Fuck. I felt like a fucking animal.
“How are you feeling?” I asked, hoping I sounded clinical, like a medic and not a horny douchebag who wanted to nail the wounded girl in front of me.
“Better,” she said. “I can move my fingers and toes.”
“Mind if I take a look?” It sounded almost suggestive to my ears, but I guess that was because of my dirty fucking mind.
Lilah didn’t seem to notice.
“Sure. But, um, could I have some coffee?” she asked.
“I’ll get it,” Jude said, jumping to his feet.
Rafe moved away from the machine, looking like he wanted to murder us all.
My breath caught in my throat when she looked up at me and offered her hands. I knew she had to be tough to make it through the woods in the snow — we were five miles from Blackwell Falls and even farther from Greenvale, the next closest town — but right then she looked like a wounded bird and fuck me if I didn’t want to shelter her from the storm.
Figuratively and literally.
I squeezed her fingertips. “Feel this?”
She nodded. “They do feel a little weird. My feet too.”
“Weird how?” I asked.
Jude put a cup of coffee in front of her. “Want sugar or cream?”
“No, thanks.” She took a drink of the coffee and her ensuing sigh went straight to my already enthused cock. “Weird like I almost have pins and needles, or like I did have pins and needles and it hasn’t quite gone away.”
“That’s pretty normal,” I said. “It’ll take a while for your circulation to be optimal again, especially with the AVS.”
“What’s AVS?” Jude asked.
“Aortic valve stenosis,” Lilah said. “It’s a heart thing.”
“You have a heart condition?” Jude asked, obviously surprised.
“Yep. And I left my meds in my bag. Luckily Nolan had some beta-blockers.”
“Have you always had it?” Jude asked.
I wondered if he was thinking the same thing I was thinking, the same thing that had kept me up most of the night, riddled with shame: Lilah had been sick when we’d set her up at that party, when we’d gotten her naked and texted her nudes to everyone in school.
It shouldn’t have mattered — I already knew what we’d done was fucked — but I felt like even more of a dick knowing she’d been sick, and that was saying something because I’d been feeling like a dick for the past six years.
“I was born with it,” she said.
I knelt at her feet and pulled off the socks I’d put on the night before. I was relieved to see that there was no discoloration in her toes, a good sign.
“Can you feel this?” I asked, pinching her toes.
She nodded. “But it’s like my fingers. They still feel a little numb.”
I slipped her socks back on and got to my feet.
“They can’t fix it?” Jude asked. “The heart thing?”
“They can replace the broken valve,” she said, “but it’s heart surgery, so they try to control it instead.”