by Amelia Wilde
He’s not paying attention to the curves in the road, but he is paying attention to whatever he’s trying to find on the floor of the cab. His forehead is wrinkled, but he’s looking at something far away.
Fuck. Fuck.
Eva gasps, a strangled sound, and the information from my brain finally reaches my muscles.
There’s no time.
I wrap my arm around her waist and lift her, throwing us both over the guardrail as the semi rear-ends the little rental car at top speed. The guardrail catches my thigh as we go over, a line of metal and pain against my shorts, and all I know is I can’t land on top of her. I shift my weight just in time to take the brunt of the impact.
Thank God, there’s not a cliff on the other side of the rail. Just a gentle sloping hill, and I brace my arms so I don’t crush Eva. We tumble into a patch of wildflowers.
“Oh, shit.” It must be the driver of the semi. “Oh, shit.” I look up, and the guy is standing in the middle of the road. The collision carried the little rental car and the cab of the truck across the centerline. He must have overcorrected, and now his semi truck is blocking the entire road. “Fuck!” he shouts, and then he appears at the guardrail. His nose is still bleeding. “Are you guys okay?”
I turn my attention back toward Eva, who is on her back beneath me, wildflowers in her hair.
Her face is an ashen pale, and tears leak from the corners of her eyes.
Oh, Jesus. What if there was something on the ground? What if—
My field training kicks in and I put a hand to the side of her face. “You’re okay,” I tell her, trying to telegraph as much calm as possible. “I’ve got you. You’re okay, Eva.”
I check the front of her clothes for any sign of blood.
There is none.
“Are you okay?” The driver doesn’t sound okay. “I’m going to call 9-1-1. Don’t worry. I’ve got it,” he calls. “I’ve got it.”
I press my fingers up and down Eva’s arms, down to her wrists, to her hands. “Does anything hurt? Eva, tell me if it hurts.”
She presses her lips together so tightly they go white.
“Eva,” I say firmly. “Are you in any pain?”
She shakes her head.
“Okay. I’m going to turn you over, so I can make sure.”
I don’t know what I’m expecting when I lift her. A piece of shrapnel jutting out of her back. Something equally horrific.
But when I’ve cradled her up far enough to see, there’s nothing. A few flower petals. A blade of grass.
She’s shaking in my arms. Shock? I pull her in tighter. The police will be here any minute, and probably an ambulance, but there’s no fucking way in hell I’m letting anyone touch her when she’s this terrified. Eva is already coiled tight under the stress of her deadline. The urge to protect her is like a fire raging across the center of my chest. I need to, even though I know a woman like her…. She’s stronger than anyone thinks. But why? What made her that way?
Jesus. This is not the time to think about this. Not now.
“Hey.” I keep my voice even and calm. “We’re all right. It didn’t touch us.”
Eva turns so I can see her face. Her teeth are chattering, and she’s still a deathly pale. I can’t tell if she knows she’s crying or not. I wipe away one tear with the pad of my thumb, and then another. Eva slides her hand up my shirt then grips the fabric in her fist.
Then she uses it to pull herself upright.
Both her hands go to her face, touching her cheeks, her lips, her hair. I smooth my hand over her curls. Tears drip down onto her lap. Eva seems to notice them for the first time, tracing one fingertip over the droplet.
Her eyes move over to my lap.
“Gorgeous.” Am I even getting through to her? “We’re both fine.” I glance back up at the road. “The rental car is a goner, but we can chalk that up to a freak accident.” I smile at her, even though my heart is still pounding. “The insurance will cover it.”
Eva won’t look at me, but she does reach up to brush another teardrop away. “It was….” She swallows hard. “That was so much more terrifying than I imagined it.” She moves closer, a subtle shift, and I could die with how much I love that. But her eyes are still on my lap. “And also you’re bleeding.”
11
Eva
I can’t stop seeing it in my mind, over and over. The red cab of the truck coming right at us. The rental car would have crushed us to death before the semi swept it out into the middle of the highway. I saw it when we went over the guardrail, heard it, the screech of metal against metal, sparks flying, the impact right where we’d been standing.
