Chapter 25

“Don’t even think about hugging me,” Matt called out when I was still a good ten feet away. The words would have hurt if I couldn’t see that he was smiling, and that he probably had a semi-decent reason for holding his palms out to ward me off. He looked even worse than the last time I’d seen him. He’d washed his face and his arms up to the elbows, but his hair was stiff with dirt and sweat and rain and the shirt he’d put back on was streaked with grime and covered with disturbing splotches of red. “Seriously,” he chuckled. “I reek. I need a shower in a major way. You should keep a safe distance at all times.”

I laughed with him. It was so good to see his smile. So good to see him, period. We were standing on the street beside his car, since I had flown through the gate as soon as I got his text. “Is that your blood or Koby’s?” I asked, pointing to the irregular patches of red that covered his chest and shoulder.

He glanced down. “Oh. Actually, I think it’s Easton’s. He kept moving the clothes around to keep Koby covered, and his hands were cut up pretty bad.”

“How is he?” I asked, stepping closer. “Koby, I mean?”

“He’s good. On his way into surgery when I left. The cut was deep enough to need some muscle repair, and they had to make sure all the glass was out. Sounds like it was really painful. I’m impressed the dude held it together as well as he did.”

“Football players,” I said with a smile. “High pain tolerance.”

He smiled back at me. “Damn straight.”

“His parents made it in okay?”

“Yeah, no problem,” Matt answered. “I stayed anyway, till they took him off to prep.”

A drop of water fell squarely on my nose. I looked up at the sky, and a few more fell. Matt frowned. I knew what he was thinking. He didn’t want to go inside my house looking and smelling like he did. We could get back in his car, but I had a better idea. “Let’s go to the gazebo,” I suggested.

It was pouring by the time we’d both reached the shelter of the Zhaos’ picturesque gazebo, but the view was worth getting wet again. We stood for a moment and looked out with awe as giant columns of rain fell from the sky and bent in the wind, sweeping out over the bright green valley. “Kana’s been downgraded, did you hear?” I asked.

“I did,” he answered, watching the show with me. We were still getting wet with blowing rain, but it wasn’t enough to matter. If the wind wasn’t strong enough to scare me, it couldn’t be that bad.

My heart skittered as I prepared to ask the dreaded question. “So… what’s happening with the hurricane party?”

He looked at me with surprise. “Oh. It’s off. I guess you didn’t know, did you?” He chuckled ruefully. “It was going to be at Kobe’s house. After all that talk, it turned out that not very many guys could actually come, and nobody wanted to pay what it would cost to rent out someplace with so few people. But it didn’t end up mattering, because there were enough dropouts that we got under Koby’s mom’s ‘drop dead limit,’ so his place was a go. They’ve got a nice spread in Manoa — almost as big as this.” He gestured toward the Zhaos’ house.

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding, slowly and with no small amount of glee. “So you’re going home from here?”

He nodded, then glanced at his watch. “Yeah. My mom’s normally pretty chill about stuff like this, but me calling her from an emergency room twice in one week has got her a little freaked. Even if I wasn’t the patient.” He threw me a smirk. “Either time.”

Whoops. I hadn’t even thought about that. It was only seven days ago that he’d spent half the night in an ER with me. “You’re a good friend, Matt Sawyer,” I praised, my eyes feeling misty suddenly. “And a good team captain. I have to admit, I’m really glad you cancelled the hurricane party. I would have worried about you, you know.”

The baby blues held my own eyes with an uncharacteristic intensity. “I usually hate it when people worry about me.” He paused a moment, still staring at me. “But, Lacey… you saved my life today. Do you know that?”

My heart pounded. Matt was deadly serious. He wasn’t speaking in the least bit figuratively. “Oh?” I replied, my voice a croak. “How’s that? Did you… did you hear me scream?”

His forehead wrinkled slightly. “No. You screamed? When?”

Well, that answered that question. No need to freak the poor guy out any more than he already was. “When I saw the press box fall. From the other side of the stands.”

He shook his head slowly. He turned to look out at the rain. “I didn’t hear you. I didn’t even know where you were. I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t suspecting anything. When the rain got heavy, there were just the four of us left at the meeting. We were talking about the food, how to get it to Koby’s house. Easton thought he could get us some barbecue on the cheap, so he was there, and Gavin was hanging out because they live close and he was Easton’s ride. We ran up under the press box to get out of the downpour while we finished talking. It was no big deal. But then… well, I didn’t lie before. I heard something. And it bothered me.”

I thought of the ghastly chewing sounds. “What? What did you hear?”

His eyes trained back on mine. “I heard myself, Lacey. I heard me say the words, ‘What’s on the bottom?’”

