Tymber Dalton - Pinch Me

Surreal did not begin to describe it. Laura decided the best way was to start at the beginning since she was missing the last few years anyway. The early journals were filled with handwriting that looked vaguely familiar, a narrow script that eventually morphed into the penmanship she now used.

Well, used before. Even her handwriting was different now when compared to notes and signatures on paperwork at the shop from the days before the attack.

She had normal teenage experiences, hated math, loved English. A crush on a boy a year older than herself. Then a month later, he was the anti-Christ. Two months after that, she accepted his invitation to a fall dance.

I don’t understand why boys are soooo childish. They just drive me absolutely nuts. They are immature and absolutely not worth wasting time on. Why are they so cute?

Laura couldn’t help but smile at the words. They brought back ghostly images—memories or fantasies, she wasn’t sure. There was an easy feel, a flow to the rhythm of the narrative that entranced her and gripped her. Steve was right—she was a good writer. Even in junior high.

There was no school today, teacher work day (hurray!). I took the flats boat out by myself. I didn’t go far, just out to Bull Bay. Didn’t even take a fishing pole with me. I had my notebook and a pen. I wanted to write, work on my poetry and get a few ideas for my stories. I was the only one there, no one looking for snook, no one trolling for tarpon.

The air was heavy, sweet with the fecund smell of the mangrove roots and mud and salt. I watched a school of baitfish come in, followed soon after by a school of snook. Wished for a pole then! I watched them dancing on the surface, turning and spinning and ripping across the water. The only sounds the lapping of the water on the fiberglass hull, the fish splashing, the cry of a gull hitting the leftovers on the surface. Far away, the drone of an outboard had no more effect than a mosquito near my ear.

Wait, that was a mosquito near my ear. Remember the deet next time…

Laura made it all the way to her freshman year at Lemon Bay High when she yawned and looked at the clock. It was nearly two in the morning, and she realized she was about to fall asleep where she sat. It didn’t make any sense to force herself through them all in one night.

She went to bed with Doogie on her heels.

There wasn’t a girls’ day that week because Leah, Tilly, and Loren had a meeting for a charity project they were involved with. When Laura awoke shortly before dawn, she returned to the journals.

At seven she called Steve and told him she wouldn’t make it in and why. By eight o’clock, she’d worked her way to her junior year of college and had progressed from simple daily events to interspersing poetry and snippets of fiction. The writing improved as well.

Sunlight on the water,

gulls over the beach,

magical, a moment forever suspended in time

by the sheer power of its renewal

We should be so lucky

that nature could bring us back

to such beauty on a daily basis…

It was different from the magazine articles she’d already read. This was real and held a raw, magic quality that couldn’t have been evident to her as a teenager, or even as an adult fresh into college. Maybe not ever. Why else would these have been sitting buried in the warehouse?

Perhaps before she didn’t realize how good her writing was.

She?

Laura wondered if this was how people with multiple personalities felt. Even with most of her childhood intact, as well as other memory fragments returning, she still saw herself before as a different person whose mind she couldn’t decipher other than what she read on the paper in front of her.

She also read, yes, about the guy she’d dated back then. A professor older than her by fifteen years. So at least that part of Don Kern’s story matched up.

When Laura took a break at ten to stretch her back, she realized while she was trying to get her memories back by going through her old writings, she’d yet to look up any of Shayla’s.

After a quick search on her laptop, she found the website for the magazine Shayla worked for. She started with the most recent entries. One was about a marine research facility in Sarasota, Mote Marine.

A few memories trickled back as she read, something about a charity dinner.

She closed her eyes. Rob was there, dressed in a nice suit, as were their friends. Tony and Shayla, Seth and Leah, and the others.

But nothing more than a few stray memories from that night.

Still, she’d take the win.

She kept reading the articles, regardless of the subject matter, hopefully desperate for another recent memory including Rob to slide home and lock into place.

It felt like all she did lately was search for elusive clues to who she used to be. Like trying to find a missing person standing right in front of her.

Maybe that’s another reason Shayla and I are such good friends, because we’re both writers.

That made sense. Even better, it felt right.

She spent two hours working through the magazine’s online archives, sometimes getting sidetracked from Shayla’s articles by another article that caught her eye.

Unfortunately, nothing she read was enough to trigger a lot of memories, but stray fragments gathered like dust to static electricity. That gave her hope.

Then she accidentally closed the search result page and had to run a new one on the site. She typed in Shayla’s first name and hit enter before thinking about it.

Several new articles appeared, with a different last name of Pierce, but showing earlier dates than the first batch of articles.

Oh, stupid. That’s her maiden name.

She immediately giggled as she realized what she’d thought, adding one more hash mark in the win column for the tiny victory.

I remembered her maiden name!

Pleased with herself, she continued reading, latest articles first and working backward through time.

When she reached the last several articles, apparently some of the first ones Shayla wrote for the publication, Laura realized they were part of a series.

She froze as she jumped back farther in time to open the first in the series.

Part of her wanted to close the browser window, forget she ever saw it.

And yet, something kept her reading. Refused to let her stop.

As her heart pounded, thudding hard and heavy in her chest like a gorilla trying to break free, she took a deep breath and started over from the beginning.

Last weekend, a group of friends gathered around a table at a local restaurant and discussed their week, their jobs, their lives, graciously inviting this writer into their inner circle. Nothing distinguished them from anyone else in the restaurant.

Except that an hour later, after dinner ended, they all met up at a local private BDSM dungeon club to continue their evening…

She wasn’t an idiot. As she read, despite the way Shayla had disguised the identities of the people she met and talked with along the way, she easily recognized them.

Mental pictures flashed through her mind, of her friends, dressed in a wide variety of sexy clothes.

Or maybe I’m remembering?

Now she wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing.

Her mind pulled her back to finding the corsets in her closet.

A numbing chill settled over her.

And the description of the man Shayla had paired up with—mentor and teacher at first, progressing into Dominant—left no doubt in Laura’s mind it was Tony.

Several times during reading, she caught herself feeling at her throat for the necklace no longer there.

A necklace much like Shayla’s, which Laura now suspected was a day collar.

Information and memories and emotions flooded into her brain, small chunks interconnected by their topic.

Confusion set in, overwhelming. As she finished reading the series she didn’t realize she’d stood. It felt like she’d climbed almost to the top of an incredibly high stone wall hiding the answer to her prayers on its other side, and all she needed to do was get a little nudge to make it over and finally see what lay hidden.

She had difficulty trying to pull all her thoughts together. But she knew she couldn’t talk to Rob about this. He’d never mentioned any of this. And Shayla had obviously been in on keeping this information from her.

As had their other “friends.”

Of all of them, she suspected there was only one who would give her an unvarnished, completely truthful telling, answering any and all of her questions with blatant, perhaps even painful, honesty.

She grabbed her phone, which she put on silent mode and shoved into her purse, and her keys, and headed out the door after walking Doogie and setting the alarm.

* * *

She had to stop and buy a street map, the tiny map app on her phone confusing her even more. After looking up the address, she headed north to Bradenton until she turned in at the driveway and pulled up to the guard shack marking the main entrance of the sprawling campus housing the national headquarters for Asher Insurance.

The guard held an electronic tablet. “Name and photo identification, please.”