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  ICU nurse Casey Anderson gets the shock of her life when she discovers her new coma patient is a man known in the new, brutal sport of Ultimate Fighting only as “Crash,” but to her, he will always be Chris Savage, an ex-lover she hasn’t seen in five years, a man she thought she’d never see again. Now “Crash” has really crashed—maybe permanently—and Casey is faced with not only the job of trying to bring him back to the world, but also her resurfacing feelings for a man she once deeply loved.

  Note: This is an 8,000 word story, the beginning of a serial work.

  Table of Contents

  CRASH: While He Sleeps

  About the Author

  Bonus Excerpt!

  More from Excessica

  CRASH: While He Sleeps

  By Lucy Lick

  Casey had been waiting three days for Crash to wake up.

  The rest of the world was waiting too—or at least, the rest of the Ultimate Fighting world—but she had a unique vantage point as one of the intensive care nurses on the floor. When he’d been brought in, bruised and unconscious, knuckles bloody and swollen, she didn’t have to check his chart or look at the admission bracelet on his wrist. Casey knew his name, had known it long before they’d nicknamed him “Crash” in Ultimate Fighting circles because of his tendency to fight cold, giving his opponent a cross-armed, cool smile from across the octagon, holding back, like a coiled spring—until all of a sudden, CRASH, he exploded with energy, like a force of nature, like a train hitting his opponent out of nowhere and leaving only devastation in his wake.

  Back then, his name had been Christopher William Savage, a name that had certainly foreshadowed his ultimate chosen path in life, but which had strangely remained unused, shoved aside by the other nickname, the one that had stuck, the one the girls screamed from the waiting room whenever a doctor stepped in to give his manager news about his condition.

  Crash.

  He had crashed all right.

  He’d gone down early in the fight, far too early for Crash, after a right cross that shouldn’t have done more than make him a little bit madder, pushed him a little bit closer to unleashing the energy he was known for. Casey had seen the fight, not during, but after, on the news, along with all the commentary about the brutal nature of such a blood sport, that it was no better than a human cockfight, two men going at each until with no rules, no regulations. She never would have watched it, didn’t really want to see, but it was everywhere, spearheading controversy about the sport, and she’d seen him go down.

  He’d been hit, but he hadn’t been knocked out. She was sure of it, the way his eyes had closed, showing a little bit of white before he went down. He had crumpled to his knees, the weight of his body then taking him sideways, in the same direction the blow had sent him. He’d never come out of it, had been in a coma for the three days they’d had him. He was responsive to pain, had some movement going on in his limbs, but he remained unconscious.

  She knew it could take weeks. His manager had been informed, but he’d been camped out in the waiting room for three days, his meal ticket comatose. She knew she was being unkind in her view of the man, who had introduced himself with the slick smile of most guys in his sort of profession, as Gene Hicks, while he simultaneously shook her hand and eyed her tits. He couldn’t help who he was, and in the end, she was grateful for his presence. He corralled all the fans and handled all the media and seemed to have a good time doing it. He also seemed genuinely concerned about Chris—Crash, she kept reminding herself—for reasons beyond the obvious monetary ones.

  For that, she was glad, because it seemed Crash didn’t have anyone else. Granted, he was in a strange city, far from L.A., the place he’d settled and now called home. But if he had a girlfriend or a wife, she hadn’t flown out and Gene hadn’t mentioned anyone. Casey had asked about his family—she knew Chris’s father probably still lived here in Detroit, if he wasn’t dead, but Gene didn’t know and a cursory look through the phone book and a call to information had proved fruitless. Gene told her Crash had no one listed to contact in case of an emergency, and that told her everything she needed to know.

  He was all alone, but he didn’t know it. All the tests had been done, an MRI and a CAT scan both along with the EEG, but there was no swelling in the brain, and there was still plenty of activity. Something had happened, but they just weren’t quite sure what.

  He was still in there. He had just… crashed.

  As she stood looking down at him, a big man made small in a hospital gown with an I.V. line his only current form of nutrition, his face still bruised, the purple fading into the orange and blues of a Detroit River sunrise, she realized the nickname had stuck for a reason. Chris had been destined to crash, and she’d known it, even back then in those last years of high school.

  As his nurse—she happened to be pulling three twelve-hour days, or rather nights, when they brought him in—she had done all of the tests, regularly checking his reflexes, his pupils, recording all of his responses. He was about an eight out of fifteen on the GCS—the Glasgow Coma Scale—which was good, and indicated he would benefit from the Coma Arousal Approach she’d learned and taught to all of the friends and family members of comatose patients who came through ICU.

  But the problem was, Crash had no family or friends. He was in there, fighting alone, and she wanted to reach inside him, find him, the essence of the person she had known, the boy she had loved, the man he’d become, and massage him slowly back to life. If she could have taken his heart in her hands to keep it beating, moment to moment, hour to hour, she would have. Why not? He had taken hers with him when he’d left.

