Chapter 7
My bike was toast, but Jeremy loaded it in the back of his truck anyway.
Then, he lifted me up and set me carefully in the passenger side of his truck, even taking time to make sure I was belted in. While he reached across me to click the latch, I took in his cologne. Its fragrance infiltrated my brain, smashing me once again with déjà vu—including an irrational longing for the man I’d detested for over a decade.
Upon reflection, hating him might have been a waste of my time and energy.
At my house, he carried me to a secure and comfortable place. He laid me on my side on the sofa, and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but the best course of action here is to cut away some of the fabric so we can clean the wound.”
All I could do at this point was to nod. The impact of the road rash was blooming into something more severe than I would have expected, and tears stung the corners of my eyes. I closed them and waited while he somehow managed to expose the scraped skin without compromising my modesty.
“Before I clean it and disinfect it, we’d better do something about the pain.” Moments later, he emerged from my bathroom, carrying tweezers and an aerosol can of something that ended with –caine, and he gave my bare leg and hip a swift spray with the cold mist.
Within seconds, the pain began to subside, and I exhaled.
“You all right for some discomfort?”
“I just endured the most physical discomfort I’ve been through in ages.” Probably. I couldn’t remember the Episode Between and whether or not I’d needed painkillers after the fall on my head. “With that spray, I’m ready for anything.”
“You’re braver than I thought.” He pulled a half smile, and next thing I knew, he and his tweezers had plucked about ten dozen bits of gravel out of my skin.
Meanwhile, numbed and humiliated, I glanced at him now and then, hard at work as he cured me. How had this happened that Jeremy Hotston had become my emergency contact—of all people in my life?
An hour later, he had covered me with a sheet, brought me several bags of frozen peas which he’d strategically placed along my wounded parts, and a big glass of water. He sipped from a Styrofoam gas station cup.
“Pepsi?” I ventured. For whatever reason, I associated him with that cola. “Never Coke?”
“Always Pepsi,” he said, giving me a meaningful look that he held a little too long.
“With that stare, you’re not trying to nudge me to remember something that happened right after my accident are you? Something about Pepsi? Because that whole two-month period of my life is a locked door.”
“The Pepsi thing isn’t recent.” Again with the soulful look.
“Okay.” I held out the ay. “It’s a good drink, if a little stiff on the caffeine for this late in the day. Not that I’m judging.”
“It was your idea.”
Mine! “Seriously, I have zero recollection of our time together. The photos I took are from a parallel universe Now Me never entered.”
“The Pepsi isn’t from that time period,” he repeated. When I didn’t respond or act like this rang a bell, he pivoted. “You should tell me what happened on your bike, and why you called me instead of your parents when you crashed. Are they out of town?”
So I’d inconvenienced him. Ugh. “It’s like this.” Everything about my visit with Tennille spewed forth. “Which is why I couldn’t tell my parents,” I finished up. “They’re going to be really hurt by what she did. Her mother and mine were like Siamese twins growing up.”
“From what I remember, you and Tennille were never close.”
“No, that happened later. About the time I came back to Wilder River after college. She’d just gotten married to Liam, and she needed a job. She’d been a cheerleader and knew some gymnastics skills. It seemed like a good fit to hire her as a teacher.”
“And when did she end up becoming a partner?”
“When I bought the property.”
“She owns some of it?”
“No, I bought that outright, at the auction. She and her husband supplied the seed money for the startup. Computers, utilities, advertising, coaches, certification, all of that. They’ve earned more than half their investment back, since we created the online content and sold the modules and started private coaching times. It’s not like they’re out all that money.” And we’d earned it twice as fast as the terms of the startup had indicated. He stood to double his money, so why he was freaking out, I had no idea. I told Jeremy all of this.
Jeremy took a long drink from his straw. “What do you want me to do?”
“Have you heard from Mark?” I sipped ice water from the edge of the glass, so cooling.