“Good girl.” His smile stretched wide across his face. I giggled in response as I laid there, still staring at the stars half drunk.
By the time Jace and I decided it was time to head back, I was barely hanging on. Sleep was pulling at me adamantly. I couldn’t tell if I was actually tired or if the liquor was making me drowsy.
After Jace pulled into my driveway, I attempted to step out of the truck on my own, but my legs were working about as good as Jell-O would at keeping me upright. Jace immediately noticed, so he put one arm behind my back, the other arm swooping me up by the legs, as he carried me up the porch, through the front door.
Damn.
Ellie would have been so proud of me right now. I was letting a man whisk me away like Cinderella, and I wasn’t even two seconds from kicking him in the balls.
Guess there was a first time for everything.
“Which room is yours?” Jace asked, walking from my entryway up the hallway, looking left and right, trying to find his way through the maze that was my house.
I pointed lazily to the right. I needed my bed, and I needed it quick. The room was starting to spin, and if I didn’t find somewhere to lay perfectly still, it would only be downhill from here.
Pushing my bedroom door open with his foot, Jace laid me gently on the bed, peeling off my denim jacket then my shoes next. Without thinking, I pulled my pants off, wanting to be comfortable when I fell asleep—which would be in a matter of seconds.
After being gone for a few minutes, Jace returned, handing me the bottle of ibuprofen he found in my medicine cabinet and a bottle of water from the fridge.
“Here, drink this. It will help you not have a raging headache when you get up in the morning,” he said, twisting the cap off the bottle of water for me.
My arms were about as useless as my legs at this point, but I managed.
“How do you know so much about this?” I asked. “Oh wait, never mind. You’re Silver Creek’s biggest playboy. I almost forgot. Drink alcohol, fuck women, repeat,” I said drunkenly, turning over in bed.
He didn’t crack a joke like he usually did when I talked about his wild ways.
Weird.
It wasn’t until Jace gently closed the door and walked away that the slow-motion reel in my head caught up with me in real time, and I realized I had just taken my pants off in front of him.
Oops.
Chapter 10 – Cassie
I was pretty sure the sun was directly next to my window, not a million miles away like it normally is. The rays of light shining through the slits in my curtains pierced my eyes and shot straight to my soul.
My body felt heavy, my head heavier.
Everything was sore, but I couldn’t imagine how much worse it would have been if I hadn’t taken medicine before going to bed. Shout out to Jace for hooking a girl up before he left last night.
Lying in bed, I contemplated what I needed to do first. Shower probably. Hot water against my skin was more than likely the only thing that would take this pain away.
After turning the shower knob to hot, I pulled off my remaining clothes from last night. As they hit the floor, memories of taking off my pants in front of Jace came back to life. Most girls would have been embarrassed if some guy had seen them in their underwear. I was just relieved he hadn’t seen my burns.
Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I studied my naked body.
I’d come to love everything about myself—my red hair, the freckles all over my body, my green eyes. Everything except the scar down my right side from the healed burn, a permanent memory from that terrifying fire all those years ago.
It was springtime. June Bug had just turned two.
I had spent most of the day at Ellie and Colt’s, celebrating my favorite niece’s birthday. Ponies, pink, and piñatas everywhere. June Bug was so happy. She had more toys to open than her cute little brain could even register. After leaving that night, I lay down in my bed with a heart full of happiness and a belly full of birthday cake.
I hadn’t slept long before I woke up to the sound of the smoke detectors in my apartment going off.
When I got out of bed, the smoke was so thick that I couldn’t even see two feet in front of me. Within a minute, it slipped down into my lungs, making me cough uncontrollably and pass out.
The next morning, I woke in a hospital bed with no memory of what happened after my body hit the floor. Doctors and first responders helped me piece it together. The fire department said the cause of the fire was a faulty safety switch on my space heater that had malfunctioned, causing it to overheat. At some point after I fell asleep, it got so hot that it sparked a fire. Flames climbed my curtains and engulfed the apartment in a matter of minutes. The firefighters rushed up the fire escape just in time. A minute longer and I would’ve died they said.
