this man kept slipping out of my head even faster than everything else I appeared to have forgotten. ‘That’s about it.’ For some reason I didn’t mention the memory loss. ‘I think you got it worse than me.’
‘So they tell me.’