  Now on the third day, they were talking about a Foley catheter and a tracheostomey and a feeding tube and all those sorts of long-term care issues you never want to hear, if you’re the loved-one of a coma patient. Of course, there were no loved-ones here. Just her, and while she didn’t qualify as one of Crash’s “loved ones,” not anymore, she did, in fact, love him. That had to count for something.

  Instead of going home that night after her first twelve-hour shift, she had stayed with him, using varied auditory cues to get his attention—the brain had the ability to turn off continual sound, so loud noises like whistle blasts and ringing bells had to be used, at irregular intervals. Thankfully, all ICU patients had private rooms. She continued her stimulus all night long, using an eyedropper on his tongue, varying the taste of lemon juice, mustard, soy sauce, salt, vinegar and hot chili, pleased when she received a responsive grimace.

  Using rubbing alcohol, eucalyptus, garlic, peppermint oil and ammonia, she attempted to stimulate his sense of smell, again thrilling at his response, any slight facial movement. It was all very encouraging, and she continued during her shift the next day, and again, didn’t go home that night. By then, she and Gene had an open line of communication going, and she brought him coffee and he updated her about all things “Crash” in the media. They were really trying to make him into the poster child for banning the sport, and Casey knew, if he’d been awake, he would have exploded.

  Of course, if he’d been awake, they couldn’t have appropriated him for their purposes.

  “Wake up, Crash.” Casey whispered the words, knowing he couldn’t hear her, hoping that something, eventually, would get through. She’d seen it happen before, after days, weeks, somet
imes months of intensive therapy. Most woke gradually, giving more and more indication over time that they were resurfacing. She’d only witnessed two coma patients who simply opened their eyes again and began to speak like nothing had happened.

  After the first night, when her supervisor, an old nurse they called Broom Hilda had complained about the noise, Casey focused on quieter senses for the night time shift. Tonight it was touch. She would give him a sponge bath in preparation for all the tubes they would begin to insert in the morning. Seeing him like this, so still and quiet, was disconcerting enough, but she couldn’t imagine the next step, the hole in his throat for the breathing tube, “just in case,” the feeding tube, the catheter. It was coming, and she dreaded it.

  Right now he was breathing on his own, voiding on his own—they had a collection bag on him, like they used in pediatrics, rather than a catheter. Casey told the doctor she wanted it that way, trying not to sound like she was begging or pleading when she asked for three days. Just three days without all the hookups, all the tubes that meant they were in it for the long haul. It was likely more for her own psychological comfort than his well-being, but she didn’t care.

  The doctor just shrugged and wrote the order. After all, he didn’t have to deal with the day-to-day care. That was left up to the ICU nurses. Thankfully, ICU nurses were assigned to one patient. It was expensive one-on-one care. Well, expensive for the patients, profitable for the hospital. Casey was paid a paltry twenty-five thousand a year, which barely kept her in a suburban apartment and paid for cat food for Mr. Pibbs.

  Cat food! She hoped her roommate, Aaron, would remember to feed him. She’d called yesterday and had him bring her some things, and she hadn’t even mentioned the cat! She glanced at her watch—after two in the morning, too late to call. She’d have to wait until it neared alarm-time. Aaron worked in human resources in a Southfield office and would be up for work by six.

  “Let’s get you all nice and clean,” Casey said, talking to him, like she encouraged the friends and family of her comatose patients to do. She started with his hair, using a no-rinse shampoo. The stuff worked like magic as she worked it through his thick, dark hair, feeling for bumps, anything out of place, and finding nothing. His cheek had taken the brunt of his fall, and the bruises showed it. The other side was bruised too, from the hit he’d taken, the one he hadn’t even raised his arms to protect himself from.

  “What’s going on in there?” she whispered into his ear, cradling his head in her hands. “Do you remember me, Chr—Crash?”

  She had to remind herself to call him by the name he was used to, in hopes he might recognize it, but it wasn’t the name she was used to. It wasn’t the name she had murmured on sleepy mornings when he slipped out of bed at five a.m. to go running. It wasn’t the name she had shrieked when she found a mouse in the bathtub or a spider on the living room ceiling. It definitely wasn’t the name she had whispered, cried out, sometimes even screamed, when he was on top of her in the middle of the night.

  “Do you remember me, Crash? Do you remember us?” She unsnapped his hospital gown in back and slid it down to his waist, her breath catching at the sight of him. He’d always been fit, his muscles clearly defined, but he’d bulked up over the past five years, and even unflexed, his biceps and shoulders were thickly muscled, his forearms too. His chest seemed wider than she remembered, and his stomach! The man must have been working out nonstop since he left, because his abdomen was ridged, as defined as a washboard, not an ounce of fat on him.

  He would lose muscle tone if he was like this for too long, and what a shame that would be. Casey lifted his arm, sliding the wet cloth over the rise of his shoulder, the slope of his bicep. She scrubbed him hard under the arms and was surprised to find the area hairless. His chest too. She worked the cloth over his wrist, his hands, his poor hands, his knuckles less swollen but still bloody. She washed the blood off, remembering how he would run these hands over her curves in bed, how he would grab her and pull her to him with a force that took her breath away.

