"A coma..." I repeated, hollowly. I couldn't be in a coma. I needed to get to Minnesota and crush the dreams of United FC and their stupid sky blue jerseys. I needed to tickle the backs of Golden Valley's knees until she begged me to stop... or even better, until she used her black belt in Taekwondo to make me stop. Looking down at my body in the hospital bed, though, it was impossible to deny: I was no longer a lightning nightmare on a soccer field or the guy who could satisfy 18 of the most badass women on the planet. I was human toothpaste. I was nothing.
I felt like I was swirling down the drain when I felt Sloan's hand on my shoulder. "May I?" he asked. I sighed. I had no idea what he was asking to do, but at that point I didn't care anymore. What could he do that would make things worse? Sloan might be kind of a dick, and he talked like the kind of guy that would correct your grammar before you were even done saying something, but he also seemed like the kind of dick that had something important to teach me. Without looking away from the bed, I nodded and Sloan reached out and touched my body's hand. I felt something as he did it and raised the same hand of my new body to my face. Nothing about my hand had changed, but I could feel Sloan learning what I had done with the now useless thing he touched. A woman's breast, the slippery slide of a girl's slit when she was ready for me, but also the silky soft belly fur of Vancouver's cat Bobbin, quickly followed by the sharp sensation of his teeth biting me. I laughed, remembering. Bobbin knew that I was almost always too fast for him, so then he'd go and lay out in a sunbeam on his back like a dog just to trap me with that belly.
Sloan slowly moved his hand to different parts, my cheek, my hip, and then he hesitated. I knew where he wanted to go and I knew why he had hesitated. Not that I'd admit it, but I liked him better for it. I cursed under my breath, gritted my teeth and then I moved his hand to my legs. My legs. Touched by the gods and the next best thing to Mercury's sandals. Sloan felt me dance nimbly with the ball, teasing and infuriating the sad sack that dreamed he could ever steal it from me. He felt me kick for the goal, shooting it precisely into the tiny chink in the keeper's armor that the sorry bastard never even knew he had. He felt me sprint to save the ball from going out, keeping it in play just because I knew I could. Because I knew that my legs, my Quicksilver daydreams come to life, they couldn't just run, by God they could fly. When Sloan took his hand back, the sensation faded back into memory. Still looking at my ruined limbs, I found myself nodding, as if in agreement with a heartfelt elegy. Sloan's hand was back on my shoulder and there were tears in his eyes. "It is not all that we are, Cowboy," he said, quietly.
"Yeah," I said, "but all the same, it was pretty damn good." I sighed, starting to feel embarrassed and restless. "So, why do you guys keep calling me 'Cowboy?'" I asked, my ADHD brain already jumping to the next thing when a normal person would just do whatever normal people do when they had feelings that needed to be felt. Feeling stuff always took way too much time for me.
"Well, you're not exactly Cole Howard, anymore, are you?" he asked lightly, looking down at the shapeless lump of the former me being kept alive in front of us. "Why live in the past? We give people new names when they come here. Helps us move on. Usually the name is something derived from what brought us here. Anoxia, traumatic brain injury and malignant growth don't exactly roll off the tongue and it applies to too many of us, so we get creative. The news said you'd swerved to miss a cow that was on the interstate, and so, 'Cowboy' it was. We weren't sure you'd make it here, though. They said you were in critical condition and unlikely to live through that first week, but then we heard Katlyn at the front desk get the call and they rolled you in."
