SIENNA
There was light.
Not the sharp, clinical light of a hospital or the warm gold of a morning sun. A different light. Soft and diffuse and everywhere at once, as if the air itself had become luminous. Sienna was suspended in it, weightless, and there was no pain and no body and no time, just the light and a distant sound that might have been the ocean or might have been her own blood moving through veins she could no longer feel.
She knew, as dreams allow without evidence, that she was somewhere between. Between what, she couldn't say. Between sleep and waking. Between the car and the road. Between the person she'd been that morning, driving through the pale dawn with her suitcase in the boot and Elise's last text still glowing on her phone, and the person she was now, which was no one, which was a consciousness floating in warm light with no edges and no floor.
The accident came back in fragments. Not a sequence, not a narrative she could piece together with logic and chronology. Just pieces, sharp-edged and disconnected, shuffled out of order. The coastal road curving left. The sun in her eyes, lowand blinding above the tree line. Reaching for the visor. A flash of movement in the peripheral. The impact, sudden and total, metal folding, glass breaking, the world rotating around an axis that shouldn't have existed. And then nothing.
And then this.
Elise.
The name arrived with a force that cut through the light and the weightlessness and the diffuse light. Not a memory. A need. A demand from somewhere deeper than consciousness, from the animal core that didn't care about light or dreamscapes or the comfortable absence of pain. Elise. She needed to see Elise.
The need sharpened everything. She was not resting. She was falling, very slowly, and the only thing that could catch her was the world she'd left behind, the world that had Elise in it.
She thought about Elise's voice. The dry, flat humour that landed late.
So you are a bit gay then.
The fierce, quiet certainty when she said things that mattered.
You were never broken.
How her voice roughened during sex, dropping lower, losing the control she maintained everywhere else.
How she said Sienna's name in the dark, as if it was a word she'd been waiting her whole life to say.
Last night came back to her then. The last night. Elise's apartment, the door, the goodbye. Sienna had stood on the threshold with her jacket on and her car keys in her hand and Elise had been leaning against the door frame in the warm hallway light and she'd saidI love youand Sienna had said it back and the words had been so easy, easier than they'd ever been, as if the pathway from her chest to her mouth had finally cleared after forty-one years of obstruction. And she'd walked down the stairs and driven home to pack with Elise's taste on herlips and the certainty that she would see her in two days and two days was nothing. Two days was manageable.
But what if two days was everything. What if two days was all she had left and she'd spent them unconscious on a table while strangers cut her open.
No. No. She was not done.
One more day. The thought was fierce and clear and it burned through the light like a flame through paper. I want one more day. One more morning waking up in her bed. One more cup of tea in her kitchen. One more time with her mouth on mine and her hands on my body and her voice saying my name. I have spent forty-one years keeping the world at arm's length and she broke through all of it in eight weeks and I am not done. I am not finished. I have just started.
I am choosing the pain. The broken ribs and the hospital bed and the long recovery. Because the alternative is this comfortable nothing, and nothing is not enough. Not when there's her.
The light cracked. Sound flooded in. Real sound, crude and mechanical. New sounds emerged beneath it. Mechanical sounds. A persistent beeping. The hiss of pressurised air. Voices, muffled and distant, as if speaking through a wall.
The light contracted. The sensation became heat, then pressure, then the sharp, localised agony of a body making itself known again. Her ribs. Her chest. A deep, grinding ache on her left side that pulsed with each breath and each breath was being given to her, not by her, air pushed into her lungs by a ventilator, rhythmic and insistent. Her left arm was wrong, heavy and immobile and encased in a cast.
She tried to open her eyes and the effort was enormous, the lids weighted, the muscles reluctant. The light beyond them was no longer warm and diffuse but harsh and fluorescent and it cut into her pupils and she winced and the wince sent pain radiatingfrom her ribs through her chest and she gasped against the tube in her throat.
"She's waking up."
A voice. Not Elise's. A woman's voice, calm and professional. Hands on her arm, adjusting a tube. The beeping quickened.
"Get Dr. Mars. Tell the others."
More movement. Footsteps. The squeak of shoes on linoleum. The harsh light resolved into shapes. A ceiling. White tiles. A strip light. The edge of a machine. A bag of fluid hanging from a pole. A window with blinds pulled half-shut.
She turned her head. The effort was enormous, every muscle and tendon in her neck protesting, and the movement made her vision swim and her ribs scream. The pain was astonishing in its specificity, not the vague ache of the dream-space but an exact inventory of damage, and the physician in her was already diagnosing herself even as the human in her was gasping from the agony of it. Broken ribs, at least three, the intercostal muscles inflamed, the pleura aggravated. Her left arm was in a cast from wrist to elbow. There was a drain tube in her left side. A foreign object sat between her ribs, wrong and invasive, and she wanted it out.
But none of that mattered. None of the pain or the tubes or the catalogue of injuries mattered, because Elise was sitting in a chair beside her bed.
Elise was there. She was curled in a hospital chair that was too small for her athletic frame, her legs drawn up, her shoes on the floor. She was wearing a t-shirt and jeans and no makeup and her dark hair was loose and unwashed and her face was swollen from crying and her eyes were red-rimmed and wet and she was the most beautiful thing Sienna had ever seen.