I thought I’d land on my feet, which, looking back, was a ridiculous thought.
I lost balance as soon as I hit the ground, a combination of my momentum and the ice patches underneath the soles of my shoes screwing me over. I was lucky I hadn’t fallen into the eight-foot ditch, missing it by mere inches as my hands fought for purchase in the snow. Clumps laced with stones sliced at my fingers, and I could hear Vincent’s truck tires squeal in protest as he slammed on the brakes.
The sound reminded me of Mom’s scream.
As I came to a stop on my side, I had one thought: what the heck is wrong with me?
The world stopped spinning as I pushed to my hands and knees. Snow covered me, pressed against my bare palms, but I could barely feel the sting of the cold. The fall had knocked the wind out of me, and each gasp of icy air burned my lungs.
Distantly, I knew I was shaking like a wet dog left out in the cold, shaking like a leaf in strong winds, shaking like a girl who’d faced a ghost of the past. The images of the cars were still burned into my imagination, still bloody, still broken.
I heard a door slam, then Vincent’s loud, shaky shout. “Are you insane? You’re freaking insane! You just jumped from a moving vehicle!”
His shadow fell over me as he came close, and even though I looked up at him, I couldn’t really see him. The fish-eyed lens layered over my vision made things blurry, wavy. Even my voice didn’t sound right. “It wasn’t moving that fast.”
“It was still moving.” Vincent’s gaze caught on something at ground level, a sharp breath pulling in through his teeth. “Adeline, your hands.”
My palms were still flat in the snow, but when I looked down, I saw that there was red smeared in the white. I’d torn my tights, too, and the bare skin of my knees pressed into the ground. My coat seemed to be okay—dirty, but not torn. All at once, the sharpness of the pain broke through my awareness, my hands throbbing with the ache.
When I lifted my palms to inspect them, my stomach rolled. Long, jagged edges cut across my skin, dirt sticking to the wounds, melted ice mixing with blood.
“Ow,” I said belatedly.
Vincent knelt beside me in the snow, his jeans immediately dampening. “You think?” Gently, he reached over and held my wrist lightly, angling it so the blood wouldn’t trickle onto my coat sleeve. His touch was soft, as if my wrist were made of glass. “Jeez, why would you jump from the truck, Adeline?”
“I don’t go on that…curve. This is the road—” I cut myself off, finally able to draw in a breath that seemed to stick. “I don’t go down this road.” He would know what this road was. He would know.
“How do you get to school if you don’t go down this road?”
This was one of the busiest roads in the town, especially during rush hour. It was a direct route from commercial Greenville to the residential side, but it wasn’t the only road.
“I take Brewer.”
“Brewer,” Vincent echoed. “You add an extra five minutes to your commute just to avoid this road?”
I pulled my hand from his, wincing from the pain. “Yeah.”
I prepared for him to make fun of me. Call me a drama queen. As time stretched further, I realized he wasn’t going to. Vincent just regarded me silently, both of us kneeling in the snow, the chill finally starting to raise goose bumps on my exposed skin.
After a moment, Vincent cleared his throat. “Come on, let’s get you back to the truck. I’ve got a first-aid kit in the glove box.”
Much like Jackson had yesterday, Vincent helped me to my feet, and I relied on his strength to pull me up. I was still shaking all over, but not from the cold. The tremors were coming from my core—I couldn’t suppress them. My legs wavered from the pressure, and I realized for the first time how much my knees hurt from landing on them. I moved to take a step and immediately one of my legs buckled.
Vincent stepped closer, grip tightening. “Are you okay?”
No, I was going to die from embarrassment. For a moment, I leaned against Vincent, trying to steady myself. I inhaled deeply, his scent filling my nose. He smelled like honey and coffee, comforting and warm.
“I don’t even know why I did that,” I murmured, looking down at my torn hands. “I just jumped. I didn’t even think.”
“Fear does that. Fight or flight,” he said, helping me back to where he’d stopped the truck.
Fight or flight. I’d definitely tried to take flight. “You’d think the idea of jumping out of a moving vehicle would be worse.”
“Sometimes all you think about when you’re scared is getting away.”
I still felt that way. We were too close to the curve—if I moved my head, I would be looking at it. I would be picturing crunched cars and broken glass. Push it down, I told myself, trying to control my breathing.
