Surrounding Dominance

Chapter 3

After lunch, he offered to walk me back to work, but I waved him away and called a cab. I was nervous that he would follow me like a mad man, so I kept glancing over my shoulder.

As the paranoia finally went away, I was arriving back at work. I didn't take my car because I wasn't sure if he knew what it looked like. That was a good feeling until I realized that he knew where I lived.

Suddenly I couldn't breathe.

The cab driver stopped and looked in the rear-view mirror, signaling that we were where I wanted to go and that he wanted to be paid. His eyes widened when he saw me. "Ma'am! Are you ok?"

I didn't respond, instead, I looked with him in the mirror and found a girl about 22 years old looking back at me.

She looked super white like she had seen a ghost.

Is that me? I asked myself.

As the man turned in his seat, I fell limp and couldn't move my body. Did he poison me?

__________________________________________________

"She looks like she is going to be fine."

The voice was distant and made it sound like I was underwater. It was a male voice.

Beep...Beep...Beep...

My head was throbbing.

The back of my throat was sore.

My eyes were heavy. Beep...Beep...Beep...Am I dying?

Then the last thing I remembered popped into my head. The lunch with Jasper. My new job. My new boss. The taxi. My paranoia. Jasper.

JASPER!

My eyes flew open and I shot straight up. A man in a white hospital lab coat jumped and ran out of the room. I looked at my surroundings. I was in a hospital bed, wearing an issued hospital gown that opened in the back. Another man sat at the only stationary chair in the room.

He had black hair and wore dark jeans and a fitted black t-shirt. His face was frightened and happy at the same time. He looked as if he wanted to get up and run from the room.

Jasper Price stared at me with his gorgeous green eyes with worry and fright plastered across his handsome face. He didn't dare move or talk as I narrowed my eyes at him and watched him like I was a robot scanning to see if he were real.

The man in the white lab coat rushed back into the room with two nurses. One was in dark blue scrubs, while the other had on purple. The doctor gently pushed me back on the bed, telling me to "relax", but careful not to slam me back. At first, I resisted, but then I gave up and let him push me. I kept my eyes on Japer, careful to watch any movements he made.

He still didn't dare talk.

The two nurses surrounded the right side of the bed while the doctor examined me on my left. One nurse was careful to watch everything that the doctor did, while the other wrote things down on my medical chart.

The Doctor asked me things like "Do you have any pain?" and "Do you have any family that you can contact?", while one of the nurses recorded my responses.

After a while, they left and said I should try and get some rest before a nurse came in to check my vitals.

Jasper hadn't left and was still sitting quietly in the corner looking at his feet. Gathering my thoughts in my head was never easy to do due to the fact that I overthought everything, but for some reason, only one thing was on my mind.

"How did you know I was here?" I asked not looking at him, or even in his general direction.

His voice was scarce as he responded.

"You woke up in the ambulance and demanded that somebody get on your phone and text me what was happening right before you blacked out again, so I came and they said you had a severe panic attack and it triggered a stroke."

My face was red by the time I convinced myself to look into his beautiful green eyes.

Did I really ask that?

He looked up and met my eyes. He had the best eye color in the world. The bright green matched the clothes he wore.

Just as I finished that thought, I started to feel nauseous and Jasper was fading in and out of my vision. The monitor to my right started flashing red and beeping really loud. Too Loud.

Just as Jasper started to get up, and just as I started to pull my arms up to protect my ears from the excruciating noise that the monitor was making, I fell back against my pillow as the nurse ran in, and everything went black for the second time.