He blinked. His eyes widened in surprise.
Damned if that didn’t make him smile faintly, in what looked like genuine pleasure. “Maybe I have a particle of sense. I gave Graybill an explicit cap for areason.”
“Maybe I just know what the house could be worth. Some of us have vision.”
“Vision, huh? I’m guessing yours is double right about now. You know, kind of like that time you tried to jump Whiskey Creek on your bike. Ava Knievel. Interesting, but I guess not surprising, to learn you’ve made overreach a life philosophy.”
She was perilously close to scowling at him.
She tried that brow arch instead. It worked, but it hurt, and it turned into a wince, which also hurt.
He crouched down next to her instantly. “Look at me,” he demanded softly.
The words somehow bypassed her reason. She obeyed him instantly, as if she’d simply been waiting for permission to do that and only that. She looked, and her heart hurt, as if it was unfurling after being curled in on itself, as she took in that familiar, once beloved terrain. The dimple she could nearly always see because he had a way of smiling crookedly, even in repose, as if everything was eligible to be amusing and he wanted to be ready to laugh. That little dent in his chin she could press her thumb into.
A surge of something like wonder, maybe even joy, tensed his features, gone in a flash. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her.
“Just wanted to see if your pupils are the same size and they are. You probably don’t have a concussion. You seeing spots, Harwood?” His voice was soft.
“Nope.” One frayed, woefully delayed syllable. She wanted to trace those new lines raying from the corners of his eyes with a finger.
As if they were the lines that connected the last moment she ever saw him to this one.
“I am. Thirteen of them. Six on one cheek, seven on the other. I remember, because for some reason I counted them the last time I found you flat on your back after doing something reckless.”
Her heart stopped.
The words “flat on her back” instantly conjured that day in his parents’ bedroom, the two of them lying side by side, the sun glinting off the hair on his arms, her head against his shoulder. Drunk on a surfeit of slow, endless French kissing. Their hands never wandered much and buttons didn’t open but their legs twined and their groins sure did chafe. That was the day she’d made up her mind to let him touch her boob if he tried it.
She scooted back from him now like a hermit crab. As anyone would reflexively retreat from a potential source of great pain. Or a cliff edge.
“Well, this has been an interesting reunion, Mac, but I’m afraid you’ll need to excuse me. I have a lot of things to get done this afternoon.”
She pretended not to see the gentlemanly hand he extended as she attempted to get to her feet. She managed it with a certain amount of grace. She only staggered a little. She swiped one hand all over her butt and little bits of gravel fell to the ground.
He watched all of this in apparently rapt silence.
She held on to his ersatz ice pack with the other hand, though.
They stood together in silence. It felt reluctant, dense with unspoken things, with grief and joy that felt all of a piece.
“When you open the gate and push it to the side, you need to lock it into place next to the drive. There’s a loop there for that purpose. Otherwise gravity will get you every time and it’ll swing shut.”
“Okay,” she said. And then she added, “Thank you.”
“Every couple of hours with the ice,” he said shortly. “Fifteen to twenty minutes at a time.”
“I know,” she said, crossly.
“I bet you do.”
She did scowl, then.
“You can keep the ice.”
“Thanks. It’s mostly water now.”
“You can keep that, too.”