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“Yeah. I realized it was a bad idea. We’ve got a weird history.”
“You mean a decades-long friendship,” he challenged.
I shrugged and tried to run a little faster, but he caught up quickly.
“Look, is this because I called youbaby?” he asked.
“No. It’s because I was acting like one.”
I was really breathing hard now and my hip was starting to bother me.
“You weren’t acting like anything that night. But you’re kind of acting like a baby now. I mean, you’re running from your problems,” he said, calling me out. “The Cindy Lawless I know doesn’t do that.”
I slowed my pace and took some of the pressure off my hip. Luke slowed down considerably too.
“Fine, you’re right,” I conceded. “You want to hear it, so I’m going to say it. Luke, I like you. But I don’t like what I become when I’m around you.”
“Oh? And what is that?”
Clingy. Needy. Desperate for validation.
“Fragile,” I finally answer. “Breakable.”
“I don’t see you that way.”
“That’s the point, Luke. I have to work on not caring so much what you think of me. I mean, some of the things I said to you were…”
At that moment, a car careened around the corner, tires screeching, heading right for a telephone pole.
BAM.
In an instant, the car was wrapped around the pole. Someone inside the vehicle screamed. I looked over and saw that the driver, an older man, was slumped over the wheel. A woman sat next to him, hyperventilating and calling out to him. Most terrifyingly, there were two young kids in the backseat.
“What happened?” Andy asked. He and Asher caught up to Luke and me.
“Looks like the driver lost control of the car and crashed into the pole,” I answered.
I was on autopilot as I threw off the vest and ran toward the vehicle. Adrenaline flooded through my body, but my focus was razor-sharp. This was the kind of shit I knew how to handle. This was what Captain Cindy Lawless did best.
“Stand back.”
Eighteen
Luke
I watched as Cindy gave orders to Andy and that Asher dude. Together, they got that old man out of the car. Asher got on the phone with the fire department and called for an ambulance. Cindy and Andy laid him down carefully so they could start checking his pulse and doing chest compressions.
The old man’s wife cried on my shoulder and their two grandkids joined us, watching helplessly until the ambulance arrived. Cindy passed over the CPR efforts to the EMTs and hopped out of the back.
“It looks like he had a heart attack and passed out at the wheel, Ms. Mulligan,” Cindy said. “He was conscious when I left him, but the doctors at the hospital will be able to tell you more. Officer Hauserman will drive you down there if you like.”
She nodded and thanked the both of us, even though it was Cindy who did all the real work, before rounding up the kids and shepherding them into Andy’s squad car.
Cindy sighed hard and smoothed her hair back behind her ears.
“Wow,” I said.
“Wow what?”
