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Erika blew out a slow breath, her response seemingly coming from left field. “Did I ever tell you why I became a doctor?”
He frowned, confused, then shook his head. “No. You didn’t.”
Erika bit her lip. “When I was younger, I was a bit of a wild child.”
He grinned. “You’re going to have to define wild child, because I’m having trouble picturing you in my version of that term.”
“I sort of broke bad when I started high school. I’m an only child, and my parents were pretty overprotective.”
Blake had spent a fair amount of time with Mr. and Mrs. Nelson, the older couple always very welcoming and kind. He attributed Erika’s easygoing nature to them because they struck him as the type of people to go with the flow. “Guess them being overprotective makes sense. My mom had to spread her protectiveness a bit thinner, considering she was raising me, my needy-ass half-brother, and my two crazy stepbrothers.”
Erika smiled, perfectly aware that Blake adored all three of his younger siblings. His mom had married Alan, his stepdad, when Blake was eight. Alan, who had full custody of his boys from his previous marriage, brought Marco and Todd—six and seven, respectively—into Blake’s family. A couple of years after Alan and Mom married, they had Julian. The baby of the family, Julian had probably been the most doted-on kid in the world because in addition to Mom and Alan, he’d managed to wrap his three big brothers around his finger as well.
“Your brothers are awesome.”
He pretended to disagree. “Glad you think so. I’m willing to sell them to you. Super cheap.”
She reached out, shoving at his shoulder lightly. “Be careful because I might take you up on that offer. I’ve always wanted siblings.”
Blake realized they’d strayed off topic. “You were about to tell me about your wild-child days.”
Erika grimaced. “When I started high school, I hooked in with a not-great group of friends. One of the girls, Melanie, came from a home where there wasn’t a lot of supervision, so we hung out in her basement a lot, sneaking her dad’s beer, her mom’s cigarettes, and taking hits from her older brother’s bong.”
Blake’s eyebrows rose. “No way.” While Erika liked her wine, he never would have imagined she’d been a smoker—of cigarettes or pot.
“I’m not proud of the way I behaved back then. I’d always been an honor roll student in elementary and middle school, but that did not hold true for the first semester of ninth grade. My report card was a potpourri of C’s, D’s, and even an F in English. I hate creative writing.”
That part didn’t surprise him at all. While he enjoyed reading fiction—he was a big fan of mysteries—Erika’s chosen “pleasure” reading was the nonfiction variety, shit that would bore Blake to tears.
“Melanie’s neighbor, Troy, started coming over a lot while we were hanging. He was seventeen and a junior—he’d been held back one year. He had his own car and a tattoo of a snake on his arm, and I thought he was the epitome of cool,” Erika continued. “We started dating, and his best friend, Jacob, started going out with Melanie, so our basement hijinks evolved into massive make-out sessions. Until my report card arrived.”
“Grounded?” Blake asked.
She nodded. “Big-time. On the heels of that, my mom found out about Troy and put her foot down on us dating, claiming no good would come from a seventeen-year-old boy going out with a fourteen-year-old girl. I cried and yelled and told them they were ruining my life…typical teenage girl stuff. But they didn’t relent. Being kept away from my true love was the worst form of torture,” she said sarcastically, “so when Troy texted one night, telling me to sneak out, I agreed. I thought I was in love…and I’d decided he should be my first.”
While Blake knew the story was ancient history, he was having a hard time not wanting to track down Troy and beat the shit out of him. “So you snuck out?”
“Yeah. Crawled out my bedroom window and met Troy at the end of my block, where he was parked. He knew about some out-of-the-way country road right outside the city where we could park…and other things.”
Erika slowly stroked her hand along Corky’s back as she told the story. Her eyes had a faraway look, and he could imagine her replaying that night in her mind.
“We’d just hit the city limits when the storm started. It was a really nasty one. The weather forecasters had been warning about flash flooding. Troy’s country road was narrow with lots of sharp turns. He was driving too fast, and I told him so, but he just laughed and teased me about being scared.”
Blake had a feeling where this story was headed.
“On one bad turn, he ran off the road. There was a sharp incline, and given the speed he was driving, we had enough momentum that the car flipped over into a ditch. It probably would have flipped over a few times, but we were stopped by a tree on the driver’s side. Troy’s side.”
“Jesus.”
There was enough light in the room for him to see that Erika had gone pale, the memory bad enough to still provoke fear. He reached across Corky, placing his hand on her waist. He gave it a gentle squeeze. “You don’t have to talk about it if?—”
“No,” she interjected. “I’ve actually never talked about that night, never told anyone… I’ve always been too ashamed of my actions. But I want to tell you.”
Blake wasn’t sure what to make of that, but he was more than capable of shouldering as much of this weight as he could if she was willing to share the load with him.
“The roof of the car sank into the ditch, which was deep with water from the thunderstorm. It was still raining, a total deluge—just like tonight. It was pitch black except for the occasional strikes of lightning. When one flashed, I was able to see that Troy was unconscious and bleeding a lot. I tried to unfasten my seat belt, but it was stuck. And even if I’d managed, the roof of the car had crushed in enough that there was no way I could get the car door open or crawl out of the window.”
Blake shifted, wanting to get closer to Erika. His movement woke Corky, who took exception to being smushed between them. She stood, stretching dramatically before moving to the foot of the bed to sleep there. Blake quickly filled the space she’d just vacated, turning to lay on his back while wrapping his arm around Erika’s shoulders, pulling her close enough that she could use his bare chest as a pillow.
