Page 100 of Flipping the Script

It was way too dangerous to try and walk to the cabin now. I knew the roads like the back of my hand, but between the storm and the darkness, I could easily get turned around and end up lost.

And what if Jesse was coming? I couldn’t leave now. My car was blocking the road. Even if he managed to get my car off to the side, the road wasn’t wide enough for our vehicles to pass each other.

Breathing deep, I leaned back against my seat, ignoring the chill from my wet clothes.

I needed to calm the fuck down before I did something stupid.

Everything would be fine.

I’d be fine.

And Jesse was fine.

Hopefully that fucker was doing whatever he did on Friday nights and I’d find out when I eventually charged my phone and saw his text telling me he changed his mind.

My eyes flew open.

What if he’d already been on the road when the storm started? What if he was in a ditch or he had his own flat or he crashed into a tree?

“It’s fine,” I said into the car, my voice barely louder than the rain beating on my roof and windshield. “Everything is fine.”

It had to be.

15

JESSE

“I’m never doinganyone a favor again,” I grumbled, leaning over my steering wheel to try to see better in the dark.

I left my apartment three and a half hours ago, and I still wasn’t at Sebastian’s damn cabin.

It hadn’t taken me long to get a tire from work, but anything that could have gone wrong from that point had.

The rain started twenty minutes after I left the shop, right when I was about to get onto the highway. It wasn’t bad, just a typical evening shower.

But it was the weekend, and it seemed like everyone and their brother were on the road. And of course I’d gotten stuck behind an accident that had backed traffic up for nearly a mile. What should have been a ten-minute drive had taken a full hour. It didn’t look like a bad accident, more like a giant fender bender because people forgot that roads got slippery when they were wet.

The rain stopped for a bit, and I thought I was home free. Until I got to the offramp for the lakefront properties and the rain came back with a vengeance. Instead of a gentle shower, it started downpouring. I was two and a half hours into an hour-long drive at that point, and it wasn’t like I could just turn around and leave Sebastian stranded, so I kept going, hoping the rain would stall out again or lighten up.

It did neither, and the private roads leading to his cabin were in even worse shape than I’d imagined. The broken pavement, massive potholes, and missing parts were a nightmare to navigate, and the stretches that weren’t paved had turned into muddy slip ’n slides. I’d had to slow down to a crawl so I didn’t end up sliding right off the road.

I didn’t actually know where Sebastian was, but I was coming up on his property boundary, so it couldn’t be too much further.

Was he okay? I’d texted him a few updates to tell him about the delays, but he never opened them.

I’d tried calling him a couple of times too, but they’d gone straight to voicemail. I assumed his phone had died, considering how long it had been since I heard from him, but a little part of me was terrified something happened and he wasn’t answering because he couldn’t.

Had he seen my messages? Did he think I abandoned him?

I hoped not. Bas was a smart guy, but he was impulsive. I wouldn’t put it past him to try and walk through this if he thought he was on his own.

Fear tightened my chest at the thought of him lost in the woods, wet and alone and thinking I left him to fend for himself.

The back of my truck fishtailed, my rear tires spinning in the mud.

“Shit!” I wrenched the wheel, steering into the spin, and took my foot off the pedals.

Keeping my focus on the spinning tires and the still shifting back end of my truck, I used every trick I knew to gently coax my vehicle free of the mud and get myself back on the road.

---