Page 49 of Fall for Me

“How old were you?”

“Thirteen.” Her face fell, and I folded the gauze. “Sorry. It’s a lot.” Suddenly I wanted to leave, to get up and go to Kevin’s truck and drive it as far away as I could from here. But some tenacious, new and wobbly part of me said something different.

Stay.

I didn’t know what to do with that feeling. I could feel Chelsea’s eyes on me.

“It’s not,” she said.

It was. It had been. But I nodded, pressing the gauze to her knees and laying down the tape. “It was a long time ago.”

“It doesn’t matter. Grief stays with you. At least, that’s what everyone keeps telling me.”

I bit my cheek, but the words dancing around were, What about if it should have been you? Does it live inside your bones, then? Tainting you for life?

She studied me a moment, like she knew they were there.

For a moment, I held her gaze, my pulse quickening.

Then she shifted and cringed, and I remembered what I was doing.

I wanted, suddenly, to ask her about her mom. For her to tell me something of her own grief. Not to relieve me, but so she would know I had room for all of it.

Maybe she saw the question in my eyes, because she smiled, clearly not wanting me to go there.

“Seamus?”

There went my pulse again. “Yeah?”

“I wanted to thank you for the other night.”

I lifted my brows. “Oh. Sure.” I should have been thanking her. That night had been the best night I’d had in recent memory. Years, maybe.

“I thought about it and… I’ve got a few more weeks off from work and I’m going to give it some time to think about what I’m going to do. I can’t go back to what I was doing before, not exactly. I knew that around my personal life but I hadn’t thought about it with my professional life. You helped me think about that. So… thank you.”

She blurted all of that out like she’d been thinking about it over the past few days.

I smiled. “I don’t think I did anything but… yup, I’ll take all the credit for whatever amazing thing you do with your life.”

She grinned—a great, beaming, toothy grin, flashing that crooked tooth in the front. I wanted to kiss her right then and there.

Fuck me.

“Also,” she continued. “I think you should get a dog.”

Now it was my turn to laugh, the tightness that had just coiled inside of me—me fighting my idiot urges—unwound, just a little. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. You’re good with dogs. We already established you have the perfect place, and you could use a friend.”

“I thought you were going to be my friend?”

“Is that what we decided?” She was smiling, and I knew it was an innocent question, but suddenly I wanted to tell her no. That being friends with her wasn’t enough. Eli was my friend. Chelsea was… very different.

I don’t know if it was the way she was looking at me, or the way our conversation had turned, but that tightness came back, rolling heat into my lower abdomen.

Hands—take care of her hands.

I reached for her hand, but when our skin touched this time, electricity shot through me, turning that warmth into something that burned. Shit.

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