Page 10 of Past Tents

I forced my eyes lower, just as she whipped her head over her shoulder, eyeing me accusingly. “You having trouble keeping up?”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m watching your stride. It seemed like you were favoring your right side, and now it seems like you’re favoring your left. What hurts?”

We still had to cross the large grass field before we made it to the administrative building, and at the slow pace she was limping along, we’d make it a little before sunrise. She stopped walking and turned to face me.

I saw the feisty sparkle in her eyes as she readied herself to lob a sarcastic jab my way. She put her hands on her hips but cringed once they got there. Lowering them, she shifted from one foot to the other. Her forearms were scraped from wrist to elbow, and as she gingerly dropped them to her sides, I noticed how she held them slightly away from her body.

Grudgingly, her face fell, and seeing the fight leave her nearly crushed me. “Everything,” she muttered. “At least, my whole front side.”

Nodding, I reached her in two strides and slipped an arm beneath her knees. She yelped when I drew her up, carefully sliding my hand around her back and balancing her weight against my chest. “What are you doing?” Her hands flailed about, looking for purchase. She finally settled on resting her fingertips against her stomach while I easily shouldered her weight and trudged across the grass.

“If it hurts to walk, you shouldn’t walk.”

“I need to walk. Walking is part of my daily life.”

“You don’t need to walk rightnow.”

Dammit, this woman was stubborn. I’d known this for most of my adult life, given that we’d been friendly for years. Mostly we passed each other in the hallways and said our hellos and goodbyes without extensive interaction, but I’d seen her dig in her heels at a faculty meeting when she advocated for healthier school lunches even though they cost more. “We’ll fundraise. I’m sure the folks in Green Valley would be happy to contribute to the good health of their young residents.” No one dared shoot down an idea of hers after that.

I respected her enormously for championing what she thought was right and staying at the table until she saw results. Who wouldn’t love that kind of grit and determination?

But I didn’t love it when it was directed at me.

She wriggled against my chest, and I fought against the feeling that I liked carrying her more than I should. The warm weight of her grazing my chest was making me imagine doing this again—shirtless, with her in only the lacy pink bra I could see peeking out at the neck of her tank top.

Stop looking.

I snapped my gaze upward and walked a little faster. The sooner we made it to the nurse’s office, the sooner I could put her down before I had full-on wood, which would be pretty hard to hide in my track pants.

“What’s the rush, cowboy? Those brawny biceps getting sore?” she teased as I practically ran across the last few yards of thefield and kicked open the auditorium door with my foot. She must have been half-loopy from the fall because she never talked about my body. At all.

Scooting up the auditorium aisle would get us to the nurse’s office in half the time it would take to walk down the hallways of the main building.

“Not at all. You weigh less than the bowl of oatmeal I ate for breakfast.”

Her laughter vibrated from her body, and it warmed the blood in my veins like she’d wrapped her arms around my heart. I pushed away how good it felt. What was the point? This was the first and last time I’d hold her like this. No sense getting attached to a feeling that couldn’t last.

Shifting her in my grip, I held her a little farther away from my body and strode up the aisle between padded wooden chairs.

Flyers from last night’s production ofAnnie Get Your Gunlittered the floor. Fortunately, no one was rehearsing. I hadn’t thought through the optics of racing through the auditorium carrying the art teacher like a new bride. But the place was vacant, and another kick with my foot got us through the back door, right near the teachers’ lounge and the main office.

The staff hightailed it away from campus as soon as the bell rang, so we had the place to ourselves. Gingerly, I set her down on the cot in the nurse’s office and surveyed the room. I didn’t normally spend much time in here, so I didn’t know what the place had in the way of bandages, but I felt sure it had something.

As I started rifling through drawers and pulling out gauze pads, I heard Ally chuckling behind me. “Is something funny? Or do you have more comments on my workout routine?”

“Oh, I always have comments on it. You know that.” It was true. She liked to give me shit about how runners, and therefore track coaches, don’t acquire the bicep and shoulder strength I have from running. Ergo, I must be a gym rat. Ergo, she must make fun of me.

“I do.” I searched another drawer but found only more gauze and no tape. “How’s a person supposed to secure gauze without any tape?”

Before I opened another drawer, she slipped off the table and came to stand next to me. I felt the temperature in the room rise with her proximity.

“Here, let me help. I stocked the place, so I know where everything is.” She opened a mirrored cabinet I hadn’t noticed and removed some antibacterial wipes and a box of some kind of bandages.

I pointed at the cot. “You’re the one who’s injured. Sit. Tell me where stuff is, and I’ll get it.”

Blowing out a frustrated breath, she limped back to the cot and pointed at a cabinet across the room. “In there is a basic first aid kit. It has pretty much everything. I don’t think I need all that much bandaging.”

I turned and looked at her, dabbing at her split lip with a tissue and contemplating me so seriously I felt like I was the one with dire-seeming injuries. “Yeah,” I said, crossing the room to where she sat. “You don’t think so because we haven’t really looked.” Giving her a once-over, I noticed that her pants were torn at theknee. An angry-looking gash contained a combination of blood and dirt. She followed my gaze and seemed to notice her knee for the first time.

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