Tymber Dalton: Pinch Me

“Can we bring you and her dinner from Sigalo’s?”

His stomach rumbled at the name of his favorite restaurant. “Shayla knows her favorites. I’ll take anything.”

“Maybe a little gastronomical prompting will help her memory.”

“Can’t hurt.” They ate there nearly every Saturday night with Tony, Shayla, and their other friends.

Except last Saturday.

Last Saturday, Rob had been praying she’d make it through another night.

“See you then,” Tony said.

“Thanks, man.” Rob stared at the phone for a moment after ending the call. Their little social group, which they’d dubbed the Suncoast Society because of the munch they’d met through, had been through thick and thin with each other. For some of their members, including Laura, they’d been closer than family.

And they never hesitated to rush to a friend’s side to help or provide support.

Maybe it was selfish of him, but he needed his adopted family’s support, and he didn’t have any close biological family to turn to.

He usually wasn’t one to wear his emotions on his sleeve, except in front of Laura.

But he wasn’t ashamed to admit he needed Tony’s strong and steady presence for a little while. And maybe Shayla would help jostle something in Laura’s memory. The two women were closer than sisters.

He put the box of invitations on the passenger seat and headed for the hospital.

When Rob returned to the hospital, he felt a slight lift in his spirits to learn Laura had already been moved to a private room.

That was quickly dashed when her doctor informed him her memory hadn’t returned.

Rob found her sitting up in bed, watching cable news with the deputy and the barely eaten remnants of her lunch still sitting on her bed tray. The deputy nodded to him and left to sit in the hall, closing the door behind him.

“Hi, Laura.”

She didn’t look away from the TV, where she stared at it, frowning over a commercial for a local landscaping firm out of Venice. “Hi.” The engagement ring sat on the bedside table next to her.

Rob tried not to show his pain. The last thing Laura needed now was to deal with his emotions. He wanted her to focus on getting her memory back.

He pulled a chair up next to her bed and showed her the albums. “I brought some stuff for us to look at. The doctors said maybe it would help.”

Then she pulled her attention from the TV. “Can we talk first?”

“Sure.”

“How did we meet?”

He paused, not sure how to handle this hot potato. “Through mutual friends,” he said, their usual answer to someone vanilla who asked that same question.

He thought she might ask him for more details, but then she started asking about other things and the questions came one right after another.

Where she was from? Florida. Where was her family? Her parents were dead, killed in a car accident a little over a year earlier, and he hadn’t been able to contact her brother, Bill, in Montana. What did she do for a living? She owned a dive shop and charter business, and wrote freelance articles for fishing and scuba diving magazines and websites.

Why, who, what, where—it nearly wore him out until he put it into perspective that she was, essentially, hearing these things for the first time.

Laura finally paused and lay back in bed, closing her eyes.

“I also brought you some clothes. Your clothes,” he said. “I thought it might make you a little more comfortable.” He opened the duffle bag for her. She reached in and sorted through them, finally selecting a T-shirt and pair of sweat pants.

When he offered her his arm to help her sit up she hesitated at first, then tentatively let him assist her out of bed. He helped her to the bathroom, standing back while she locked the door behind her. She obviously wasn’t comfortable having him so close.

He wasn’t used to this from her, someone he’d shared his life and bed with for two years.

Someone who, until a few days ago, had called him Sir.

Someone who had trusted him with her life and safety when they played very edgy scenes.

Someone who had never hesitated—before—to turn herself over to him completely and without reservation.

Once again he had to force himself to remember he was a stranger to her.

She took several minutes to change and when she emerged, he helped her back to bed. The Laura he knew was physically there, but the tangible emotional gulf felt miles deep and infinitely wide.

Laura reached for the photo albums. The first were from her childhood. Rob thought maybe the older memories would return faster, based on what the doctors had told him.

He watched while she slowly flipped through the pages, occasionally asking him for a name or place. Some he knew, some he didn’t. Once they got to the albums with pictures of them as a couple, he told her the stories, trying to relive them for her as best he could. He also had a ton of pictures on his phone, but until he could sanitize the photo album and remove the ones of her in bondage, or her proudly sticking her ass out so he could take pictures of her bruises, he’d hold off showing them to her.

They were halfway through one album when she smiled at a picture of them on a fishing boat. Rob held a large amberjack. Laura used two hands to hoist an impressive grouper.

“Do you remember that day?” he asked.

Laura closed her eyes, deep in concentration. “Something about a ledge.”

Rob didn’t give her any information, made her search for it.

“Maybe a…croaker?” She looked at him, her brow furrowed. He nodded.

Her finger traced the picture. “We were scuba diving?”

“Yes.”

“I know how to do that?”

He forced the smile. “You’re an instructor.”

“Oh, yeah. You said that, didn’t you. Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay. I know you’re overwhelmed.”

That earned him a sad smile. “ That’s an understatement.”

She stared at the photo for a few more minutes without speaking. The obvious intensity of her effort was mind boggling. “Something about a lobster.” After several more minutes she finally shook her head. “That’s all I remember.”

He tried to hide his disappointment. She’d been so close to getting it. “We were spearfishing in the Gulf. You shot the grouper, and he went under a ledge, making the loud croaking noise they do when they’re wounded or scared. While you were digging it out, I shot that amberjack and had my hands full. You yelled into your regulator and I turned and you had a hold of the grouper, but a large lobster had backed out of the hole and you didn’t have any hands to grab it.”

“Was that good?”

He laughed. “Well, it would have been if we could have got it. Lobsters aren’t common this far north in the Gulf. It was lobster season, and we had lobster stamps on our fishing licenses. But he got away, baby girl.”

She flinched and looked at him with a suspicious glare.

“What’s wrong?”

“Baby girl?”

That was one of his pet names for her, had been for years. She was his “baby girl,” even though they didn’t do age play, and he could call her that regardless of who was around. In front of vanillas, she’d teasingly call him Fireman instead of Sir. Or Hose Jockey, depending on her mood and whether she was trying to get him into bed. She had a hellacious sense of humor.

But alone, she always called him Sir.

“That doesn’t bring anything back?” he softly asked, hoping his voice didn’t tremble. He tried to remember Singh’s warning, that he had to stay strong for her.

“Not really.” She wrinkled her nose again. “You really called me that? I liked it?”