  She picked up the Walkman and headphones she had brought from her locker. It was an old one, the kind that played cassettes instead of CDs. Aaron had brought it for her, along with the box of tapes under her bed she’d made him look for, exclaiming, “Casey Michaels, could you please clean under your bed once in a while? You’ve got dust-demons under there, not dust-bunnies!”

  She rifled through the box, finding the tape she wanted, the sight of his handwriting on the dried, peeling label making her heart ache as she popped it into the machine. She put the headphones on, listening to the squeal of the tape as she cued it to the right place, pushing “play,” and adjusting the volume. The sound of Taylor Dane’s voice took her back in time immediately, a song that had been number one on the charts at the time, a song she had played over and over both before and after he left, while they were both going through that long, drawn out period of deciding to stay or go.

  She stayed; he went.

  Now it was five years later, and a man she had never expected to see again had appeared in her life like out of a dream. Adjusting the headphones on his head, she put the cassette player on the nightstand, wondering if anything was getting through, if maybe he was dreaming about the mixed tape he had given her, full of songs about pain and loss and enduring love. This one had made her cry—still made her cry. She sniffed and wiped away her tears, hearing the tinny sound of the voice through the headphones Crash wore.

  Love will lead you back.

  Had love led him back here? Fate? Just a strange, horrible bit of chance? A random accident? Did it matter? She liked having him here like this, all to herself, hadn’t realized how much she missed it, missed him. They hadn’t said a word, but their reunion had been more powerful and more intimate than she ever could have imagined.

  Her washcloth made its way around the white pads leading to the EKG machine beeping in the corner, showing the slow, steady beat of his athlete’s heart, over the little hills and valleys of his stomach, which felt as hard as it looked, even while he slept.

  Casey had explored all the senses in his therapy so far except touch, and now she knew why she had been avoiding it. It affected her in ways she didn’t like to think about, not here, not in her capacity as his nurse. She was a hospital employee, a professional, and everything she had done, everything she was doing, was just part of her job. She probably should have discharged herself in the beginning, but she knew well enough if he’d been assigned any other nurse, none of them would have worked as intensively with him as she had so far.

  Because she cared. More than cared. She loved him, had always loved him, had clearly never fallen out of love with him, in spite of the time they’d spent apart. Falling back into her feelings for him hadn’t even been some sort of ambivalent process—maybe because he’d come in so helpless and vulnerable. He was far less stubborn like this, she had to admit. Smiling at this observation, she pulled his sheet down and began washing him from the feet up.

  His legs were well-defined, incredibly muscled. A heat flooded both her face and her body when she moved his hospital gown to the side to remove the urine collector. It was empty, and she carefully removed the tape and tossed it in the trash. He had shaved, even here, a look that both intrigued and appealed to her in a way she hadn’t expected. When she touched him, cupping his scrotum in her hand to move it aside so she could wash him, the weight of his testicles filled her with both nostalgia and lust.

  She couldn’t deny the feeling. He made her wet, even immobile in a hospital bed. Part of her wished it wasn’t true, wished he didn’t affect her this way when she saw his body, in spite of the cuts and the bruises. Casey washed his cock carefully, pulling the foreskin back—he was deliciously uncircumcised—paying close attention to the head. The longer she washed it, the easier it became as his cock grew hard in her hand.

  It was an involuntary response—and a very promising one from a coma patient, in a nurse’s point of view—but right then
she wasn’t a nurse. Suddenly she was in college again and they were making out on the couch. His arousal, involuntary or not, made her knees weak and her pussy contract—also an involuntary response. She sat on the edge of the bed, remembering how much he’d liked his hand on her. And her mouth.

  Thinking about that made her salivate.

  Apparently, they were both full of involuntary responses today.

  Casey put her washcloth aside, covering him up with the sheet again, for his sake and for hers. She didn’t think she could bear looking at him uncovered anymore, with all that rippling muscle and tanned flesh and that glorious hard cock still tenting the sheet. Rubbing her eyes with her palms, she yawned and tried not to think about the man in the bed beside her.

  She was exhausted.

  Maybe she’d taken on more than she could handle after all. So to speak. She told herself to get up, go get a Coke from the machine and check in on Gene down in the waiting room, but she didn’t move. Instead, she looked at Crash, his chest still exposed, rising and falling with his breath. He was still breathing, his heart still beating. He was in there, she knew it. If she could just reach him…

  Casey took the headphones off him and considered playing the song again—she played it for him often at irregular intervals, along with Kashmir, his favorite song from Led Zeppelin, and a tape she had brought in from her car of new, popular songs she liked, hoping he might recognize something current in Pearl Jam’s Better Man or Green Day’s When I Come Around. What she really wanted to do was crawl into bed and curl up beside him.

  Glancing at the door, knowing the risk, she did it anyway, toeing off her sensible white nursing shoes and sliding her feet under the sheet. Careful of the leads going to the EKG machine, she rested her cheek on his chest, pulling the blanket up over them both. The strong, steady beat of his heart against her ear was like a drumbeat of comfort. She could listen to that sound forever.