She craned her neck to look behind them, where he’d been standing, where the majority of the glass had hit. Rain was flying in freely now, pushed by the brutal wind. The branch that had broken the window shimmied and danced in the opening. “That almost got you,” she breathed.
“Well, it didn’t, thanks to you.” He turned her head back to his. “And do you ever answer a question?”
“I’m fine. And you’re not,” she said, pointing to where blood was blooming through the material of his shirt from a slice on his upper arm. She started to push herself up but her grimace tipped him off and he held her still, reaching for her hand, which was also cut.
He sat up, which meant that she was sitting, too, straddling him. In the back of his mind he registered the fact that it was a very nice position to be in as he ran his gaze over her carefully, looking for—“Damn.” Another cut. Gently he ran a finger over her cheekbone, which was beginning to bleed. “Just a nick, though.”
“I’m okay.” Using nothing but thigh muscles, she stood, then reached down with her uninjured hand to pull him up. Very carefully she brushed the glass from him, until he grabbed her wrist and moved them both from the shattered window, back into the living room. “Sit,” he said, gesturing to the couch, going for his first-aid kit from his bag.
“I will if you will.”
“So you’re still stubborn,” he noted, amused at both of them.
“As a mule. And I’m the nurse, remember?” She grabbed the first-aid kit from him as he sat next to her.
“I’m a trained medic.” He grabbed it back, holding it over her head.
“So, what, brute strength trumps brains?”
“Look at you,” he murmured. “You’ve grown claws. I’m so proud.”
“I call it a backbone.”
His smile faded. “Ah, Lizzy. You always had that.”
And while she stared at him in surprise, he got to work cleaning, gauzing and wrapping up her palm with medical tape. He swiped her cheek with antiseptic, then let her repeat the favor on him.
“If we’re done playing doctor…” she murmured when she’d finished.
He had no idea what it said about him that he loved this new version of her, all tough and no longer so reserved. Once upon a time she’d stirred protectiveness and affection within him, and definitely the normal horniness of a teenage boy. All of which he’d hidden.
The woman she’d grown into stirred a hell of a lot more. But what shocked him was that he didn’t feel like hiding from any of it.
“What are you grinning about?” she asked.
Other than he had his first hard-on in eight weeks? “I like this Lizzy.”
“You don’t know this Lizzy.”
True. But as he looked out the window into the sheer destruction of the day, he had a feeling he was going to get to know her pretty quickly. “I knew you once.”
“For a minute.”
“Longer than that,” he chided gently. “We were friends.”
She laughed. “Friends? We weren’t friends, Jason. I did your English papers, and you…”
“I…?”
“You were a jerk.”
“Not all the time.”
“All the time.”
“Come on. What about the day I taught you to kiss after that idiot Paul Drucker said you kissed like a poodle?”
“I try not to remember that day,” she said bitterly.
“I don’t know. It was a pretty good day for me.”
She turned away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“About which, the fact that we kissed behind the bleachers until you had it right? Or how afterward, you—”
She sent him a glacial glance over her shoulder. “I said I don’t want to talk about it.” She paused, then let out a sigh. “But thanks for teaching me how to kiss.”
“You are most welcome.”
“You know…” She narrowed her eyes. “Now that I think about it, the whole teaching process took a lot longer than it should have.”
“Did it?”
“Yes.”
He smiled. “You kissed like heaven, Lizzy, from the get-go. Paul was an idiot and an ass.”
“So you only pretended I needed kissing tutoring? Why?”
“Hello, I was seventeen.”
With an annoyed sound, she walked away.
Yeah, he’d been an ass, but only because of what had happened next, the thing she didn’t want to talk about, and for the first time in all these years, he remembered, and felt regret. “Lizzy—”
“I’m going.”
“We’ve been through this. If you go, I go.”