Page 131 of Whips and Chains
I faltered with the phone, all my concentration on her. “Just stay there, Vi. It’s going to be okay.”
“I can’t,” she said miserably. “There’s no time. You can’t hear the countdown.” Her sob almost drowned out her words. “But I can. It’s in my head.He’sin my head.”
She stared at me across the gap. It was barely twenty feet, but neither of us could move, both of us frozen.
“I have to jump,” she said again.
I couldn’t let her do that. I still remembered what it felt like to have the water suck you down. To have it in your nose and ears and mouth. To feel it seep inside your body until it was in your lungs, the searing, crushing pain suffocating you while you fought to live.
“Run to me Violet,” I begged her. “Please. Run to me.”
“I can’t.” She just stared at me. “Ten,” she practically whispered, her mouth moving but the sound barely reaching me. “Nine.”
I shook my head. “No! Violet, run!”
She stepped toward the ledge, her decision clear.
She was going to fucking jump.
She could hear the countdown in her head. That much I could see. And I’d heard enough of it before the white van had sped away to know that she was right.
We had seconds.
But I only needed one to make a decision.
I ran for her. Sprinted across the gap, wrapping my arms around her and dragging her back.
We both landed in the dirt and mud, my body cushioning her fall, right as she whispered, “One.”
I covered her, protected her, praying to whatever fucking god there was that this wasn’t the night He took her from me.
Or that if it was, He took us together.
Because I was so fucking in love with her.
Not in the stupid, playful way I’d told her before.
But in the soul-destroying, all-encompassing way a man loved a woman when he fell so hard there was no coming back.
If she was dying tonight, then so was I.
We both waited for the explosion. Her tense beneath me, both of us barely breathing, waiting for it to end.
Nothing happened.
I counted to ten silently in my head, my breaths suddenly so fast they kept time.
Still nothing.
“Did we die?” she whispered beneath me.
I cracked open an eye and was flooded with glaring brightness. “I think so. I see the light.”
“X, that’s your van’s headlights.”
“Oh.”
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