And I was still here.
I’d lived just about my whole life pretending to be meek and keeping to myself and always tiptoeing, and where the hell had that landed me?
“You,” I made myself admit in a rush before I could talk myself out of it.
He slowly turned to look at me over his broad shoulder. His face was even, smooth. His body way too relaxed.
I lifted my chin. “You were holding a baby.” I shrugged a shoulder. “You asked. What else did you see?”
“You,” he answered.
Alex stared at me, and I stared right back.
My heart started beating even faster, and I knew he could hear it. There was no hiding it. My face went warm. “Me how?” I asked as loudly as I could. “You said no secrets,” I reminded him.
His eyebrows went a little up, pink suddenly tinting his ears.
For a moment, I thought he wasn’t going to say shit.
But this was a man who went into burning buildings without blinking an eye, and now I knew he would have done it even if he wasn’t invincible.
“You were on your hands and knees,” he said.
What the hell did that mean?What was I doing on my hands and knees?
My face went even warmer. Hotter. So hot.
“Come on,” he said suddenly, holding up an even bigger cardboard box.
What the hell had I been doing in his vision?
I couldn’t ask. I couldn’t fucking ask. And why wasn’t he questioning the baby in my vision?
I kept my eyes down, ignoring the beating pattern my heart had decided to skip along to with this between us, and followed him out of the garage and down the driveway we’d waddled through, heading toward the downward slope part of it on the other side of the house. I kept my eyes on his wide frame. I thought about the vision I’d seen.
Him holding a dark-haired baby with my eyes, smiling. Alex’s hair was longer than it was now. There had been something different about his face though. He’d looked a little older? Or maybe just… less grumpy? More… happy?
We made it to the top of the gentle hill, and I stood beside him.
“You go first,” I said, trying to act cool when I felt everything but.
Those purple eyes flicked toward me. “Me?”
“Or we can go together?” I suggested. “You can be my Atraxian shield. Make sure I don’t break an arm.”
He bumped his arm against mine. “Let’s go down together. No arm breaking.”
I smirked and laid down the cardboard I’d been carrying, pushing it into the snow. I took a seat as forward as I could get without falling off, legs straight out in front of me.
To my surprise, he climbed on behind me, his long legs bracketing mine between his. I had expected him to make me be the big spoon. He pressed his chest to my back, settling his chin over the top of my head. “Ready?” he asked, his voice soft and almost mellow. Different.
I nodded tightly, and he slipped his arm around my waist. I grabbed the sides of the cardboard, feeling his free hand grab on to one of the sides too. And with our feet dangling over the front, we pushed ourselves forward and took off.
I laughed. He chuckled. Wind whipped us in the face. And when our makeshift sled stopped halfway down the bumpy hill that didn’t have enough snow, Alex held out his hand and picked up the broken-down cardboard box with the other. We climbed back up the hill and went down again, me between his legs, his arm around my waist, and we got even farther.
We did it again and again, and I laughed and heard his laugh low beside my ear. We molded the snow with our forearms and made a longer racetrack, then gave each other a push for momentum, trading back and forth going down before going down it together again. We got soaked, and I got light-headed from hiking back up the hill so many times.
I grabbed Alex’s forearm as we hiked up, and when my hand slid down it, I clung to his wrist, and he didn’t shake me off. Then we did it again and again.
