there looking this vibrant and sharp. I recalled Alonzo’s instruction to redirect her after a reset and glanced down at her work. She’d drawn a pyramid. On closer inspection, she’d built one out of words. Strings of words written in ballpoint pen, colored over with Magic Markers.
“That’s really good,” I said. More than good.
“Thank you,” Thea said, frowning at the paper. “It’s okay but there’s something missing. It feels…”
“Small.”
She glanced up at me with a wry twist to her lips. “Are you an art critic, Jim Whelan?”
“N-N-No, I just meant—”
“I’m teasing,” she said with a sigh and turned back to her drawing. “It is small. I wish I had a canvas as big as a wall. And paint to last me for months.”
“That’s exactly what I meant,” I said, still standing over her awkwardly. “Your talent is bigger than paper and pens. Grand Canyon-big.”
I hoped the cue from yesterday would spark her, but Thea blushed and grinned playfully at me. “I take it back. You can critique my art any time you want.”
The moment caught and held, and again, I saw the depths of Thea Hughes. Miles instead of minutes.
“Jim?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re staring at me.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I don’t mind being stared at by you. You have kind eyes.”
Déjà vu to the fucking extreme.
I felt my skin burn hot and redirected my own damn self away from her. I craned a little lower to read one of the word chains comprising a slope of her pyramid.
Carried buried bury born torn mourn moan loan alone lone lonely lonely lonely
“What do these mean?” I asked, tapping a finger over the words. “If you don’t mind…?”
Thea cocked her head at the words as if they were foreign to her. “I don’t know. I wrote them before the accident. Two years ago.”
“You drew this two years ago?” I felt I was on shaky ground, testing the limits of her understanding and possibly setting her off.
She nodded. “I must have. But now that I’m back, I can finish it.”
“Okay,” I said.
Thea’s brows furrowed, and she tucked a lock of blond hair behind her ear as if puzzled by her own words. “It sounds strange, doesn’t it? I’ve been away for a long time.”
“It’s what happened.”
Her smile was grateful. “That’s a good way to put it. I feel like…”
“Like what?”
“Like there’s more to it, but whenever I try to remember more, there’s nothing. I don’t even remember how I got here, to this table. With you.”
I had no words that could help her understand. I hardly understood her situation myself.
“But I know the doctors are working on my case,” she said. “I’ll let them worry about it. I’m just happy to be back.”
“Me too.”
Thea’s smile grew more brilliant, and she picked up her ballpoint pen again. “Tell me about yourself, Jim. And sit down, for crying out loud. You’re hovering.”
I glanced around for Alonzo, but he was nowhere in sight. I sat down across from Thea, telling myself I was only doing my job.
“That’s better,” Thea said, beaming. “What do you do?”
“I’m an orderly.”
“Oh, yeah? Where at?”
Alonzo might tear me a new one for talking to Thea mere seconds after telling me not to fuck up and say the wrong thing. The rising anxiety brought out the damn stutter.
“At the B-B-Blue Ridge Sanitarium.”
Shit.
Thea glanced sharply at me, then her gaze softened. “Do you have a stutter, Jim?”
No one had asked me in years, I’d kept it hidden so well. Humiliation dug deep claws into me as I inhaled and exhaled. “Sometimes. It shows up when I get n-nervous. Or pissed off.”
“You don’t look pissed off.” Her brows rose and her smile turned sly. “Do I make you nervous?”
Christ, was she flirting with me?
Thea patted my hand. “Don’t be. I don’t bite… hard.”
A flush of heat on my skin where her soft fingers touched me quickly became a jolt that surged through my arm, my spine, down to my groin.
She’s a resident, for fuck’s sake.
I gently pulled my hand away.
“I heard that line somewhere. A movie, maybe.” She cocked her head. “You don’t talk much, do you?”
“Not much.”
“Because of the stutter?”
I nodded.
“My sister says I never shut up.” She laughed and shrugged. “Guilty as charged. I say what I mean because life’s too short, right?”
Now she leaned closer to me. The scent of plain, industrial soap wafted from her warm skin.
“I’m just going to come out and say I have a feeling your stutter is not the most interesting thing about you, Jim Whelan.”
I stared. No one had said anything