“Too bad I didn’t stick the landing,” I said as Vincent pulled open the passenger’s side door and helped me inside. Unsurprisingly, my joke fell flat.
Once again, Vincent made that chuckling sound, but his expression was hard to read. He popped open the glove box and pulled out a small red first-aid kit, opening it up and immediately finding the gauze.
“What’s your biggest fear?” I asked him, knowing that I was breaking our rule.
To my surprise, Vincent answered this one, but didn’t look at me while he did. Instead, he focused on extracting a small antiseptic wipe. “Losing my dad.”
There was something in the way he spoke that felt so real. He wasn’t saying that to inadvertently hurt me—he was being honest. “Because it’s just you two.”
“I can’t imagine life without him, without the café. It’s unthinkable.” Vincent looked up at me through his lashes, the green shuttered with black. “Your turn.”
Something in my stomach tightened at the way he looked at me. So badly I wanted to lie and say “clowns” or “spiders,” but I knew the truth. “This road.”
That intensity didn’t leave Vincent’s gaze until he looked back down to my hand. He dabbed the wipe across my skin, trying to be as gentle as possible. A lock of dark hair fell across his forehead, and as he pushed it away with a ringed hand, I was struck, rather randomly, with how attractive he was.
It was a stray thought, like “oh, the sky is gloomy today”—“oh, Vincent Castello is good-looking.” He wasn’t cute in a way that would normally catch my attention, what with the long hair, lip piercing, and ripped jeans, but there was something about his eyes. The seriousness there, the way he watched me. It made everything in my body aware, tingling all over.
I looked at him for a long moment. He had secrets in him, so many. I wanted to know them all. I wanted to pry his head apart and peek inside, see everything that made him tick. That was the whole point of the project, but it was more than my grade propelling me now. It was so, so weird how invested I was in getting Vincent to spill his life story. I didn’t even understand it myself.
Vincent crumpled up the wipe and moved to the gauze next. “I’d use a normal bandage, but I must not have restocked them last time.”
“That’s okay,” I replied, but my voice was way too high to sound normal. Vincent looked up again, probably afraid I was going into shock or something, as another idle thought ran across my brain: He’s even prettier than Bryce.
“Did you hit your head?” he asked.
“What? Why?” Had I said the Bryce thing out loud? Oh my gosh.
Vincent continued wrapping my hand. “Just trying to figure out if we should stop by an ER or something.”
I shook the strange thoughts from my mind. “I’m okay. I think my hands and knees took the brunt of it.” My skin poked through the tatters in my tights, but thankfully, the scrapes weren’t deep enough to break skin. The fabric, though, was beyond saving.
Once Vincent finished wrapping the gauze around my palms, he said, “Next time, let’s wait for the truck to actually stop, yeah?”
I traced the gauze with a finger. “Yeah.”
Vincent lingered for a moment before taking a step back to shut my door. I looked at the tears in my leggings. There was no way I’d want to wear these in public. Without thinking further, I reached under my skirt for the band of the tights, wiggling them down past my knees.
So when Vincent rounded the corner to the other side and opened his door, he saw me in the process of taking off my tights. He faltered for a second, averting his eyes, before getting out, “Uh, are you—what are you doing?”
“They’re ripped,” I said in a duh tone, careful not to put too much pressure on my injured palms. At least his reaction took my mind off the road in front of us. Took my mind off my aching hands. “Relax, it’s not like I’m taking my skirt off.”
“Yeah, but you’re literally undressing.” His voice sounded so distressed that I nearly had to laugh.
With one final tug, I pulled my tights completely off, sliding my feet back into my flats. “Actually, I undressed. Past tense. You can look now.”
When he glanced back into the cab, his gaze immediately fell to my bare legs. The cold air slipped against them, causing me to shudder.
When Vincent finally climbed into the truck, I could’ve sworn his cheeks were red. “I’ll turn around and we can go down Brewer, okay?”
I sagged a little in the seat, relief making me dizzy. After shoving my tights into my backpack, I shot him a look full of gratitude, refusing to look out the windshield. “Thank you.”
