I swallowed, my eyes locked on hers. “Wow,” I said, not really sure how to respond. Why was she telling me this?
“Maybe you heard about the accident? It was in the newspaper.” She continued to watch me. I couldn’t read her expression clearly because the only light in the car came from the dash as the streetlight in front of her building was burned out. Judging from the part of town we were in, that lamp probably hadn’t had a bulb change since the nineties.
But even in the practically nonexistent light, I could see the whites of her eyes, and they were focused directly at me.
“I don’t read the paper,” I replied. “What happened?”
Even though I knew what happened, even though part of me said not to even talk about it, I couldn’t help but want to know how she remembered that night.
“I’d just gotten off my shift. It was late, like tonight…” Her voice faded and the whites of her eyes suddenly disappeared. She closed them, like the memory was painful.
Then her eyes reopened and she said, “I was walking home and there was this guy… He was on the sidewalk too. A bus came around the corner and slid on a sheet of black ice. I froze. I knew it was going to hit me, but I couldn’t seem to move. But then he pushed me out of the way and the bus hit him instead.”
“Wow,” I echoed again, wishing this body came with a better vocabulary. My stomach cramped as I remembered the feeling of the bus plowing into me.
“He died right there in the snow. He didn’t have any ID. I don’t even know his name.” Her eyelids closed again and she took a deep breath.
“Didn’t the newspaper say who he was?” I asked curiously.
She shook her head. “I don’t even think they knew. I called the hospital, but they wouldn’t tell me anything.”
“You called the hospital?” Why would she do that? Why would she care?
“I wanted to go to his funeral. To at least tell someone what he did, that he saved me—a complete stranger. I wanted to tell him thank you.”
“You did,” I replied, remembering. She said thank you that night. On the street when she leaned over me. The echo of her words whispered in the back of my mind.
“What did you say?” she asked, her voice losing a little bit of sorrow.
Dumbass.I mentally yelled at myself. Way to make the Target trust you. Say suspicious things so she would run every time she caught a glimpse of you.
I pushed my hand through my hair—surprised to feel it shaking—and took a breath. There was no way she could think what I said was suspicious. There was no possible way on this earth she could know I was the guy who got flattened by the bus. To her, I probably looked like some dude who babbled stuff because he wasn’t really listening to what she was saying. I mean, this was probably the first time I ever listened to a girl talk.
“What I meant was you did say thank you. Right now. Where ever he is, maybe he heard you.”
She sat there for a long second, then nodded slowly. “Yeah. I hope he heard.”
She seemed like she really meant it.
My stomach cramped again and I felt a clammy sweat break out on my forehead. My knee started bouncing up and down, knocking the bottom of the steering wheel.
“Are you all right?” she asked, leaning a little closer.
I lifted my hand to adjust my glasses, and it was visibly shaking. I buried it in my lap and hoped she hadn’t seen. “Yeah, I just didn’t get that much sleep last night,”
My knee was still bouncing up and down and all of my insides felt jittery and bouncy. Maybe those three cups of coffee weren’t a very good idea.
“You don’t look too good,” she said, reaching across the small interior of the Roadster to brush her hand across my forehead.
I jerked and grabbed her wrist, pulling her closer toward me.
My sudden movement startled her and she fell forward when I yanked her. Her hair fell over her shoulders and brushed against my hand. She wiggled, trying to pull away, and I realized I was squeezing her.
I let go and she moved back into her own seat, rubbing at her wrist.
“I have to go,” she said, reaching for the door handle.
“Yeah. Sorry about that. You just took me by surprise.” I swallowed back the rising bile. What was wrong with me all of a sudden?
