I grinned. “You have a nice cabin, Garrick. Sparse. I’m guessing that’s intentional.”
“It is.”
“And you live up here all alone.”
“Yes.”
“Also intentional, I’m guessing.”
“You’re two for two.”
He laid the clothes down beside me. “You need to take a shower. Get warm.”
I sighed. While I loved to talk, I did enjoy the occasional conversation where the other person answered back with full sentences.
I glanced at the clothing he’d found for me. A folded red plaid shirt and what looked like a pair of sweatpants that had been cut off into shorts.
I got up slowly and grabbed the clothes. “That explains the Bigfoot thing.”
He frowned down at me.
“The size, the beard, living alone in the woods.” I gestured at… all of him. “The whole situation.”
“I’m going to need you to stop calling me Bigfoot.”
“Probably not going to happen. But you can give me a nickname.”
He gave me a slow once-over. “Oh,yeah?”
“Yes. Anything you feel suits me.”
“How about magpie?”
I stuck my tongue out at him. “Try again.”
He pointed at the bathroom. “Go take a shower, Amy.”
Something happened to me when he said my name. Something I was going to need to examine later, when I was dry and had more functional brain cells. He said it like an ordinary word, but it did not land like an ordinary word.
The bathroom was just like everything else. One bar of soap. One shampoo. A single dark towel on the rail, and I could not have cared less whether he’d used it. Everything in that room was his, and I was about to be naked in the middle of it. I handled that thought with tremendous maturity and didn’t start the fantasy reel again.
Or I tried. I tried not to think about him in here with me, our bodies touching as he helped me wash my hair and then…
Getting out of my clothes took longer than it should have. The leggings had dried onto me like a second skin, and I had to work them down over the cut on my thigh with my teeth gritted. I stood there in the fluorescent honesty of a stranger’s bathroom, and I got my first look at exactly how the day had treated me.
A bruise bloomed along my hip in an interesting shade of galaxy. Another was coming up on my shin. There was a small scrape on my cheekbone I hadn’t felt until right now. And the white bandage on my thigh reminded me I had gotten off lucky. Deciding it would get wet in the shower, I took it off.
I looked like I’d lost a fight with a river. Which I had.
I stepped into the shower, and the hot water hit me and I just stood there. Here’s the thing nobody warns you about. The adrenaline that’s been keeping you going doesn’t give you any warning. It just goes away.
It had held me together through the rescue, the banter, the truck. Now, alone, safe, warm, it packed up and walked out. My hands started shaking. Then the rest of me. I put both palms flat against the tile and let it happen — the full, wet, hiccupping ugly of it — because I had almost drowned today. Actually almost. Real water, real rocks, real me under it, and no amount of narrating it into a comedy changed the three seconds where I’d been sure that was it.
I cried until I was done, which took less time than I expected, and then I washed my hair with Bigfoot’s shampoo and felt strangely, stupidly new.
By the time I turned the water off, I’d put myself mostly back together. The flannel was soft in the way things only got after years of washing. It hung off my shoulder on one side and hit mid-thigh, and the shorts were surprisingly big, despite my big hips. I looked at myself in the small mirror over the sink. Damp hair. Scrubbed face. Pink eyes I would be attributing to shampoo if asked.
“Okay,” I told my reflection. “You’re fine.”
