Page 143 of Perfectly Accidental

“We have to go to school tomorrow.”

“Do we?”

“Well, I do,” she sassed.

“But you won’t have to deal with next year if you don’t pass this year,” I teased as my nose dipped to her neck.

She laughed. “I am successfully avoiding my current issues, thank you. I don’t need to add to them.”

“Can I do anything?” I ran my nose over her neck, and she took a deep breath.

“Just be you.”

“Always, Barlow.” I rubbed her arm again, but then she jumped, and I felt my heart thud in my chest. “What have you done to yourself?” I asked.

“Ah. I had a battle with a tree and apparently I lost.” She lifted her leg and there was a dark spot on it to match the one on her arm. Blood.

I could only sigh and hug her closer. “What the hell am I going to do with you? Honestly. Babe, I can’t leave you alone for five minutes.”

“I guess you’ll have to stay by my side forever.”

“I think I could manage that,” was out of my mouth before I could stop it.

Thankfully, she didn’t say anything about it. We just sat in silence for a moment, then she broke it.

“Lombardi?”

“Barlow?”

“Thanks.”

“For what, love?”

“For being here for me.”

“The day I’m not here for you, Piper, you can look for my body in the morgue.”

“That’s rather morbid,” she chuckled.

I shrugged. “What can I say, Barlow? Only death will part me from you.”

“That’s straying into romantic territory there, Lombardi,” she warned.

“Well, I guess you can call me a romantic, then.”

She snorted. “I don’t think anyone would be stupid enough to call you that.”

I was saying an awful lot of things I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t stop.

“I might be,” I told her, actually believing it for a second.

Then I got some control over myself, remembered who I was and tickled her to distract her. Whether it worked or not, I didn’t know, but we didn’t stray into territory that might be considered too close to romantic.

We stayed at the lake, mostly in companionable silence, for a while longer, then she snuck me into her room, and I held her until she finally fell into a fitful sleep at about five. Even in sleep, her hand gripped me so tightly I had trouble extricating myself before her parents woke up.

So, neither of us were holding up very well at school the next day, but I seemed to be faring better than her when I found her at lunch. She seemed to be faring a lot less well than when I’d left her at her locker with Mason that morning, too.

She hadn’t wanted to talk to him, and I’d spent the morning thinking that maybe she was going to say no to him. But she didn’t seem like someone who’d done the rejecting. Surely the fucking idiot hadn’t rejected her?

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