Lying In Bed Read Online Free

I thought. Our having the same shape cut in the same place on our palms didn’t mean anything. Even if the gash was similar, it was impossible that his psyche was ripped in the same places as mine or that the glue that mended me would be the same as had mended him.
    Still, I was mesmerized by his injury. Hypnotized and angered by its familiarity. I wanted to rub it off him and erase the coincidence of it, annulling what I couldn’t understand.
    No.
    I didn’t want to erase it.
    In what seemed like an obscenely short amount of time - mere seconds - I knew that I didn’t want his scar to disappear. I was fascinated by it and I wanted to touch it.
    Maybe I had been momentarily stunned from getting hurt. Or I was simply curious because of the odd parallelism of the way we were both marked. The why didn’t matter - I was fixated on the scar.
    Or maybe Grace, with all her talk about predestination and symbolism and how there were no coincidences had primed me for that moment.
    Grace made prophecies. She brought in amulets and crystals and left them on my desk the way someone else would leave flowers. I adored her. She was the older sister I never had. And so I took her offerings and respected her. But I had never believed any of what she told me when she went all “new age” on me.
    Or so I thought.
    Because the truth was, in that moment, looking down at the scar on his hand, a mirror image of my own fresh one, all I could think about was what Grace would say it meant and how she would interpret my reaction to it.
    Maybe the pain in my hand
had
made me hypersensitive to other feelings, or perhaps it was the sound of the man’s voice or the way he looked so familiar in the instant when I’d seen his face, I didn’t know. But my reaction was both completely unexpected and foreign to me. I disliked it. And so I mistrusted the man who had aroused it to me.
    I wanted to dissect his scar. Explore it with my fingertip and read it like Braille. Examine its contours and ridges just as I had done to my own cut. I needed to prove how distinct it was from mine, how dry, how healed compared to my open, sharp-edged and wet wound.
    “There’s blood everywhere,” he said. The wind now a worry. “How bad is that cut? You might need stitches.” He gripped me by my elbow and lifted me up.
    As I stood, shards of broken glass fell from my skirt and hit the tile floor with a high pitched sound that rung out like glass bells.
    In one swift motion he pulled my hand toward him, bending over it so quickly that I didn’t get a chance to see any more of his face and instead found myself studying his hair which was burnt umber – a deep brown color I used when I painted - and fell forward in thick curls.
    “Are you a doctor?”
    “No. But I know about cuts.”
    I was quiet while he studied my hand. A customer in the store who had come to my aid. A stranger who I had no reason to notice. He was much taller than me, wore blue jeans and a black turtleneck. He was lean and gangly and almost disheveled but not quite.
    I was aware of his strong fingers on my skin. Where we made contact, my nerve endings pulsed. Similar to the throb of pain, sensation spiked and retreated and then repeated itself.
    It made me uncomfortable and uneasy. I was too aware of his touch. The accident had made me nervous.
    “This cut isn’t deep enough for all this blood. You must be hurt somewhere else.” He picked up his head and looked at me. “Are you?”
    Once he wasn’t bending over my hand anymore, I examined his face while I explained that what he thought was blood on my clothes and the floor was only ink and how I’d been kneeling, searching on a low shelf for a box of gold leaf paper, heard the phone ring, rushed to get it, pulled myself up using a shelf above me, but somehow yanked out and spilled a box of six bottles of vermilion ink in the process. How all of them had broken around me, sending glass and splashes of red liquid everywhere.
    “Something