Astra didn’t know what had happened

Astra didn’t know what had happened. One moment, she’d been upright, walking. Now, she knew she wasn’t walking, and that she was surrounded by hard but warm firmness that was grainy and unforgiving. She heard a continuous and loud noise…almost like…a car horn. But she couldn’t see anything—everything was just white, the center of her vision brighter than the outskirts of it.

She tasted blood as she tried to turn her head slightly. The metallic taste turned her stomach inside out and she pressed her lips together and tried to swallow, but couldn’t.

Someone shouted, something about a doctor. Yes, she thought—it had been a car accident. Someone must be hurt; people were always hurt in car accidents. Call for a doctor. Immediately. Her mind searched for her cell phone to do just that, but it took her a minute to realize that her body was not answering her mind’s summoning.

An ache was starting in the back of her head, like a headache, only flowing like the gentle melting of caramel over a rip red apple. Still, the whiteness surrounded her, but now it was speckled with little dots of darker color, almost like an artist had flicked her brush of black and brown paint and thrown droplets onto the canvas.

“She’s hurt badly,” a voice said from above her, very near.

Astra tried to say something, moved her head, but a warm, firm hand pressed to the side of her face. With that touch, her vision started to melt back in the strangest fashion.

“Don’t move, sweetheart, we don’t know what kind of injuries you have,” the voice said again. It sounded strained, but the vague attempt to be calming was present.

“What…?” she tried to whisper, but the sound was so slight in her own head that she wasn’t even sure she’d spoken it.

“You were hit by a speeding car coming around the corner,” he said

The little ground her mind had made over the past few minutes was lost. Hit—hit by a car? She couldn’t have been—dear God, no. She couldn’t die like Rhemus had—what about Lucia? Her baby would be alone in the world, left with only the brutal memories that her daddy had died in a car crash and so had her mama, after a fashion.

Besides that, Astra didn’t want to die. She was too young to die…Hot tears began to seep down her cheeks and the pain in her body came rushing home.

“Shh, it’ll be all right. Everything will be fine.” The man said, and a hand stroked comfortingly down her head and hair.

But it wouldn’t be all right—Astra tired to yell at him. She’d been hit by a car and was going to die. How could it be all right?

The trauma and instant flare of pain and tears, emotions like fear, dread and anger, overwhelmed her. Astra didn’t even realize it before she passed out.

--

Dirk Riley watched the young woman who lay in the hospital bed. She didn’t stir, but that didn’t make his interest any less keen. He would have been totally floored by her beauty—long eyelashes, elegant cheekbones, little nose and full lips all blended together with an easy, slightly tanned complexion—if he hadn’t been so afraid of how pale she was. He couldn’t tell which was whiter—her or the bed sheets.

Either way, it worried him. There were dark, dark bruised circles under eyes, lines that marred her face at the corners of her mouth and eyes that proclaimed either a tough lot in life or the trauma that continued even in her sleep.

Thinking of that trauma returned him to the scene, hours gone past now. The driver hadn’t meant to hit her, had tried with a jerky motion and locked breaks to avoid her, but it seemed fate had pre-ordained it to be. As soon as Dirk had realized what was going to happen, he’d dropped his book bag and laptop case and run.

He shook his head now—what he had intended to do to protect her from a speeding car he didn’t know. The reaction had been purest instinct, futile though it had turned out to be. He reached Astra too late.

The frustration of being able to do so little for her while the realization had sunk it had been maddening on Dirk. He’d never liked being useless, and watching the emotions shift opening across Astra O’Neil’s eyes had only emphasized the pain.

He didn’t know this woman, really. Yet, here he sat, alone with her drained form, because he knew no one else would come. He’d asked the nurse who had brought him to her room if someone was coming to her.

“No,” the older woman had said with sad eyes. “Poor thing doesn’t have any surviving family, except her little girl. Her husband died a couple months ago. I was on shift when they brought him in, straight from the crash.”

Straight from the crash, she had said. Dirk knew now what that strange emotion that had been in Astra’s eyes had been—she had thought she would die like her husband had.

No one was coming to stay with Astra, to urge her on in her recovery, to offer support and comfort and a shoulder to cry on. He didn’t know when her daughter would be brought to see her—or even if there was anyone to bring her—but when the daughter came, Astra would have to be the strong one.

That was why he stayed.

When he had other things to do, work to complete, his apartment to clean, the family picnic tomorrow to cook for, dozens of things to do and here he sat in a quite hospital room with a magazine draped over one knee and his heart being squeezed dry by an unconscious woman.