Jenn
For the first hour, I assume it was touch-and-go. Unfortunately, when I was lucid I could barely remember my name and when I was sleeping I was no closer to getting back to work. All I could make sense of when I was awake was Carrie's constant nagging, which seemed to be the one thing that remained constant while I was sitting in a hospital room for reasons I couldn't quite remember. I felt drugs in my system, but other than "Blah blah be so stupid" and "Blah blah could have been killed" I was getting few to no clues.
"She told me she was going to take care of herself and now look where we are, Kim. I'm sitting here when I should be working. You're sitting here when you could be working. Jennifer's concussed for reasons we don't even know, and she was hauled in here with a dead guy and an almost-dead guy. What is it about me that attracts situations where everything becomes utterly fucked up?"
"The fact that you could even find a way to make this about you is really frightening."
"Yeah, what the hell," I tried saying out loud. "I'm lying here in a hospital bed and I wake up to hear you talking shit."
Carrie's gaze snapped to me then, and she breathed a sigh of what sounded like relief but couldn't have been, because she probably wasn't concerned in the first place.
"I'm sorry," she said, but I wasn't sure she was. "How are you feeling?"
"What's going on?" I asked, ignoring her apology and her question because neither one struck me as genuine. The truth was I had missed her, but she could be such a bitch that it was sometimes hard to conjure affection that I knew wouldn't be returned.
"I'll...give you two a moment," Kim decided before getting up and leaving the room. The way she said it, it almost sounded as though I was the one interrupting their personal moment, rather than the reverse. I'd been awake for all of twenty seconds, and already I wasn't too into reality.
Carrie nodded without saying a word, and moved to sit at the foot of my bed. She was careful, I noticed, not to sit on my feet, or upset my balance, or push me out of the way, and for some reason it drove me insane. I don't know why I wished that she would just throw herself down casually, recline there and kick me by accident and not care, but I did. I wanted her to be comfortable with me instead of worrying about upsetting me. It seemed like she never cared about upsetting me except when I wanted her to. But maybe I was just being unreasonable.
"Don't be mad at me," was the first thing I decided to say.
"I'm not mad at you," she said. "I'm concerned."
"I'm fine," I reminded her.
"Well, you're sitting in a hospital bed with four broken ribs, having almost slipped into a coma," she decided to detail for me. "So, if you don't mind my saying so, you're not fine, and you're beginning to sound like me."
"Okay," I acquiesced. "Then in that case, I'm not fine. I have four broken ribs and almost slipped into a coma. But I'm pretty sure I'm on heavy drugs right now, so I feel fine."
She smiled only briefly, and it was almost a sad one, before she put her serious face back on.
"What are you wearing?" I wondered out loud.
"Wow, okay. Thanks. You look great too."
"You know you look great," I challenged. "Too great for the office."
"I wasn't at the office, okay, Mom?"
"You not at the office?"
"I had the night off."
YOU ARE READING
Conflict of Interest
Mystery / ThrillerThere is only one thing that we can never change, and that is the place from which we come. Though she tries to control everything else in her life, there are three things that Counselor Carrie Everett just can't tame: her growing caseload, her weak...