The Bellamy Harris Affair {Lesbian Short Story}✔

Heart Monitors Don't Lie

I awoke two hours later, in a hospital bed with a blaring headache. I blinked several times, and allowed the small exam room to come into focus in gradual increments. All the usual suspects littered the room. A small beeping noise kept steady time beside the bed. Nothing was out of the ordinary.

Question was, how did I get there?

When I turned my head, which took a great amount of effort, I found the angry beauty from that morning sitting beside the gurney.

Her feet were propped up on another chair. The injured ankle had since been cleaned and bandaged. She sat with her arms crossed, and her head resting against the wall. A thin hospital blanket was strewn about her shoulders. I couldn’t be sure, but the slow rise and fall of her chest suggested she was asleep.

The questions I had took a backseat, while I contented myself with staring at her. The anonymity granted by her sleep, made me feel safe in my unabashed study of her features. Her eyes had me transfixed before. Now it was her lips that had me glued to them.

“Look who’s awake,” a petite nurse announced as she entered the exam room.

“Shh.” I put a finger to my lips, and pointed over at . . . I didn’t even know her name. There we were sharing a room in the trauma unit, and I hadn’t the slightest clue as to who she was.

“Oh, sorry.” The nurse made an apologetic gesture, and lowered her voice. She came over to my bedside with a clipboard and some meds in hand. “Well, Ms. Sinclair, we’re just about ready to release you. I just need you to sign these discharge papers for me.”

She passed the clipboard and a pen over to me, and raised the bed a bit more. I glanced at the paperwork. But on that yellow background, all the words seemed to jumble together in a bright unreadable mess.

“Um . . . how long have I . . . we . . . been here?” I asked.

“Since around eight thirty.” She answered, making note of my vital signs. “Your girlfriend brought you in. Said you passed out in the kitchen.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

In that context, girlfriend was a rather ambiguous word. It didn’t have to imply anything romantic. I just didn’t want any assumptions that had been made to continue. Though, I had been eyeing the woman since she showed up on my doorstep.

“Okay, then. Your friend deserves a thank you,” she said with a swift intake of air, and an upward tilt of her eyebrows. “You got a nasty little cut on your head when you fell. Needed stitches. That bout of walking pneumonia you’re dealing with might have had something to do with the fainting. You should try to take it easy for a while.”

Leave it to me to contract walking pneumonia in the middle of July. The few times that I have fallen ill, it was never a simple sniffle. I always ended up with something that had a possible mortality rate.

The nurse continued to explain the prescriptions I would need to have filled, and how I should take care of the cut on my head. I was able to steady my hand and vision long enough to scrawl my name on the discharge orders.

“Her arm might be a bit sore from the rabies shot. Tylenol is fine for that. Oh, and this is the cream for her leg.” She passed a small tube of ointment over to me. “She needs to change that dressing once a day. Lucky for her, that stray dog didn’t leave any parting gifts.”

A stray dog? I smirked. She had defended my evil canine’s honor. How noble.

I thanked the nurse, and swallowed the painkillers she offered to me. She exited the room with a promise to be back in a few minutes. It was hospital policy that I be escorted out in a wheelchair. And it would take her a bit to track down one.

I needed a minute or two to gather my wits anyhow. As I looked through the paperwork in my lap, the prescription label on the tube of cream caught my eye.

It might have been in violation of some HIPAA law that I even had someone else’s medication, albeit a topical cream, in my hand. But curiosity got the better of my integrity. Besides, that disease killed cats, not nosy humans.

I raised the tube to my eyes, almost touching my nose with it. The one thing that I inherited from my mother was her terrible eyesight. Even with my glasses, sometimes a squint was necessary.

Harris W. Lynwood.

Harris. Not a typical name for a girl. But then again, neither was Bellamy. It seemed our parents had been on the same wavelength when it came to names. Nothing was more unique, and oft hard to explain, than a surname as a first.

Hers was much more daring than mine. It wasn't at all feminine. I was sure employers found themselves puzzled when a petite woman with caramel skin walked into their office.

She had the name of an old oil tycoon. I imagined that’s what the Monopoly man’s moniker was in his heyday of wheeling and dealing, before the board game fame. That was likely the name he used at the AA meetings, or whatever anonymous group he used to exorcise his demons. He had to have at least one vice. Monopolizing ain’t easy.

“Harris,” I whispered, trying out her name on my lips.

I glanced down at my own name printed on the wristband that was cutting off my circulation. Sinclair, Bellamy R. 11/03/1986.

Wait . . . How would they have known my name? I didn’t have any memory of regaining consciousness between my kitchen floor and the emergency room. My eyes traveled over to the woman who was still asleep against the wall. A drowsy voice interrupted my thoughts.

“If you’re wondering how I knew all your information, I found your wallet.” She lazily lifted her head from its resting place, and produced my leather handbag from the space between her and the seat.

“You went through my purse?”

“It was either that, or let them admit you as Jane Doe.” Harris rose from the chair, and stretched her arms. Grabbing my purse, she deposited it next to my legs. She leaned on the bed rail, and pulled out a little case that held all my pertinent info. “I could have let them shoot you full of penicillin.”

I sighed and rolled my eyes, as the reason behind her intrusion became more valid.  

“I’m allergic to penicillin," I muttered.

“And how else would I have known to inform them of that crucial bit of information?”

“Point proven,” I said. “So why are you still rifling through my things?”

“Because it’s a treasure trove in here.” She dug deeper into the bag, pulling out various artifacts of my life. “I’ve never seen so much stuff in one place. It’s like a Walgreens.”

Books, feminine products and odd notes littered the thin hospital sheet as she continued to explore. When she held up a gold square packet, I quickly snatched the thing away from her.

The knowing smirk on her face made me feel like I was in eighth grade again about to have "the talk" with my mother. That experience had included a banana and hand puppets. Somehow this moment was more unbearable.

It wasn’t like I had anything to be embarrassed of. I was a grown woman. And I could bed a man if I wanted to. At least if that rare occasion had ever presented itself, I would have been prepared.

Despite that silent declaration of female sexual empowerment, my cheeks still flared a bright red. This particular condom had been in my purse over a year and a half, had been worked partially free from its package by the friction of the other necessities in my purse, and told far more about my personal life than I wanted her to know.

Harris smiled as if she could see right through me, and handed the purse over to me. For a moment, she stood in silence and stared past me at the heart monitor.

“You know something.” She spoke as casual as a mid-summer breeze. And then she looked me square in the eyes. “I don’t think I’d mind being Mrs. Bellamy Sinclair.”

The heart monitor went crazy.