Mrs. Keller should’ve warned me that the arch was ginormous. It looked like it was made out of a white wicker and lattice-like material, with blue vines laced through it. I had zero idea how I was supposed to be getting it anywhere. It definitely wouldn’t have fit in my car.
“This’ll be a breeze,” Vincent had said once he got a look at it. “I’ve got straps in the back that’ll hold it down.”
“It’ll fit?” I hadn’t been so sure. Maybe on its side…
But Vincent had no doubts. He and one of the store employees worked on getting it out to the back of his truck while I gathered the fake snow. I hadn’t been sure how much to get, so I just got three big bags worth, hoping it’d be enough.
I hadn’t thought about the car ride home with it, though. Vincent’s truck didn’t have a backseat, so I had to hug a bag on my lap and let the other two rest in the space between us. The plastic of the bag made my hair feel staticky.
My hands no longer stung, but every once in a while, they’d throb. If I shifted my fingers enough or curled my hand around the faux snow, they’d hurt. Hopefully I’d be able to hide the injury from Mom. That would get difficult to explain.
By the time we pulled back into the school’s parking lot, it was a little after seven, the sun completely disappeared from the sky. “I’m sorry that you wasted your day off on this,” I told him, feeling guilty.
“I didn’t mind. If I did, I wouldn’t have agreed to it.” The statement was so simple that I found myself just nodding. Vincent stopped the truck in the space beside the convertible, shifting the gear into park. “I can come early tomorrow to drop the arch off.”
“You’re seriously a lifesaver. It’ll look great at the dance.”
Vincent’s face glowed with the dashboard lights, but in the darkness, it was impossible to see the color of his eyes. “I can’t imagine having to be in charge of dances. It sounds like a nightmare.”
That made me smile. I couldn’t quite imagine Vincent Castello in charge of a dance either. “I can’t imagine you attending one.”
“No kidding.”
Around the bags of snow, I lifted my palms, bandages facing him. “Thanks for this.”
“Can I ask you something?”
I wanted to tease him and say “actually, that’s against the rules” but he’d said it so seriously that it made my heart skip a beat. “Sure.”
“Have you ever talked to someone about everything?”
Something tight and prickly swept through me, and the longer I looked at him, the stronger it became. All of the thoughts I’d been keeping pinned back rallied at the encouragement of Vincent’s question, ready to break free and overwhelm me. “We said we wouldn’t talk about the accident.”
“I don’t mean the accident,” he said evenly. “I mean losing your dad.”
He had on that stupid blank expression and it made me want to hit him. Hit him so hard that my stupid palms would bleed again. That spiky sensation flared into anger, ready and hot. “That’s not any of your business,” I all but snapped, pushing against the seatbelt latch. “You don’t know anything about it.”
“I don’t,” he agreed, but spoke quicker now, as if trying to get the words out before I left. “I just know if I were your position—”
“But you’re not,” I cut him off sharply, shoving my door open. I’d been so hasty that I almost clipped the side of my convertible, catching the truck’s door at the last second. “Save the psychoanalysis for the report.”
“Adeline.” Vincent’s hand came down on the bag of fake snow that sat between us, refusing to let go. “If you have panic attacks so often, you should—”
“I don’t have panic attacks.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah? What do you call jumping from a vehicle? Or how you reacted to your flat tire?”
Of course Vincent got to witness both of these instances, but he didn’t get it. He didn’t know the truth. Those weren’t panic attacks. He’d said so himself, today was fight or flight. As for my tire, that was grief trying to spill out. And I couldn’t let it. A momentary lapse, but not a panic attack.
“You know, I think I’ve got enough for my report.” My voice shook as I spoke, and I tugged the snow from his grip, forcing all three bags into my arms and climbing out of the truck. I couldn’t listen to him talk like this. “Hopefully you’ve got enough for yours.” And I shoved the passenger’s side door shut behind me.
I almost expected him to roll the window down, not letting the conversation end on that note, but he didn’t. He also didn’t pull out of the parking space. He just sat in the idling truck, no doubt waiting for me to look over, but I sure wasn’t going to. I should’ve listened to my gut instinct before. Pairing with Vincent Castello had been a mistake.
After shoving the bags of snow into the backseat, I jammed my key in the ignition, barely having enough time to buckle my seatbelt before I pulled out of the space, leaving Vincent and his stupid opinions behind.