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Clara didn't know what to say, so she didn't say anything at all.

She, of course, let nurses look for any bruises or scratches on her entire body and gave them permission to dig deeper in every crevice of her body. They wouldn't find out the results to the test right away, but the doctor assured her that nothing probably happened.

Key word: probably.

"And you called me crazy for being worried about you," Austin says, referring to their conversation earlier in the day as they walk to his car.

Clara ignores his jab and focuses on not puking again. Her stomach still churns, but she's not so sure who's the culprit this time; is it the concussion or the nerves? After all, the doctor basically just told her that someone hit her over the head with a metal object, and she has no idea who did it and for what reason.

"I just want to go home," she says, pressing her head against the window. The coolness of the glass alleviates a bit of the pain in her head, but she feels every bump in the road through the vibration of the window.

The ride back home takes longer than usual. It's already midday, and kids around town are getting out of school already. Clara practically marches to the front door after they pull into her driveway, concentrated on pulling her house key out of her purse and placing it into the key hole. Flicking the lock, she walks to the couch and lays down.

Austin enters her house a minute or two after she does and closes the door behind him. "I'll get you an Advil and a glass of water. Do you need anything else?"

"A blanket," she replies, already closing her eyes. "I'm cold."

"Okay, I'll be right back."

Austin heads up stairs and grabs a pill bottle from the mirrored medicine cabinet. He jogs to her quaint bedroom, dragging the quilted blanket off the bed and heading downstairs again. Setting the pills on the coffee table, he lays the blanket on his girlfriend with a worried expression on his face.

God, he really didn't expect this to happen to her. Austin rubs a bead of sweat from her pale forehead and pushes a lock of brown hair out of her beautiful face. She looks so peaceful when she's asleep, but he knows that her brain is frantically trying to repair itself from the beating it took.

It's not fair that she had to suffer and not remember who did it to her. Austin is sure that someone must have been messing with her as she was coming home from work. He knows that she works late into the night often, and no one is ever around when she's stuck in the office, editing articles for the newspaper.

When he finds out who did this to her, he will make sure his (or her) ass is in jail.

No, Austin isn't quite perfect, either. He, too, hurt Clara exactly where it hurts. He's pushed her away so many times that he's genuinely surprised she's still around. Paranoia seems into his better judgement when he thinks about how easily Clara can just leave him, but now, he sees that it's up to him to keep her close.

He's her protector, and he takes that job quite seriously no matter how much his bruised ego encourages him to push her away emotionally.

Austin sits down on the couch, turning on the television to distract him from his thoughts. It works fairly easily, too.

But Clara isn't so lucky. Her dreams magnify her worries in real life and makes everything appear much worse than it actually could be.This time, her subconscious imagines all the ways she could have received that bump on her head.

First, she appears in the middle of a baseball field, and kids play the game around her. While she tries to figure out why she's there, she hears the crack of a bat, and the ball hits her on the back of the head, forcing her to faceplant onto the ground.

Clara blinks, and a new scene surrounds her. Slumped on a layer of dirt, she rolls over onto her back and looks up at the tops of trees above her. Stretching her arms, Clara's hand reach to touch the muddy walls of the pit she's in.

A dark figure above her tosses dirt onto her stomach with a metal shovel. And when her brown eyes meet his sparking icy blue eyes, she realizes that he's burying her alive. Screaming, the mud walls cave in on her.

Clara closes her eyes, and when she opens them again, she's underwater. Swimming to the surface, she inhales a large breath of air and observes her surrounding. The only thing she can spot for miles is the open ocean. Suddenly, a small boat appears. The captain extends a hand towards her. "Come on, now, you're safe now."

Clara reaches for the middle-aged man, and once his hands grabs her wrists, the scene transforms. His steady grasp turns into a pair of handcuffs weighing down her arms. Clara spins in a circle, looking at the stone-faced mob in colonial garb surrounding her. They stand three feet away from her with rocks in their hands.

A hard object hits the back of her head, and she lets out a scream of pain, whipping around to see who'd thrown it. Her eyes meet a familiar set of icy blue ones, and the dirty blond haired man lets out a laugh. "Didn't think you'd see me again, huh? Kill the witch, for Christ's sake!"

The townspeople collectively launch their rocks at Clara, and that's when she wakes up with a jolt.

It takes a few seconds before Clara realizes that she's not in colonial America anymore. It was all just a dream, she thinks to herself before closing her eyes once more. No one can hurt you in your dreams, silly head, you have nothing to worry about.

She didn't realize, though, that her dreams were a loose interpretation of reality.

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