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“I think I would have. If we’d had that time.”
“Why on earth would your mom push you, then? She has to know it…would hurt.”
He bit his lip, but he was in too deep to stop now. “She doesn’t know. None of them do.” She simply stared at him. “I’ve never…told anyone about her.”
And he had no idea why he’d told her now.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Britt felt as if her entire life had condensed down to being between the proverbial rock and a hard place. What had happened in fact had somehow turned her life into a simile so corny she tried not to think about it. The actual rock had done its damage. But somehow her life, at least this morning, had degenerated into the cliché, as she bounced from the one to the other, trying not to think about either. The metaphorical rock, the knowledge she should not put too much hope into this new cast she was getting today, not think it was going to put her completely back on her feet and functional, and the hard place, her totally unexpected, ridiculous, and bewildering reaction to Cody the Coder.
She could barely even think about him that way anymore. As her lifelong enemy, the boy next door she hated with a passion. Because every time she tried to, a different Cody snuck into her mind. The Cody who had rescued her, who had carried her, who had taken care of her.
The Cody of last night. The one she had actually enjoyed sitting here watching that old movie with. Eating popcorn, making jokes. The one she’d actually told about her mother’s pressure for her to settle down.
The Cody who had told her something he’d never told anyone, about the girl he’d fallen for and lost, the girl who had stolen his heart and then died so young.
She recoiled from that thought, because she didn’t like the way it made her feel, a weird combination of wondering why he’d had so much loss and pain in his life when she, the same age nearly down to the minute, had in essence had so little. She’d lost animals in her life, and had been horribly saddened by it, but her parents and even grandparents were alive and well. And she’d never fallen in love, not like he’d described, so she’d never had that to lose.
But pulling back from it had her wondering why he’d told her. Her, of all people, when he’d never told the people he was closest to, his family. The Raffertys were a tightly knit bunch, all of them finding a way to stay together and yet having their separate lives. Even when his older brothers had found their obvious soul mates, they’d managed to keep it all together there on the ranch that had been in their family for generations, since before the Revolution.
When she found herself starting to wonder how Cody would adapt when his time came, her recoil became a physical thing. She tried to ignore her gut-level reaction as they got ready to head back to the hospital for the 3D-cast scan.
Which Cody would be there for. She’d known that, she just hadn’t quite put together that he’d actually be riding with them. They’d started a second movie last night, but she hadn’t made it to the end; the darn pain meds still made her too sleepy. That had to stop, and soon. When her parents had returned, fairly late, all he’d said as he left was “See you tomorrow,” and she hadn’t thought much beyond that before she’d conked out completely.
As if his assurance about tomorrow was all she had needed to sleep peacefully.
A tapping on the bathroom door snapped her out of the crazy ruminations she’d slipped into. Again.
“Honey? Are you ready?”
“I’ll be out in a minute,” she said as she wrestled with the knitted cover for the toes of her injured leg, which her mother had said she’d need this morning.
“Your dad’s out warming up the car, but Cody’s here and he can help if you need it.”
“Great,” she muttered, listening to Mom’s footsteps fade away.
Memories of the last time he’d helped her out of the bathroom made her cheeks heat. She’d lost her balance when she’d accidentally leaned too far to keep from putting weight on the injured ankle and had ended up careening into him. He’d caught her, held her until she was steady, and…longer. It was probably only a few seconds. But it had felt both longer and far too short.
The temporal version of a rock and a hard place? And stop putting hard anything and him in the same thought!
She maneuvered her way out of the bathroom now and down the hall. She hated being so limited, and by the time she got to the living room her jaw was tight, not so much from pain as from frustration.
“You okay? I can carry you out there if it’s bad this morning.”
He sounded so sincere, so genuinely worried that she couldn’t doubt him. And she had, through her aggravation, remembered the thought she’d had up at the ridge, about this being a Cody imposter who’d come to rescue her. Except she knew for certain now it wasn’t. The Cody he’d been since was probably closer to the real Cody than she had ever seen.
Or wanted to see. Because how on earth could you stay angry with this guy?
As it turned out the scan was the quickest, least uncomfortable part of the process, because the original casts had to be removed, which wasn’t fun given the ankle fracture was obviously still unhealed, although the new set of X-rays showed the process was beginning. But the doctor was even more enthused than he had been before, once he saw the swelling had gone away nearly completely.
For Britt the best news at the moment was her wrist. He’d said she could go with only the new splint and take it off for exercises the first week.
“Then I think you’ll be using crutches by the end of next week. I was hoping for this, since you’re young and fit, and you’ve obviously followed instructions and taken it easy,” he said, sounding excited.
Britt half-expected Cody to make some crack about how much she’d complained about following those instructions, but he didn’t. So, she did. “Except on the complaining, that I did full strength.”
Dr. Reed smiled, and her mother brushed it off, but Cody let out an audible chuckle.
