Page 8 of Lovesick
My body molded to it like mush.
4
JJ
Mark appeared from the attic thirty minutes after Lizbeth went to bed. He tilted his head toward the spare bedroom. “Bed?” he mouthed.
I nodded.
Once she’d left, I’d sunk into food preparation. The smell of marinara and pasta filled the room. Mark gravitated to the food naturally.
“She okay?” Mark asked in a quiet voice as he approached. “She didn’t look so great when you arrived.”
“Fine, I think.” I rubbed a hand over my face, suddenly exhausted. I recounted the story, with the scariest parts emphasized appropriately. While I told it, Mark grabbed dishes for dinner.
“Seriously?” he whispered and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “JJ, you’re a freaking hero. It’s all those climbing muscles. I always knew you had a knight in shining armor buried underneath all those layers of hippie.”
“I couldn’t have done anything if she hadn’t gotten herself halfway out already.”
“You look shaken up.”
He leaned back in his chair, spaghetti piled high in a bowl. Ifeltshaken up. Reality had set in. Tonight could have been a tragedy. I loosed my hair and let it fall to my shoulders, relieved to ease the pressure from the hair tie.
“Iamshaken. I almost didn’t get her.”
“Well done, brother. You saved her.”
He decked me lightly in the arm as he dove into his food. My mind wandered to Lizbeth. She still seemed to be in shock. Her overall mien was a bit too calm. I wasn’t the one who’d dangled over a white-capped river, seconds away from death, and even I felt it all the way to my gut.
“I made you some hot chocolate,” I said. “It’s in the microwave staying warm.”
“But not because you made it in there.”
“Don’t insult me.”
“You’re the best brother ever. Real, made-from-scratch hot chocolate on a blizzard night? You’ll always be my fave, JJ. What would I ever do without you? Fortunately, we never have to know. Hey, I had an idea tonight and started putting out some feelers. You want in on it?”
His voice faded into the background as I turned my attention back to my food. Mark rarely wanted me to respond—he just wanted a listening ear—so I let my mind drift.
Thoughts of a certain terrorized redhead circled my brain in an endless loop for the rest of the night.
5
Lizbeth
When I woke up, my neck felt as tight as the spine of a new book.
I straightened carefully. My collarbone protested each millimeter where it had pressed against the seat belt. My stomach felt a bit sore from lying on the windowsill before the car fell. A quick inventory confirmed I was fine. Alive.
A wooden ceiling loomed overhead. Behind me, the warm crackle of a dying fire filled the air. I blinked away a dream of tangled steel, grating metal, and deep ravines.
Yet here I sat in ... Adventura.
Memory returned quickly. With a groan, I rubbed a hand over my face. At some point in the night, I’d slipped out to the living room, too cold to sleep. The Bailey brothers had already gone to bed, so I’d made a little nest on the couch closest to the fire and slept there.
Nightmares had replayed every second of the crash in excruciating detail all night long. As if my brain wanted to process it in slow motion. In the dream, my car hadn’t just been sliding. No, I’d dangled on the edge, one finger on a rock. I screamed and screamed and screamed, stuck in the awful sensation ofalmostdying.
It left me feeling cold.
