Crush - KarEena

Chapter 14

Karishma got away from Santosh with no time to spare. She climbed into her car, it seemed to take an hour for the parking lot attendant to tally her charge and drove to the edge of downtown. She parked on a deserted side street and then, for the next few minutes, tried to convince herself that she wasn't about to die.

Repeatedly she popped the rubber band against her wrist, hard, but it didn't stop the false signals of imminent death from whizzing toward her brain. She'd never had much faith that a rubber band could work that kind of miracle. It would be like using a bullwhip to halt a run-away goods train. But the doctor had recommended it, so Karishma had humoured her and started wearing it.

Her fingers and toes tingled. Numbness crept up her legs and through her hands into her arms. The first time she experienced that temporary paralysis, she took it as proof positive that she had a brain tumour. She had learned that it was symptomatic of nothing except a shortage of oxygenated blood in her extremities due to hyperventilation.

She opened her glove box and took out the brown- paper lunch sack she carried with her. Within seconds of breathing into it, the tingling stopped, the numbness receded, and the feeling returned.

But her heart was pumping as though she had come nose-to-nose with a cobra poised and ready to strike. She was drenched with sweat. Although she knew she wasn't dying, it sure as hell felt like she was. For five hellish minutes, her reason and her body went to war. Her reason told her she was suffering a panic attack. Her body told her she was dying. Of the two, her body was the more convincing.

She had been having dinner out with friends when she was seized by her first. Midway through the meal it had slammed into her. She hadn't seen it coming. There was no warning. She didn't just begin to feel bad and then gradually get worse.

One second, she was fine, and the next a wave of heat surged through her and left her trembling. Immediately she was dizzy and nauseated. She excused herself from the table, rushed into the lady's room, and was stricken with violent diarrhoea. She shook like she had a palsy, and her scalp felt like it was crawling off her head. Her heart was beating like a son of a bitch, and though she was gasping, she couldn't suck in enough breath.

She had believed wholeheartedly that whatever the hell had made her suddenly sick was going to kill him. There and then. She was going to die on the floor of that public restroom. She had been convinced of that as she'd never been convinced of anything in her life.

Twenty minutes later she was strong enough to stand, to wash her face with cold water, to excuse herself from the group of friends. She felt lucky to be leaving the restaurant alive, as wrung out as a dishcloth, but alive. She'd gone home and slept for twelve hours. The next day she was weak but otherwise fine. She figured she'd been gripped by a vicious strain of flu, or maybe the marinara sauce she'd been eating was toxic.

Forty-eight hours later it had happened again. She woke up in her own bed. No nightmare. Nothing. She'd been sleeping soundly when she abruptly awoke, in abject terror of dying. Her heart was hammering. Sweat poured from her. She was gasping for air. Again, she'd had the tingling in his extremities, the crawling scalp, and the absolute conviction that her time on earth was ending.

This had taken place shortly after all the shit with Roy had gone down. The assassin was thumbing his nose at the department in general and at Karishma in particular. And now she'd been stricken with a terminal disease. That was her take on the situation when she made an appointment with a doctor.

"You mean I'm just crazy?"

After putting her through a battery of tests, neurological, gastrointestinal, cardiological, you name it, the doctor's diagnosis was that she suffered from an acute anxiety disorder. The doctor was quick to tell her she wasn't crazy and to explain the nature of the syndrome.