Oh, fuck, it had been so awful. I’ll never forget it for the rest of my life. That sharp, wrenching fear. Fuck. I really might die. That’s what I’d been thinking.
And that was the worst thing of all.
They couldn’t have been oblivious. Could they? No. All of them, all three of them, had been awake when it happened, and now I’ve survived again in a cruel twist of fate.
The knowledge ricochets around underneath my skin like a creature trying to get out. I can feel the shakes, but I can’t stop them.
“The paramedics are here,” Ben says as he lifts me from the ground and sets me on my feet, holding on a long extra moment to make sure I’m not going to fall over. He ran his hands over my ankles and legs, but he’s double-checking to be sure. I’m still busy replaying that near miss in my mind to say anything.
We’re walking, and then there are hands and voices helping us step back over the guardrail. Ben must give my name, because the next thing I know, there’s a black woman with a smooth voice saying, “Eva, my name is Natalie, and I’m here to help you,” and the two of them are ushering me toward the open back of an ambulance.
The antiseptic smell of it hits me like a punch in the face and I rear back into Natalie’s arm. Ben reaches out to steady me. “No. Nope. I’m good.” It lifts me bodily out of my memory and into the present. And in this present, I am not getting into the back of an ambulance. I am not going to the hospital.
“Ma’am,” says the paramedic, Natalie, “you’ve had a shock, and it’ll be best for you if you—”
“I said no,” I repeat louder. I don’t want either of them to take their hands off me, but I am not going to any hospital. Not today.
I look over my shoulder and catch Natalie exchanging a look with Ben. “Sir, if you and your wife—”
I’ll admit it; wife sounds nice enough to send a jolt of warmth right through me. But to hell with everyone at this scene if they’re going to try to make me go in there. “Ben’s not my husband,” I say, and it sounds like a lie. “And I’m not going in the ambulance.”
Natalie looks at him again, assessing him, and her eyebrows flicker upward in what looks like approval.
“He’s going to go home with me,” I state. “I mean… he’ll take me home.” A grin flashes on Ben’s face and disappears again. “I’m going home. If you want to check me out, do it right here.
Natalie appraises me, brow furrowed. It’s true. I’m not really making the case that I’m fine enough to walk away from the scene. To prove I’m acting in good faith, I plop my ass down on the deck of the ambulance and extend my arm out to her. “Blood pressure. Whatever you want.” My teeth are chattering and I clench my jaw to get them to stop.
Natalie reaches into the ambulance behind me and pulls out a blood pressure cuff. She fastens it around my arm. “What’s your last name, Eva?”
“Lipton.”
“And what day is it?”
I have to think about it. It seems like a million years have passed since I went to the party at Whitney’s. “Sunday.” She unfastens the cuff and gets out a little penlight.
“Follow the light,” she tells me.
“I didn’t hit my head,” I insist, but I follow the instructions to the letter. “Besides, he’s the one bleeding.”
Another paramedic is with the driver of the truck. That guy is in rough shape.
Bloody nose. They’ve got him sitting on the pavement, and he leans over and throws up onto the ground. Natalie glances over her shoulder. “We’ve got him covered.”
“No. Ben.”
He’s standing right behind her, probably on purpose, and the blood from his cut is soaking through his shorts. They’re almost too dark for it to be obvious.
Natalie drops her flashlight and reaches for Ben’s arm.
Ben shakes his head. “You’re sure she’s all right?”
She turns back to me. “Eva, can you move over to the side? We need to deal with this cut right now.” Her voice is perfectly calm, perfectly even, but I sense a certain urgency.
“Don’t bother with me unless she’s okay,” Ben says. He’s resisting Natalie’s attempt to get him to sit beside me and I hop up to my feet.
“I’m fine.”
He looks me in the eye. “You’re not.”
“I’ll be fine,” I tell him.
