At some point, she shifts, her forehead tucking under my chin, her breath ghosting across my collarbone.
“Lucy?”
“Yeah?”
“My back is killing me.”
Chapter 21
Lucy
This is not how I imagined the scene when Harris Bennett met my mother.
No. She didn’t catch us in the act.
She didn’t barge in unannounced.
She’s here because she’s the only person I could think to call with a level head; we already know Annabelle is zero help during an emergency. Obviously, the only logical thing to do was call my parents over—moms usually know what to do, and I’m fairly certain my father’s back has been jacked up a time or two.
Yes. They’ll have the answers.
They’re standing over Harris—giant hunk of a man—like two field medics assessing a patient, fussing over his bruises.
Dad stares down at him, Harris’s lower half covered by my comforter. I couldn’t get a T-shirt on him without causing more pain, so his chest is still bare, bruises and all.
“Well, hello, young man,” Mom says, clasping her hands together as she gives Harris a slow, assessing look. “I’m Liz—Lucy’s mom.”
Harris, for all his usual confidence, visibly swallows before shifting his arm off his forehead and attempting to sit up a little straighter. “Uh, hello, Mrs. ...”
He doesn’t even know my last name.
Oh God. Could this get any more embarrassing?
“LeBrandt,” my mother supplies, glancing at me over her shoulder, brows raised as if to saySeriously, Lucy?
I shrug.
Harris clears his throat. “Mrs. LeBrandt.”
He shifts again, like he’s trying to sit up properly, but then immediately winces and gives up, sinking back into the pillows. It does nothing to improve the situation. If anything, it makes all this look so much worse—because he looks like some wounded knight in a romance novel, battered and bare chested and inmybed.
“Have you taken any ibuprofen?” Mom asks Harris, pressing her open palm to his forehead. She smooths his hair back as if he were a feverish toddler, giving him the same sympathetic expression she once reserved for me all the times I was sick or injured.
“No.”
She gives me another disapproving look. “Luce—can you grab three?”
As I leave the room I glance at them again. Harris Bennett, a literal football-playing tank of a man and wannabe lumberjack, leans into my mother’s pampering like heisindeed a feverish toddler.
Kill me.
Kill me now.
Dad, who has been standing silently through this whole exchange, finally sighs. “Liz, stop babying him. Look at him, he’s huge.”
Mom scoffs. “He’s hurt.”
“He fell into a garbage can.”
