Page 109 of Things I Wish I Said
A burst of agony radiates through me at the same time my head jerks toward the window with acrack, and my vision turns black.
When I wake up sometime later, I have no idea how much time has passed.
I blink my eyes open, but my left one won’t cooperate. It’s swollen and stiff. I can barely open it to squint through the darkness.
I groan when my vision clears, taking in the shattered windshield and the mutilated hood of my car.
I need to get the fuck out of here, but my brain is foggy, my thoughts muddled.
I bat away at the semi-deflated air bag and try to move my legs, but it’s a Herculean effort, and I’m not sure which is worse: the throbbing in the left side of my face, my whole body thumping, or the machete slicing through my brain.
I clutch my head, the feel of something slippery coating my fingers at the same time the distinct tang of metal fills the air. When I lower them, I’m unsurprised to find blood.
I must’ve hit my head.
I glance around me but find nothing but brush and a smattering of pines. The road is barely visible from here, and it dawns on me no one will ever find me unless they know where to look.
A bitter laugh spills from my lips as I reach into my pocket for my phone. Dustin probably left me here to die. Either that or he hoped I’d get arrested for DUI.
I wonder how pissed he’ll be when he finds out he didn’t succeed.
Air wheezes in my lungs, inflating my chest in a slow painful rhythm as I unlock the screen, fingers hovering over Cameron’s name, before I scroll past it and find Ryleigh.
I shouldn’t call her. I know I shouldn’t.
She has enough to deal with, but I can’t call my mother, and for reasons I can’t understand, she’s the only person I can trust. Maybe it’s because she knows what it’s like to have your life falling apart. Or maybe it’s because we’re both sinking and in need of a life raft no one can give us.
Either way, I hit the call button and wait while it rings.
The line clicks, and I know she’s there, but all I can hear is coughing.
Shit.
My chest screams, protests at the sound because Ry hurting is worse than any of my injuries. I try to clear my head, to focus through my muddied thoughts, but it’s hard.
“Hello?” she finally answers, a thicker rasp to her voice than normal.
I close my eyes, dropping my head back onto the headrest both relieved and worried. “Sinclair, it’s Grayson.”
“Grayson? Are you okay?”
I inhale, a pinching in my lungs. “I need you.”
Panic laces her voice. “Grayson, where are you?”
I pull the phone away from my ear as my vision blurs, my thoughts liquid as I manage to send her a pin with my location, then fall back asleep to the frantic sound of her voice.
Chapter twenty-four
RYLEIGH
It takes me anhour to get to Grayson between the time he woke me from a dead sleep to when I finally spot his car behind a thicket of brush, beneath a towering pine.
I pull over and flick my hazards on, even though the road is desolate. It took me several passes of this exact spot to find him and when I did, I quickly realized he’d been in a car accident.
My stomach tumbles to my feet as my shoes sink into the soft grass and I take in the wreckage, illuminated by the beam of my headlights.
Inside, I can barely make out a shadowy figure, and the closer I get to the car, the more my heart sinks.