Another ambulance pulls up, and then a police car.
Natalie pulls up Ben’s shorts to expose the cut. The guardrail’s edge was sharp enough to go through the fabric. “I bet you’re going to refuse to go to the hospital too,” she says to Ben.
He’s still looking at me when he answers. “I wouldn’t leave her for anything.”
It takes longer than I expected. We both have to give statements to the police, and then a tow truck comes, and then, and then, and then…. They don’t force me to go to the hospital, but we have no car. The police chief gives us a ride two towns away so we can replace the rental car, and all I want to do once we’re in it is drive back to the cabin.
Eating lunch seems like a bad omen. Ben doesn’t fight me on it. His leg is wrapped in gauze and not bleeding anymore. It’s funny how shallow cuts can bleed, and bleed like that, and just...stop.
By the time we pull back into the cabin’s driveway, it’s bathed in the kind of late afternoon light that reminds me of standing at my recital, waiting and waiting as the sun went down. It twists at my heart.
Ben runs a hand through his hair. “Maybe we should—”
“Be alone,” I finish for him. “I need to be alone.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah.”
I can still hear his words from earlier ringing in my ears. I wouldn’t leave her for anything.
I feel his eyes on me as I search out the laptop on the counter in the kitchen, pick it up, and go into the second bedroom. He doesn’t follow me, but a minute later, I hear him settle into the couch in the living room.
He’s not leaving.
But he’s seen too much, and I honestly don’t know if I can live with it.
The second bedroom leads onto a little screened-in porch, and that’s where I perch with my laptop on my lap and look out over the lake.
A storm is coming.
The day was clear this morning, but as the afternoon wears on and I can’t bring myself to write anything, a line of dark clouds approaches. They leach the sun out of the sky, coming to cover everything.
Ben doesn’t interrupt me.
He doesn’t knock on the door, though at some time past four, I hear him in the kitchen. There’s the scrape and clang of pots and pans.
The sky gets darker.
The sun can’t have set yet, but the clouds trend toward black. The breeze picks up, becoming a stiff wind, and it whips right through the screen. A strand of hair blows into my eyes. “Shit,” I hiss under my breath, and get up to shut the glass windows that cover the screen.
It feels urgent now. The air seems to crackle with unshed lightning, and I’m worried for the furniture in here. If the water comes through the screens, it’ll be a nightmare to dry out. There are four big glass windows and I pull them shut one by one, and as I flip the lock on the last one, the storm breaks right over the cabin.
Nothing we could do could stop it from coming, and now I have a wild urge to be in it. I push open the screen door and step out into the rain.
It’s pouring.
It soaks the off-the-shoulder sweatshirt I’m wearing in two seconds, a warm summer thunderstorm verging on cool, and then the water works its way through my shorts. I tilt my face up to the sky and raise my arms toward the rain. I look insane.
Somewhere to the left, off in the woods, there’s a crack like a shot, ringing with a residual sizzle, and when the answering thunder booms, it’s so loud it knocks my teeth together.
“Holy shit,” I yell into the storm, for lack of something profound to shout. I can’t hear the words as much as I can feel them, and I shout it again just to feel that hum at the center of my body.
“Eva!” Ben’s voice cuts through the noise somehow, like he’s on another frequency from the rest of the world.
I turn around. He’s standing in the open screen door, which is banging against the front of the cabin like it’s about to fly off its hinges.
“What are you doing?” He cups his hands around his mouth to make his shout carry.
Another superheated crack of lightning touches down in the woods, and I let the thunder rock through me. “I wanted to feel it,” I shout back at him.
“What?”
He comes out from the porch, rushing toward me, and he’s instantly soaked to the skin. If this is what he looks like in the shower, then this is a sight I want to see every day for the rest of my life.
Ben must like the sight of me too, because he’s wearing a half smile by the time he gets to me. He wipes at the rain in his eyes and holds out his hand. “You’re going to get struck by lightning.”
“I wanted to feel it,” I say again.
