Cured [ManxMan]

Chapter Seventeen

Another two days passed uneventfully. I walked with more success, with Mattie hovering the entire time, though thankfully never having to catch me, and I ate solid food. It was only plain chicken and rice, not even seasoned with salt and pepper, but after days of broth and bread, and years of raw flesh and blood, it tasted amazing.

Apparently, that was enough for Kiara to decide I was strong enough for surgery, and the surgeon—who didn't really seem to care about anything—only needed her okay to go ahead.

Unfortunately, as Kiara had explained this morning, they were very low on sedatives, so while they would have some in the room—"For emergencies," Kiara had said, which I did not find comforting in the slightest—they would be performing the surgery under only a local anesthetic. So I would be completely awake, I just wouldn't be able to feel my arm. Great.

Mattie, unsurprisingly, decided to stay with me during the procedure, and they hung a curtain so neither of us could see what they were doing to my arm, which was really for the best. The two doctors also had ulterior motives in allowing Mattie to stay, as he started speaking almost as soon as we settled, distracting me from what the doctors were doing.

"So are your dreams always memories?" he asked. I didn't remember telling him this, so he must have assumed it after I'd mentioned a few of them, or the bad ones woke me.

I shrugged. "They seem to be. I'm not sure... how many are real." My speech was getting better, and I was proud to have only paused once in the long string of words.

"I can tell you which are real," Mattie assured me. "What's the earliest thing you remember?"

My earliest memory was of a woman with red hair and sapphire blue eyes that I somehow remembered being the same as mine, though I didn't have any memories of seeing my own eyes. I knew it was the oldest of my small pool of memories because it was the most faded, and all I remembered was laughing and singing, and then she was gone. This would have been before Matthew met me, so there was no reason he would be able to tell any better than me if it was real or not.

So I chose instead to say, "A psychology project. We were at my house... and my father came home." I didn't continue, but I didn't have to. Mattie sighed, nodding before I finished speaking.

"The nightmare you had last week?" At my nod, he continued. "That was real. Somehow we got an A on that presentation, even though we didn't practice at all. A testament to our fine PowerPoint skills, I think."

Emboldened by the confirmation that this memory, at least, was real, I said, "We went to your house. I said I... thought I was broken."

The corners of Mattie's lips curled up. "I'm not sure how you managed to understand it was perfectly normal to be gay, straight, or bi, but had no idea people could be asexual."

I hesitated. I'd decided that day I was asexual, but somehow that didn't feel right now, at least not quite. "I'm... asexual?" For the first time I was aware of the others in the room, the doctor performing the surgery speaking softly to Kiara, who was assisting him. They didn't seem to be paying any attention to us, but the knowledge that they could hear everything we were saying suddenly felt invasive.

Mattie, also seeming to notice this, leaned closer and lowered his voice, though they were still close enough they could probably hear if they paid any attention, it made me feel better. "You're demisexual, or at least you were. Sexuality can be pretty fluid, especially in the asexual spectrum. Basically it means you need a strong emotional attachment to someone before you feel any sexual attraction to them."

I felt my face heating up, and cast a glance at the curtain blocking us from the doctors, who still spoke to each other in soft voices, so I could only hope they weren't paying any attention to our conversation.