Hot Flash by Carrie H. Johnson Page B

I’m saying you need to learn how to flow with them flashes and feel the power in them,” she said. “I’ll make you a recording so you can push Replay whenever you’re needin’—”
    â€œDulcey, shut up. Please. Just shut up.”
    â€œListen to me, M. When you think you’re going to lose your mind and the temperature can’t go any higher and you want to just melt and be done, get pissed, girl. Punch something, scream. You’ll cool right down and your sense, what little you have”—she cackled, then continued—“will come right back, better than before you lost it.”
    â€œYeah, except the hotter I get, the more out of control I feel, and Lord only knows what might happen.”

C HAPTER 9
    A nother week passed before I regained enough strength to travel and Dulcey could clear her client schedule. I called Bates to let him know I was coming. He had called once since I’d asked him to look into Nareece’s disappearance, only to say there were no new developments.
    On the way out of town, we stopped at the hospital to see Calvin. The nurse at the station said his condition remained unchanged, now three weeks in a coma. Three weeks since someone had tried to kill us.
    I stood outside the door unable to move farther until a nurse came and pushed it open. She was on a mission to take his vitals. I stood in the doorway for a bit, then stumbled in behind her and waited for her to finish and leave before I inched up to his bedside. He looked as though he was just sleeping. I mean, there were two jagged lines on his forehead, and a scrape across the bridge of his nose, but his expression was uninhibited. I rubbed my fingers over his forehead and down his cheek. His skin was as smooth and shiny as a sandstone. My heart beat hard and fast. I kissed his stilled lips and his cheek.

    Driving through New York took two hours, a drive that really should have taken half that time. Another three hours passed before patches of green with splashes of yellow, pink, and purple streaked by, the backdrop on both sides of the Massachusetts Turnpike. A long winter riddled with record snowstorms had finally given way to spring peeking through. Spring had bloomed all the way twenty years ago when Cap and I had moved Nareece to Boston. The tepid breeze and vibrant colors were even more inviting then, until I almost decided to move with her. Nareece shunned the idea. She said she needed to stand on her own two feet, which was a major contradiction where she was concerned. I thought her being in Boston would give me relief from wondering and having to deal with whatever insanity she managed to find on any given day. Really, her move became a twenty-year, long-distance upbringing, with no vacation from worry for me, until she met John, ten years ago.
    â€œHmm, not even then,” I said out loud without realizing it, but for Dulcey coming back at me.
    â€œGirl, what you talkin’? I thought you were asleep.”
    â€œNo, just thinking. Nareece and her crazy self. Twenty years and still she acts crazy more than she acts sane, and even then you have to wonder if she really does manage to exhibit a lucid moment in her madness. John has to love the ground she prances on to put up with her stuff. What is she thinking, leaving those babies?”
    â€œShe’s not. You and John haven’t let her. Every time the child burps, one of you wipes any spittle from her cheeks and then you want to wash her up while you’re at it, and dress her up in bows and frills and put her in a bubble lined with cushiony stuff so she won’t bump anything or get bruised anywhere.”
    Blah, blah, blah . Sweat beads popped out on her forehead.
    I appreciated Dulcey being the devil at my back most times, but sometimes she pushed so hard I could hardly resist the urge to snatch her face off. I was watching her mouth moving fast, spit spraying out every other word, head bobbing up and