“Trust me, you don’t want to get struck by lightning.”
“We’re surrounded by trees.”
“Eva.” He laughs. “Narrowly avoiding death by semi didn’t do it for you?”
“Not everyone avoids it.”
“Okay.” He looks at me through the rain and the wind kicks up, slamming the screen door against the side of the cabin. Another crack of lightning, this one closer. “You can tell me all about whatever the hell it is you’re talking about once we’re both inside and not about to get killed by lightning.”
“What if it’s terrible?”
He reaches out and takes my hand. Ben is muscled, tall, strong; it takes him no effort to pull me in close and wrap his arm around my shoulders. “I’ll carry you if I have to.”
Suddenly, it hits me—the roiling storm right on top of our heads, the relatively open lawn, the force of the wind. “I can walk,” I tell him, but he’s already hustling us toward the door.
Three steps inside, he turns back and forces himself out into the rain, pulling the screen door closed. Then he unhooks the latch of the storm door and pushes it firmly closed.
I’m shivering, full-body shakes. Inside, away from the whipping rain, my soaked clothes feel smothering against my skin. This little cabin must have central air, or some kind of A/C unit, because it’s much cooler inside. Water pools on the floor at my feet.
“Let’s go, let’s go.” Ben says this as urgently as if we’re still standing out in the rain. I let him lead me out to the main room, which is half living room, half kitchen, and watch as he opens a closet tucked in next to the cabinets and pulls out one towel, two, and an extra blanket.
“What are you doing?” he asks as puts the bundle of towels and blankets onto the kitchen counter and strips off his shirt. Right now what I’m doing is feeling my brain melt at the sight of the most perfect abs I have ever viewed in this or any lifetime. He unbuckles his belt. “Eva?”
I drag my eyes back to his face. “Yeah?”
“It’s time to get naked.”
12
Bennett
Eva’s face changes as fast as the clouds rolling over us. One minute, she’s red as a beet. The next, she’s lit up like a shooting star. And then her face goes dark again.
The near miss with the semi shook her to the core. It would shake me too. There’s something else there, somet
hing beneath the truck that came at us today, but all that matters now is that she’s dripping wet.
She looks at me from her place in the middle of the living room, eyes so green it’s as if they contained their own living storm. What the hell was she doing out there? If she wanted to feel alive, that’s one way to do it. But I felt plenty alive after I jumped us over that guardrail.
“Time to get naked,” she says softly, and another roll of thunder booms. The rain is so loud on the roof that I can barely make out her words.
“I wouldn’t let you sit around in wet clothes any more than I’d have let any vehicle hit you earlier.”
There’s a flash of lightning in her eyes, and her gaze slips lower, to where my hands are undoing my belt.
The paper-thin sweatshirt is the first to go.
She peels it over her head, revealing a spaghetti strap tank top that’s cupping her breasts just like the bikini did.
I drop my pants to the floor and step out of them.
There’s no way to be casual about this. I’m hard as a fucking rock, and Eva is still fully clothed.
I’m hyperaware of every breath she takes. Every shift of her weight. Every drip of water from her skin hitting the oval braided rug beneath her feet. Eva drags her bottom lip through her teeth and follows it with the tip of her tongue.
The rain on the roof gets louder.
I don’t know how it does, but it’s louder. The worst of the storm must be circling right on top of us, and my heart speeds up at the thought of her standing out there in the open, exposed.
I’d rather have her exposed in here.
I cross my arms over my chest and a pure, clean energy fills the room beneath the hammering downpour. Push and pull. A tug of war. I take off my pants and shirt; you give me something.
Take off that tank top, I think. Take it off and show me what’s underneath.
The moment I saw Eva at that party, I knew I couldn’t hurry this along. Not that I’m some fucking sicko who gets off on pressuring women into sex. No. That shit is for cowards and assholes and scum. Did it hurt my very skin to sleep in bed with her without even crossing the unspoken line in the center of the bed? Yes, it fucking did. But nothing hurts so good as this.