Page 9 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

Who IS that?

I should open my eyes. I should figure out who’s standing outside my room talking about me like they know me, like they have a reason to be here, like they have the right to ask if I’m okay.

But my eyelids weigh approximately seven thousand pounds each, and the pillow is so soft, and the drugs are still doing their thing with the edges of my panic, and whoever it is will still be there when I wake up.

Probably.

Millie. It’s probably Millie. She’s probably just arrived, and she’s talking to the nurse, and in a minute she’s going to come in here and yell at me for almost dying and then hug me for a really long time.

I let myself drift again.

When I finally drag myself back to the surface, all the way to the surface, eyes open, brain mostly functional, the light in the room has changed. It’s later now, that golden-orange tint that means sunset is bleeding through the blinds, and there’s someone standing by the door.

Talking to my nurse.

Towering over my nurse, actually. A mountain that learned how to wear clothes. Like someone took the concept of “tall” and decided it wasn’t ambitious enough.

He’s got his back partially to me, so I can’t see his face, but I can see the breadth of his shoulders, ridiculous, frankly, the kind of shoulders that belong on a lumberjack or a superhero or possibly a refrigerator, and the dark hair, neatly cut, and the sweater that looks soft and expensive and completely inappropriate for a hospital waiting room.

That’s not Millie.

Millie is five-foot-two on a good day. Millie has hair that she dyes a different color every three months and opinions about everything and a laugh that belongs to a tickled seal. Millie would not be standing there looking like she just stepped off the cover of one of those “brooding billionaire” romance novels I keep recommending to Mrs. Patterson.

So who the hell is that?

I blink, trying to bring him into focus. My vision is still doing the swimming thing, but less than before, and I can make out details now. The way he holds himself, very still, very controlled, like every movement is deliberate. The way he’s listening to Debra talk, head tilted slightly, giving her his full attention.

And then he turns, just a little, and I see his face.

Black hair. Storm-gray eyes. A jaw that could cut glass and a mouth that’s doing something complicated, hovering somewhere between concern and relief.

Wait.

WAIT.

That’s the angel. That’s my hallucination. That’s the man I called “pretty” while I was bleeding out in my car.

But he can’t be here. He wasn’t real. He was a product of my concussed brain, a comforting fiction my mind conjured up to make dying feel less scary. Just a face in the chaos, put together from fragments of every romance hero I’ve ever read about, assembled by my subconscious into a greatest-hits compilation of fictional men.

Except he’s standing right there.

Except he’s very clearly real.

Except Debra is talking to him like he’s a person who exists, not a hallucination who should have dissolved the moment I woke up.

Maybe your brain is just casting a stranger in the role. Concussions do that, right? Make you think you recognize people? Make faces blur together? This is probably just some guy, a doctor, maybe, or a hospital administrator, and your addled brain is overlaying the angel onto him because it can’t tell the difference between memory and reality right now.

“You’ve got a very handsome hallucination,” I inform the nurse, because apparently my brain-to-mouth filter is still offline. Has been offline since the crash, possibly permanently.

Debra looks at me. Then at him. Then back at me, with an expression that suggests she’s rapidly reconsidering my cognitive status.

“Sweetie,” she says slowly, “that’s your emergency contact. He’s real. He’s been here two hours.”

I stare at her.

I stare at him.

He stares back, and his expression eases, relief, maybe, or satisfaction, or something else entirely that I don’t have the cognitive capacity to identify, and his eyes are gray, impossibly gray, exactly like the angel’s eyes were, except the angel was a hallucination and this man is apparently my emergency contact.