Page 47 of Never Say Yes To A Stranger

“I did, yes. To the grocery store in town. A very small, perfectly safe town.”

“You’re not supposed to go anywhere without me,” I grit.

She lifts a shoulder, and her brows shoot to her hairline. “Umm, have you noticed that you’re barely alive? You look like you went out to the woods and got into a fight with a trollicorn.”

For the love of all the hairy beasts, I can smell the coffee, and it’s temptingly delicious. “A what?”

“Like a mix between a troll and a unicorn. Except the troll was the dad, and he was kind of nice, but the unicorn was the mom, and she wasn’t nice at all. I think those things are terrifying, actually. They’d mean so much business with that horn. Trolls just get a hard time because they’re not so easy on the eyes, which is plain mean. I think they’d be okay, or at least, there should be good ones in the world.”

“You do know trolls are a fictional invention, right?”

“That’s what you think,” she huffs. “You could be wrong, you know.”

“I think their existence would have been proven true by now if it was ever going to happen.”

“They could just be hiding,” she insists.

I scoff. “Not many places to hide with the rate humanity is destroying the planet.”

“Goodness. So crabby this morning when you’re hurting.”

“I am not—”

She chuckles, cutting me off. Shaking her head, she walks around the bed and touches my cheek. Not the scraped-up one, but the other one. Then, she tilts my face to the light, and I’m so shocked that I just sit there and let her. “Ouch. I’ll get you some more ointment for the scrapes. How’s your side doing?”

“It’s fine. And the bandages are still okay. No more bleeding after last night.”

“You’re sure nothing is broken? Would you tell me if it was?”

“No, but I would call in a doctor, and I haven’t yet.”

“Your pump isn’t here yet,” she points out.

“It’s not nine yet.”

Her eyes drift to the ancient digital alarm clock on her nightstand. Hers. God. They’re both hers. This isn’t my bed, this isn’t my house, and Ignacia isn’t mine in any way.

Her fingers skim down my cheek, making me shiver and ache worse than the bastard roof. Then, she grasps my chin. “You’re going to let me take care of you today. I want you to stay in bed.”

“There’s zero chance that’s going to happen.” Gross. I can’t think of anything worse or more humiliating than beingtaken care of.

“Do you ever think a hug might fix a lot of things? Like a real one? That if someone cared about you, it might actually fix the things inside you that hurt instead of tearing you up even worse?”

Sweet, innocent, lovely Ignacia—the woman with the pealing laughter and the joy and the sunshine where none should exist. She still believes there’s good in the world, and for her, there can be. But she wants to convince me that, for me, it’s possible, too.

“No.” My voice is flatter than my body after the impact of hitting the ground and also deader than I should be right now.

“I know that for most people who act like they have no souls, it’s a thing that happens to them throughout their life. It’s a thing the world does to them. The pain just stays on the inside, scarring them up, even if they’re immaculate on the exterior.”

“So you’ve said.”

“It’s okay to be that way. But it’s okay to not want to be that way as well.”

“By that definition, I’m perfectly fine, so that’s quite faulty logic.”

She shrugs, grinning at me with more sunshine than what’s shining through the window we crawled through last night, and it’s getting pretty sunny out as the morning ticks on.

“Get back into bed.” A pillow gets plumped behind me, and she pats it and eyes my legs. “Don’t make me swing them up and in myself.”

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