“We’ve known each other for one month and you haven’t even gotten to second base yet and you honestly want me to just declare, in front of your little brother and my best friend that I’m falling in love with you?” I gasped at the insanity of it all.
“That’s exactly what I want,” he grinned at me.
“I’m not little!” Harrison protested but we all ignored him.
“And Reagan will know if you’re lying,” Nelson warned.
I thought Reagan would be on my side, I mean, I had always been on hers. We were best friends, sisters in arms, simply girls forced to endure bathing in natural bodies of water and giving up our dream of laser hair removal.
“He’s right, Hales,” Reagan smirked at me. “I’ll know if you’re lying.”
“And here I thought you were on my side!” I tugged my pack on and then we collectively moved toward the barn door with our guns raised, safety’s off.
“Don’t worry,” she grumbled. “Hendrix will give you plenty of opportunity to pay me back for my betrayal. I promise.”
I snorted a laugh because it was so very true. And then I decided to just go with it. “Fine, Nelson, you want to hear that I was seconds from falling in love with you on that bed? Then yes, most definitely if you would have kept kissing me like that, holy smokes, I would have signed over my virginity in blood because I was so in love with you. The problem is we stopped. So…. I guess, we’ll just have to see how this plays out now that we’ll never get another moment alone together again.”
I thought I was being funny. Reagan laughed. Harrison and Nelson were oddly silent- awkwardly so.
Finally, when we were just steps from the back door to the farmhouse, Nelson asked, “You’re a virgin?”
The blush was back! And not because a very personal fact had been announced and repeated. Oh no, the redness in my face and humiliation washing over me was all because of the excited, awed tone in Nelson’s voice. I felt stripped bare by his tone and pushed into an intensely intimate moment by the look on his face. This was so not the place to have this conversation.
“Can we just go inside?” I whisper-pleaded. “We’ve exposed your brother to enough sex-ed for a lifetime.”
Before Nelson could respond, Harrison cut in with a, “There’s just a few missing parts. Mostly anatomy lessons, nothing huge. And since we don’t have any books or movies, if I could just see-“
“Stop right there, little pervert,” Reagan waved her gun around in the air. “Not happening. Not ever. Got that?”
Harrison grinned from ear to ear and then ducked into the house without giving Reagan a reply.
She cleared her throat and flashed an apologetic smile my way. “Well, I guess that answers that…..”
Inside the house, things were quiet and tense. Hendrix paced helplessly in the kitchen while King and Vaughan hovered over Page. She lay on a long, plaid couch in a living room just off the dining room.
I ignored Hendrix, even though Reagan didn’t, and walked over to check on Page. Her eyes were shut tight and her skin, pale and ashen. The blinds had been opened to let in natural light and a blanket pulled over her tiny body.
I could see she was shaking from chills and before I even touched her head I knew her forehead would be burning up.
I knelt down next to her, easing in between Vaughan and King. They moved out of my way like I had some kind of authority here, but probably they were just happy to pass the torch.
Illness was out of any of our realms of expertise and the smallest sickness could be life-threatening to any of us. Page was worst case scenario for us and I hated the idea of her suffering anything, let alone facing something as scary as death because there were no such things as clinics, doctors on call or antibiotics anymore.
It would be almost impossible to even figure out what’s wrong with her unless she had an obvious symptom.
I laid my hand gently on her forehead and she leaned into the touch like it was soothing. Her skin was hotter than Hades, and my entire body sagged with that knowledge. My heart started thrashing in my chest and my relaxed mind was suddenly at work, struggling to find any solution to soothe her pain and suffering.
I stroked her hair gently and then asked in a whisper, “How are you feeling, Pagey?”
She let out a moan of agony and put a hand to her throat.
“Is that what hurts? Your throat?” I asked gently. A sore throat was both a good thing and a bad thing. Good because it was easy to check and bad because strep throat could be really dangerous if not treated. I knew this, because I had a cousin when I was growing up that didn’t get his strep treated with antibiotic and ended up in the hospital for three days because the infection had spread to the rest of his body.