Page 5 of Leather & Lark
When I hesitate in the center of the road, the door creaks open and a man steps out, his muscular body sheathed in a black wet suit. A mask covers his face so that only his eyes and mouth are visible. His build is powerful but every movement is graceful as he approaches.
My hand tightens around the gun.
“Code,” he growls.
I rub my head with my free hand as I try to remember the numerical sequence that I’ve repeated to myself several times since my stepfather gave it to me. With this strange guy staring me down, it takes a moment longer to remember than it probably should. “Four, nine, seven, zero, six, two.”
I can barely see the man’s eyes in the moonless night, but I canfeelthem as they slide from my face to my toes and back again.
“Injured,” he half-whispers, as though he’s purposely trying to make it sound as though he’s swallowed gravel.
“What …?”
He strides closer. I back away but I don’t make it more than three steps before he’s caught my wrist. Thoughts of my gun evaporate as his palm warms my cool skin, his touch unyielding yet gentle as he flicks a flashlight on and points it at my hairline.
“Stitches,” is all he says.
“Okay … well, those weren’t readily available,” I reply.
This earns me a grunt, as though it’smyproblem that I haven’t stitched up my own head wound.
I give my arm a swift tug but he holds on. My attempt to twist free of his grip is futile too—he only holds my wrist tighter before he shines the light in my left eye, then my right, then back again.
“Unconscious?” he asks.
When I narrow my eyes and crinkle my nose in an unvoiced question, he taps me on the head with his flashlight.
“Ouch—”
“Unconscious?” he says again, his tone commanding even though it’s barely more than a whisper.
“You mean, did I pass out? No.”
“Nauseous?”
“A little.”
“Concussed,” he declares, his voice a gritty stamp of two syllables. He drops my wrist as though I’m contagious and then turns away, striding toward the intersection where I sped through a stop sign to T-bone Jamie Merrick’s car.
I wobble after the man as he keeps the light pointed to the asphalt. He doesn’t tell me what he seems to be looking for, but I assume it’s pieces of the vehicles left behind from the impact.
“I’ve never had a concussion before. Could I fall into a coma?” I ask as I catch up to him, following close on his heels.
“No.”
“Do you think I have a brain bleed?”
“No.”
“But how do you know for sure? Are you a doctor?”
“No.”
“Oh good, because your bedside manner sucks.”
The man scoffs but doesn’t turn around. When he lurches to an abrupt stop, I nearly face-plant into his back. I’m so close that I can smell the lingering scent of the sea on his wet suit. It doesn’t take much effort to imagine the broad span of muscle hiding beneath the thin layer of synthetic rubber that separates us. Should I be wondering if he also surfs, or what he might look like peeling off the saturated fabric at the beach? Probably not. But I am.
I pull my imagination away from picturing his irritatingly athletic body and focus instead on the slow sweep of his flashlight as it pans across the road from one ditch to the other and back again.
