With Closed Eyes, I See You

Chapter 1 – January 2015

"Michael! Michael! Get back here."

The deep voice rattling with fear shocked her out of her daydreams. Across the street, a toddler — two or three years old at the most — scampered away from a man who must have been his father.

She furrowed her eyebrows, wondering why the man didn't just go get the lad himself, until she noticed the large amount of parcels that he carried in his hands. Terror flashed across the man's face as he panicked and dropped the bags to grab his son, but it was too late. The child had already run onto the road.

Charlie dropped her coffee and ran across the street, barely glancing to the sides. A car screeched to a stop beside her, yells echoing all around her, but she had eyes only for the child. She scooped the baby into her arms and breathed a sigh of relief before a terror-filled shout made her glance up, only to feel all the air knocked out of her lungs and pain shoot up her side and back as the car in front of her braked a little too late.

She'd say that it all happened in slow motion, but really, all that she remembered thinking was, "The boy!"

She wrapped her arms and body tighter around him as she fell to the ground and knocked her head against the asphalt, blacking out immediately.

She did not plan on her day going like this.

# # #

Strangely, Charlie's first thought when she came to was that the myth of having full knowledge of what's going around a person when in an unconscious state was grossly unfounded. All that she could remember were screams and then black. Now, as her soul finally returned to her body, she awoke to the sound of arguing. Her head pounded, a thousand jackhammers working their way into the crevices of her brain. Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to confine the pain. God damn, she thought. What happened?

Giving up on her head, she concentrated on the voices, hoping to glean some information from them. Two males with London accents. One was a little older than the other, that much was obvious from the distinct rasp that elderly men tended to have. The other had an unusually deep voice that caused shivers to run up her spine. And that was about it. She didn't recognise either of the voices and this was a cause of concern for her—had she been kidnapped?

"What do you mean by you don't know when she'll wake up? Is she in a coma?" asked the deep voice.

"Mr Williams, you have to understand that until we get back the test results, we won't know a thing. She was extremely lucky that the car knocked her as it did, braking when it had. She could have broken a few limbs at best if the driver hadn't seen her. But that's all I can say for now."

"What is wrong with you doctors of today? It's the twenty-first century! Shouldn't you be able to tell me something I didn't already know?"

Okay, not kidnapped. That was a good thing. One of them was a doctor, the elderly man and the other was a Mr Williams. Well done, Charlie. You should be a detective.

So who was Mr Williams anyway and, assuming that they were talking about her, why did he, with his sinful voice, want to know about her health? Also, why was she having lustful thoughts about a man's voice when her head was pounding away to the bell notes of Notre Dame?

"Listen to me, Mr Williams. You have been given special permission to be here. You are not a relative to Miss Adkins and therefore I don't even need to give out any information concerning her."

She heard Mr Williams huff out a frustrated breath before saying, "I know, and I'm sorry for being like this, Dr Abbot. I'm just worried, is all."

She groaned as a sharp pain shot through her forehead. Where had that come from? It was like someone had taken a sledgehammer to her cranium.

"Miss Adkins? Miss Adkins? Can you hear me?"

She opened her eyes, immediately shutting them as the bright light assaulted her retinas. Trying again, she squinted as she looked at the man leaning over her. The image swam before her eyes for a few seconds before the shape of a head came into focus. Grey hair. The doctor, then.

"Miss Adkins? Can you hear me? I am Dr Abbot, and you are in St Mary's Hospital. Do you remember what happened to you?"

St Mary's?

Opening her eyes again, she peered past the doctor and caught a glimpse of the person that he had been speaking to.

Her blurry vision cleared again and the man came into view. Luckily for her, he was peering down at her over the doctor's shoulder, an easy feat for him due to his height. His brow was wrinkled in concern but his silvery-blue eyes gazed down in curiosity.

Holy mother of all jam and sugar doughnuts.

He was tall and he was wearing a suit, too, from what she could see. But God damn was he fine. His black hair was pushed back, neat until it came to his nape, where it flicked out rebelliously. Good lord, and those cheekbones! He looked eerily familiar to the actor Benedict Williams.

Wait a minute.

Williams. Mr Williams?

Definitely a dream, she thought. She was never lucky enough to have such incidents happen to her. She closed her eyes as she blacked out again.