Heart Rate and Respiration

            I felt my face being slapped.  “Kyuhyun!  Wake up!”
            If a hundred years passed without hearing it again, I would still recognize that voice, although I’d only heard it once before.  I’d dreamt of it in the dark of the night.  If I heard no other sound for the rest of my life accept his voice, I would consider myself blessed.

            “Kyuhyun, you’re going to freeze if you don’t move!” he cried, shaking me.

            My eyes flew open.  I wasn’t dreaming this time.  Ryeowook was kneeling beside me in the snow.  His hands were gripping my shoulders as I laid on the ground.  How could he possibly be touching me?  Wasn’t he dead?  I’d never heard of a ghost touching someone before.  I felt so confused and I knew that my throbbing head wasn’t helping me concentrate because I should have been freaking out about it, at least a little.

            I was so stunned, I couldn’t speak.  Was I dead?  But I felt too much pain to be dead.  My head was killing me, by skin felt frozen, and my muscles ached.  Ryeowook cupped my face with his chilled hands and looked me straight in the eyes.  And it was then that I’d remembered him kissing me in the water.  Is that possible?  Kissing a ghost?

            “Can you hear me?  Say something!”

            “What happened?” I asked.

            “You fell through the ice,” he said, grasping my arms and trying to pull me to my feet.  “If you don’t get into the house and take off these wet clothes, you’ll die.  It was hard enough to pull you out of the water.  I don’t have the strength to get you up the stairs.”

            He was distracted, trying to pull me up, so he probably didn’t notice me staring at him.  But I was so dumbfounded by his sudden presence.  He was standing there, grasping my arms, with his cold hands, but I refused to move.  I was mesmerized, just watching him.  He reached up and ran one of his hands through his dripping hair, pushing it off his forehead, and shook the water off his fingers before grasping my arms tighter. 

            “Ryeowook.”

            “What?” he absently answered.

            Up until then, I assumed that I had to be wrong.  It couldn’t possibly be him.  But what were the odds that there were two Ryeowooks in this small town?  But how could it be him when he was dead?  For a moment, I just laid there, unable to move.

            “A little help, Kyuhyun!”

            I snapped out of my daze and sat up.  Then I pushed myself up, off the ground.  I would have fallen back over if he wasn’t holding onto me.  I shook so bad, I had to grip the railing to steady myself.  There were four flights of stairs to get to the house and five more steps to get up the deck. 

            “You have to hurry or you’re going to freeze!” he reminded me, nudging me up the stairs.

            “What about you?”

            His brows rose.  “The cold doesn’t affect me,” he only said.

            I felt myself shiver even harder as I realized what he was alluding to.  He was already dead.  The temperatures couldn’t kill him a second time.  He was seriously the best looking corpse I’d ever seen.  Because he couldn’t be a ghost, could he?  He was touching me.  Ghosts can’t touch you. 

            “We can discuss this later.  Start walking.  If I let you die here, I’ll probably be damned to spend eternity with you in this house.”

            “That’s hardly a deterrent,” I pointed out.

            “Move!” he shouted. 

            For the first time ever, I was a little afraid of my ghost and began climbing up the stairs.  About halfway up the second flight, I fell forward.  All my strength was gone and I sat down on the stairs.  My fingers felt as if they were burning and tingled.  They were too numb to grip the railing anymore. 

            “Get back up!  I’m not letting you give up!”

            “I will if you kiss me again.”  I don’t know what possessed me to mention it then, but I was having a hard time thinking of anything else.

            “I never kissed you!”

            “Yes, you did.  In the water.”

            Ryeowook pulled on my arm and I reluctantly got up.  “I was blowing air into your mouth.”

            “Can you blow air into my mouth again?”

            “You have enough hot air in your head.  Don’t make me regret saving you!  I could just go back to playing the piano and let you freeze out here,” he said, yanking me up the stairs with him.

            I quit arguing and continued to climb.  It felt like forever, but I finally reached the top and collapsed on the ground. 

            “We’re not inside yet,” he said, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me towards the deck.

            I crawled up the last few stairs and then across the deck.  Ryeowook quickly opened the door and dragged me inside.  At that point, I was shaking so bad, I couldn’t move.  He grabbed me under the arms and pulled me into the living room.  He ditched me in the middle of the floor and rushed over to the fireplace, grabbing stacks of wood and piling them inside.  Then he reached on top of the mantle and grabbed a pack of matches.  After a couple tries, he got it to light. 

