Slashed (Extreme Risk 3)

I try to get a look at the damage, but she’s a mess. Her foot is coated in blood—the bottom, between the toes, even the top. Some of it has dried by now, but there’s a long, jagged cut over the ball of her foot that is still bleeding sluggishly. With a curse, I grab a clean towel out of the drawer and run it under warm water. Then I start to clean off her foot.

She winces, but she doesn’t say anything. Neither do I. I’m too busy counting the cuts—five on her right foot and what turns out to be three smaller ones on her left. Most of them are shallow, but the cut I noticed first is deep enough that it’s going to hurt her for a while.

What the hell happened to her?

I take my time as I wash, then disinfect each separate cut. But there are still a couple random pieces of glass embedded in her foot and I have to use a pair of tweezers to pull them out—something that isn’t exactly fun for either one of us. Cam keeps her stoic face—of course—but the way her foot twitches involuntarily tells me that it hurts. Fuck. The last thing I ever want to do is cause her pain, even if it helps her in the long run. And even if she doesn’t have the same compunction about me.

After what feels like forever—but is really more like half an hour—she’s bandaged up and ready to go. Except she doesn’t attempt to go anywhere. Instead, she just kind of sits there on the counter, swinging her legs and looking anywhere but at me.

She didn’t say much while I was cleaning her feet, but then, neither did I. Now, however, the silence hangs between us like a cornice, one that will tumble into an avalanche with the first wrong word, and leave us trapped and suffocating under the snow. It’s a feeling that’s become way too common lately, especially considering the fact that we’ve had each other’s backs for most of our lives.

Until I fucked up and took her up on the one thing I shouldn’t have. That one mistake screwed everything up. Royally. Today’s brouhaha just adds to the shit that’s already piled up between us.

When I can’t stand the silence any more, I walk over to the fridge and pop it open. “Want a beer?” I ask, as I reach for one.

“Yeah, sure,” she answers, accepting the bottle I hold out to her. “But when did you give up tequila and start drinking beer?”

“A couple months ago, when we were in Chile.” Right around the time I decided I was done with pretending to be something—someone—I wasn’t, all in the vain hope that it would make Cam like me more. Because the truth is, I could drink a gallon of tequila, could land a perfect Quad Cork 1800, could win the fucking X Games, and she still wouldn’t look at me the way she looks at Z.

“Really? I never noticed.”

“Why would you?”

Pretty hard to notice changes when she barely looks at me anymore. I don’t say that, though. No reason to rock the boat now that we’re both finally back aboard.

She doesn’t answer. Instead, she takes a sip of her beer before wasting a couple minutes peeling at the bottle label and again looking anywhere but at me.

And suddenly, I’m sick of it all.

Sick of not being able to talk to Cam about anything when we used to talk about everything.

Sick of ignoring her when all I really want to do is pull her into my arms and kiss her senseless.

Sick of pretending I don’t give a fuck that she doesn’t believe in me, doesn’t respect me.

And most of all, I’m sick of pretending everything is okay when nothing has been okay for months.

I drain my beer in one long swallow—a little fake courage never hurt anyone—then slam the bottle down onto the counter as I ask the question that’s been burning through my veins from the moment I opened the door and found her standing on my porch. “What are you doing here, Cam?”

“What do you mean?” She’s so startled by the question that she forgets she’s avoiding my gaze. For the first time since she got here, she looks straight at me and the second her mossy green eyes meet mine I know there’s a lot more going on here than her bloody feet and our bloodier past.

“You’ve spent the last four months avoiding me—”

“You’ve been avoiding me!”

“I’m going to go ahead and call it mutual. And that’s fine. I get it. But suddenly you show up at my condo, looking shell-shocked and with your feet cut all to hell. I’d be an idiot or an asshole if I didn’t know something was really wrong. So what is it? What’s happened? Is it—”

I stop myself before I say his name, and make everything a million times worse between us. Because Cam’s feelings for Z might just be the only subject touchier than my feelings for her.

“My mom’s back.” She blurts the words out, and I’m not sure which one of us is more shocked by them.

“Your mom?” I repeat incredulously. “Since when?”

“Since tonight. Or maybe before that, I don’t know. I just know that when I got home tonight she and my dad seemed to have worked things out.”

“Worked things—out?” I sound like a fucking parrot, but I can’t help it. My mind is literally boggling. “How is that possible? He hasn’t heard from her in close to eighteen years.”

“That’s what I told him. It doesn’t seem to matter. She’s back, and I guess they’ve been talking for a while because they’re back together and we’re supposed to just go back to being one, big, happy family.”