Page 85 of Chasing the Other Woman

"Again, so are you."

Her fingers tighten once. A laugh tries to come out of me and doesn’t quite make it, turning into something rough enough that I have to drop my chin against her wet hair and breathe through it.

I nearly lost her. Again.

Only this time, she was exactly where she chose to be. Beside me. Reading the sky better than anyone alive. Making calls I trusted because I should’ve been trusting them all along. No part of me knows what to do with that yet.

Sam pulls back just enough to look at me. Her face is streaked with rain and dirt, her hair plastered to her cheeks, her mouth pale from cold. There’s a bruise blooming near her jaw that makes something in me go sharp.

I lift my hand, then stop before I touch it. She sees me stop. Her eyes flick to my hand, then back to my face.

The space between us changes. Not forgiveness, not yet, but something warmer than the rain. I think about kissing her. God help me, I think about it so hard my whole body leans toward her.

Then a voice tears across the field.

“Brooks! Sam!”

Hershel.

Sam jerks back, and I turn toward the sound so fast my bad shoulder lights up. Headlights bob through the rain. Boots slap mud. Hershel comes over the rise first, jacket open, hair plastered to his forehead, face twisted with a kind of fury that’s mostly fear. Behind him, two camera guys, Riley, and Mark from Unit Three scramble through the debris.

Hershel reaches us and grabs my shirt in both fists. For one wild second, I think he’s going to hit me. Instead, he yanks me into a hug hard enough to make me grunt.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” he says into my ear. “You absolute, hardheaded son of a bitch.”

“I’m glad to see you too.”

He shoves me back and looks me over. “Don’t start. I’m too old for this.” Then he turns to Sam, and his whole face changes. “Girl.”

Sam’s mouth wobbles. “Hey, Hershel.”

He pulls her into a hug, gentler than the one he gave me but no less fierce. “Don’t you ever scare me like that again.”

“I won’t.”

“Damn right you won’t.”

After that, everything happens at once. Riley checks Sam’s knee. Mark radios our position. Someone swears at the crushed truck, and someone else swears louder when they see the live wire snapping near the ditch. Hershel keeps asking the same questions in three different ways, like maybe if he rearranges the words he’ll believe the answers: Are you hurt? Can you walk? Did you hit your head?

Sam answers every one with more patience than I deserve to witness. I stand close enough to catch her if she sways, but I don’t put my hands on her again. She notices that, too.

When the medic from the volunteer crew finally reaches us, Sam lets him shine a light in her eyes and check her scraped knee. I do the same, mostly because Hershel looks ready to shove me down into the mud if I argue. The whole time, the storm moves farther away. The whole time, I can still feel Sam’s weight against me.

By the time everyone is accounted for, my hands won’t stop shaking.

I hide it by pretending to inventory equipment near the ruined truck. It’s a poor lie. The truck’s done. The beacon case survived, half the dash cameras are probably dead, and the tablet Sam carried out is sitting safe in her bag because she knew what mattered even while everything was coming apart.

Hershel finds me beside the driver’s door. “You look like hell.”

“I feel worse.”

“Good. Means you’re alive enough to feel it.”

I glance over at him. He’s got mud up one leg, a shallow cut across his knuckles, and the expression of a man ready to tear into me the second we’re alone.

I look past him. Sam is standing near Unit Two, wrapped in somebody’s dry jacket, talking with Riley about whether the barometer reading before the turn was steady enough to log. Alive. Bruised. Brilliant. Exactly where she belongs because she decided to be there.

My throat tightens. “I need to talk to you,” I say.