Page 157 of The Moment We Know

He sighed, not wanting to answer.

“Is it sort of bad, or really bad?” she asked.

“Probably really bad.”

She gave him a fairly sympathetic look, which surprised him. He was still relatively sure if he was on fire, the only reason she’d throw water on him would be to save her couch.

David drained his Knob Creek, then gave her the very abridged version of events, after which she remained silent for several moments. “Well, I’m not going to blow smoke up your rear and say you don’t have a problem, because you do. And I’m not going to tell you she’ll forgive you right away, because she probably won’t—and she shouldn’t. I’m also not going to tell you that you can’t make amends for this, because you can—and you should. But I will tell you, ‘Good luck’.”

“Oh. Well, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, then tilted her head toward her front door. “And you’re going to need it because I just heard her come home.”

Chapter 63

David knocked on Paige’s door and waited, heart thumping, throat tight.

When she answered the door, her expression went from surprise to aggravation within seconds. Unfortunately, he didn’t see any sign she was even remotely happy to see him, which wasn’t surprising, but was rather disappointing.

And then, she started to close the door in his face.

Without thinking, he shoved his hand between the door and door frame to stop her, getting it partially slammed in the process. “Holy fuck!” he burst out, as pain ripped through him.

Horrified, Paige pulled the door back. “Oh, my God!”

He looked down at his injured extremity, which was turning red and starting to swell, but before he could answer, she was scolding him. “Why did you do that?”

“I—”

“What were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t really thinking. I was just trying to keep you from closing the door.”

“God dammit, David,” she sighed, sounding both angry and concerned as she took in the fiery redness and rapid swelling. “Let me look at it.”

When she reached out, as if to take his hand and examine it, he pulled it back. “It’s fine.”

“It obviously isn’t fine,” she disagreed. “It might even be broken … and if I broke your hand, I’m going to be even more pissed at you than I already am.”

“I doubt it’s broken,” he said, gingerly flexing his fingers and moving his hand around as if to prove it, because he didn’t want her to be more pissed at him. Thankfully, the palm and back of his hand had taken the brunt of the trauma, leaving his fingers unscathed, otherwise a few of them probably would’ve been broken. That didn’t mean all of his metacarpals were still intact, though (now that the shock was over, the pain was hitting him hard), but that was something he’d deal with at a later date. “See? It’s fine.”

“Yeah, I see,” she muttered, staring at his hand, clearly not happy with his choices this evening. Then, opening the door wide, she motioned him inside her apartment. “Let me get you some ice.”

Silently, he followed her into the kitchen, where she put some ice in a baggie and wrapped it in a towel, as a makeshift ice pack for him. “Thank you,” he said gratefully, taking it and applying it to his hand, which seemed to have doubled in size, including his fingers.

Paige also got him a glass of water and some Motrin, and after he’d taken them, she threw back a couple of her own.

“You have a headache?” he asked.

She gave him a look that said he was two IQ points above brain dead.

This really wasn’t going well.

He could tell she was fairly intoxicated and wondered how much more she’d had to drink after she’d hung up on him. It looked like a lot, and he told himself to not ask because she would likely put a knee in his balls … and he was in enough pain as it was.

“Let me guess … you were in the parking lot, waiting for me to get home?” she asked, her voice flat.

“I was, actually, but then Dolores saw me and invited me up to her place.”

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