I shut my eyes against a pain so sharp, it feels like my nerves are rubbing raw against my bones. Dylan is right up against my side, and if her arms wrap any tighter around me, I’ll have difficulty breathing in addition to difficulty standing.
“Walk,” I mutter. One word is all I’m going to manage right now.
“Are you sure?” Greg asks me.
I nod.
Dylan says my name, and I make myself look at her. Her teeth are clamped down on her bottom lip, and her eyes are flickering around my face at lightning speed. “Nothing’s broken,” I tell her.
If something were broken, I’d be screaming where I stood. Ditto for torn ligaments or tendons.
Greg takes a step forward, and I follow. There’s no good way to do this. I can’t hobble or hop because both knees are smarting.
“Maybe you should take him to the hospital,” Greg tells Dylan.
“No.”
“Silas, please. What if something is wrong?”
I take another step, and the pain continues, but I’m getting used to it. It’ll fade soon, and I’ll just be sore. That’s all.
“Keep walking,” I say.
The stiffness is still there. I’m keeping my legs as straight as I can with each step, and after a few more strides, I can bear enough of my own weight that I let go of Greg, and just use Dylan to keep me steady.
“See?” I grunt at her. “Better already.”
“You are such a liar.”
“She’s right, man. Your expression looks like you just took a knee to the balls.”
I look up and Dylan’s redheaded friend Matt is ahead of us. I didn’t even know he was here, but it’s kind of nice to see another familiar face.
“I’ve survived that before, too.”
Dylan mumbles, “Probably multiple times.”
It shocks a laugh out of me even through the ache. “Hit me while I’m down why don’t you.”
“Yeah, well, you’re a cocky bastard, and I’m mad that you laughed. And that you won’t let me take you to the hospital.”
Dylan Brenner might have plenty of practice telling other people no, but I’m not sure she’s heard it very often herself.
“At least let me take you home, so you can rest.”
“That sounds like a deal.”
She scoffs. “You and your deals.”
“You like my deals.”
It’s Matt who cuts in: “You guys even have inside jokes now. This is so freaking weird.”
She says, “Matt, can you get some ice from Mrs. Baker?”
“Don’t bother,” I tell him. “We’re five minutes from my place.”
“It’s going to start swelling soon.”
I bend my face down to hers and rest my forehead against her temple. “Thank you for worrying about me,” I murmur into her ear. “But really I’m fine. And I’d just like to go home and handle this without an audience.”
She swallows, and with my head still touching hers, she nods.
I look back up at Matt, and notice Henry watching from a few feet behind him. Matt says, “I’ll help you get him in the car.”
Dylan apologizes to Greg, but says she won’t be coming back to work in the afternoon. He tells her to take care of me, and something inflates in my chest at those words. He asks her to call him after she gets me settled so he can get all the information about the accident down in a report.
By all logic, the thought of being taken care of should annoy me. But because it’s her, it’s different. Everything is a little bit different where Dylan is concerned.
Even when I get to the point that I could probably handle walking on my own, I don’t say anything, and continue letting her walk along with me.
Our pace is slow as we cross the yard, and I’m thankful when Matt volunteers to go get Dylan’s car where it’s parked a few houses down.
“This is all my fault. I’m so sorry, Silas.”
“It was my idea not to wait for the ladder.”
“I pulled too hard on the vine.”
“I decided to drop to my knees.”
“Because of me.”
“Damn right, it was because of you. I promise you, this is nothing. A few days of rest, and I’ll be fine. Better my knees than your head. That wouldn’t have been fixed with a few days rest.”
“I had my head covered. I would have been fine.”
“I don’t care. If I had it to do again, I’d do the same thing.”
We stop and wait for Matt on the sidewalk in front of the house, and she squints against the sun as she looks up at me. I can see her cataloging me, examining my words and my actions, and filing them all into the appropriate boxes in that too-ordered head of hers. She thinks and rethinks through everything she does and says. And if everything in her head is perfectly organized, mine is more akin to a trailer park after a tornado, something I experienced a number of times as a kid. I know the way those funnels hop, destroying one house and sparing another. I think that’s what’s happening to me. My past is creeping up on me, dropping down from the sky when I least expect it, demolishing some parts of me, and leaving others for another day.
And what my history hasn’t bulldozed, Dylan is flattening, sweeping through my life like a flood that I’m welcoming just so I can drown in her. I’m doing just that, caught up in her gaze, when her car glides to a stop in front of us.
It takes some maneuvering, getting me into her sporty car and keeping my legs stretched out as much as possible. I end up in the backseat, knees slightly bent so the door can close. It hurts, but it’s worth it to get out of there and on the road.
By the time we get back to my place, though, my knees have gone stiff, and I know they’re swelling.
It’s just a sprain. It happens. I’ve had them before from the occasional rough tackle. It will hurt for a couple of days, but that’s it. That has to be it.
I refuse to let it be anything else.
There cannot be another thing keeping me away from football, because I won’t survive it. I’ll self-destruct so quickly and efficiently that it will make the current damage in my head look like a f**king walk in the park.
The front porch steps are a bitch, but I manage to get up them with nothing worse than a grimace.
I don’t have the energy or the willpower to climb upstairs to my bedroom, so instead, I shuffle to the couch in the living room. There’s a bag of chips, a fast-food wrapper, some shoes, and a balled up T-shirt on it that Dylan removes without a blink.