            I was shaking even harder than before.  Ryeowook knelt over me and began to pull up my shirt.  “You d-don’t think…we’re m-m-moving too fast?” I teased, my teeth chattering as I spoke.

            “You think this is funny?” he asked, yanking the shirt over my head and tossing it off to the side.  “You’re going to die of hypothermia and you’re making jokes about me taking your clothes off?”

            I didn’t say anything else as he stripped off the rest of my clothes and moved me closer to the fire.  I was too damn cold and I couldn’t concentrate on anything.  I noticed him moving around the room and then felt a gentle weight over me.  He’d covered me with blankets. 

            “This isn’t going to be enough” he said, sounding panicked.  “Say something.”

            “See-seemed to…m-make you m-m-mad.”

            Ryeowook wrapped more blankets around me.  “I take it back.  Go ahead and joke.  I know you’re still alive if you keep speaking.  And I can’t let you die.  Not like this,” he said, rubbing his hands over my body.  I would have enjoyed that so much more if I hadn’t felt so numb.

            “Why don’t you c-c-call for help…or r-run over to my neighbor’s house?” I suggested. 

            “You’re the only one that can hear me and I’m bound to this house and the area around it.  I’ve never been able to go onto your neighbor’s property,” Ryeowook said, moving closer to the fire and adding more wood, which made the flames flare.  I noticed that it didn’t seem to bother him if the flames his fingers, but the sparks landed dangerously close to my blankets.

            “Don’t s-set me on fire.  I’d rather freeze,” I said, closing my eyes.  “If I get to ch-choose.”

            Ryeowook smacked my cheek again, which hurt so much worse when my skin was ice cold.  “No, no!  Don’t close your eyes.  I need you to stay awake!”

            “I’m so tired,” I whispered.

            Ryeowook shook me.  “Kyuhyun!”

            I peered up at him through my lashes, but I lacked the energy to respond anymore.  As the room began to fade into blackness and I began to lose consciousness a second time, I watched as Ryeowook stood up and ran out of the room. 

            I woke a little while later, to someone shaking me hard.  My eyes cracked open and I was thoroughly confused as Eunhyuk and Donghae hovered over me.  “He’s still breathing!” Donghae said, reaching for my phone, which was sitting beside me.  I vaguely remember leaving it in my car earlier and was thankful, for the first time in my life, that I was so absentminded.  Most of the time, it got me into trouble.  If I’d put in back in my coat, it would be at the bottom of the lake. 

            “I’m calling for an ambulance.”

            Eunhyuk knelt down beside me and wrapped the blankets around me tighter.  “His eyes are open.  Kyu!  Can you hear me?”

            I nodded.  Or, at least, I’m pretty sure that I did.  It was hard to tell.  I was still shaking.

            Donghae quickly spoke to the emergency responder while Eunhyuk tossed more wood into the fire.  It had gone down significantly since I was awake last but flared up again quickly and bathed the room in a warm, golden light.  I glanced around, expecting to see Ryeowook, but he was nowhere to be found.

            “Where’s R-ryeowook?”

            Eunhyuk leaned down to hear me better.  “What’s that?”

            “Ryeowook.”

            Both of them stared down at me and Donghae quit speaking for a moment.  Then he walked out of the room, rambling off the address to my house.  Eunhyuk stared down at me.  “I got the strangest call from your phone.  It sounded like someone was pounding the phone against something.  We were worried that someone broke in and attacked you.”

            “Someone h-hit me…in the back of the head…I f-fell into the water.”

            Donghae rushed back into the room and knelt down on the other side of me as Eunhyuk reached around the back of my head.  I grimaced as he touched the cut.  He withdrew his hand and it was smeared with blood. 

            “How did you manage to get back into the house?” Donghae asked.

            “Ryeowook,” I simply answered. 

            I was bored to tears in the hospital all day.  It was the fifth day already, but my doctor refused to release me because I had a concussion.  I tried to pretend like I was doing better, but medical staff insisted I wasn’t.  I did feel a little foggy headed, but thought it was just from some of the pain medication they’d been giving me.

            When one of the nurses announced that the police chief had arrived to question me, I was relieved just to have someone new to talk to.  Siwon sat down on the side of the bed, notebook in hand.  He’d been by once before, the day after I was admitted, but felt that I wasn’t quite coherent enough to answer questions, due to my concussion.  One of the nurses came in while he was there and asked me to extend my arm out for a blood draw and I asked her what an arm was. 

            “We found a shovel next to the break in the ice, along with a hat and empty cup of coffee,” Chief Officer Choi Siwon informed me.

            “They probably grabbed my shovel from outside and decided it would mak