I sucked in a breath. That was so not what I’d expected him to say. “You said…” I whispered hoarsely, “…but why?”

Matt harrumphed. “It was that shirt Gavin had on. Did you see it? It had this weird picture of a pig wearing black leather and riding a Harley.”

I nodded. The meme shirt.

“It said something above the picture, I don’t remember what,” Matt continued. “And there was more writing below it. But I couldn’t read the joke, because the shirt was wrinkled around his waist, and his arm was in the way. He was standing maybe ten feet from me, then. He’d stepped out from under the press box already — the rain had slowed down. And I hadn’t paid any attention to the stupid shirt before, but we were talking about meat and somebody mentioned it, and so I called out—”

“What’s on the bottom,” I finished for him.

“Right,” he said heavily, staring at me. “And the second those words were out of my mouth, I got the weirdest feeling. I remembered what you’d said, and it seemed impossible. Such a strange thing to say. It would be, like, the most unlikely coincidence ever. And then I realized something else. I realized I was standing between Koby and Easton, and that you’d just mentioned both their names to me at lunch. And that was bizarre too, because how do you even know Easton? And then I thought, ‘we’re all standing under this thing…’ and that’s all the thinking I did. I got us the hell out of there.”

My eyes were watering like crazy. I didn’t feel like I was crying, but the liquid was unstoppable nevertheless. I swiped at my cheeks and smiled at him.

“You knew, Lacey,” he said calmly, still looking at me. “How did you know?”

I drew in a ragged breath, then shook my head. I wanted to be honest with him. I would be honest with him. But instinct told me he’d be better off if the whole truth was delivered in stages. We’d both had a very long week. “I don’t have an answer for that,” I explained carefully. “I have no idea how I knew. I just did. The nightmares… well, it’s a certain kind of nightmare, really… I can’t control them. But when they come, I can’t ignore them, either.”

I wanted more than anything to close the few feet of distance between us, to wrap my arms around his waist and hold him tight. But even if he hadn’t told me not to touch him before, his body language now was clear. He was keeping his distance, and I couldn’t blame him. It isn’t every day you escape from the jaws of death only to find out your best friend is a freak.

“You said this has happened to you before?” he asked, not moving a muscle.

The gentleness of his tone surprised me. It also made the temptation to hug him against his will nearly unbearable. I nodded and looked away. “A few times. The first time I was just a kid.”

“You’ve… had nightmares that certain people were going to die?”

I nodded again.

A long silence followed. Still, he didn’t come any closer, and as long as he didn’t, I figured I’d better look at something else.

“And what happened?” he asked softly. Hesitantly. “To those other people?”

I swallowed a painful lump in my throat. “They all died.”

Don’t. Force him. To hold you. I moved to the railing near me and gripped it instead. Then I dared to look back at him. He looked horrified, as expected. But when our eyes met, the misery I saw in him was purely empathetic.

“I’m so sorry, Lacey,” he murmured. “I didn’t know… I mean, that must have been awful for you. And then to think that… Oh, wow.” He straightened and whirled farther away from me for a second, then returned. “You really did think I was going to die, didn’t you?”

I nodded my head for a third time.

“No wonder you were such a mess,” he exclaimed. He took a step closer. “I really am sorry.”

At that point, I figured I had two choices. I could either break down and fling myself at him, in which case I would totally devolve into a blubbering, simpering idiot, or I could lighten the mood.

“You’re sorry?” I countered brightly. “What do you have to be sorry about? You saved two people’s lives today besides your own! You, my friend, are a hero!”

He scowled. “Don’t call me that. They were giving me that crap at the hospital, too. If it were just me, we’d all be dead! If it hadn’t been for your warning, I wouldn’t have known we were in danger in the first place. And I for sure would have tried to pull that thing out of Koby’s leg the second he starting screaming. He’d have wound up with nerve damage, if he didn’t bleed to death first!”

Matt’s scowl only deepened as he started to pace. “The EMTs were really impressed by how Easton handled things, did you know that? They couldn’t believe that a kid with no medical training had the sense not only to leave the glass in him, but to hold that god-awful broken window right where it was until help came. Because if we’d tried to pull it out, or even let Koby squirm too much, it could have ripped him up really bad. They said that, but at the hospital it was still me that everyone focused on!”

I felt a sly smile creeping over my face. “You don’t say?”

“Yeah!” he continued with annoyance, still pacing. “I kept telling them that it was Easton giving the orders, not me, but nobody seemed to care. And I couldn’t explain the whole truth about why I got the guys out in the first place because I didn’t understand it myself! And even if I did understand it, nobody would believe me!”

“Bummer,” I commiserated, still smiling.

“Don’t look at me like that!” he complained. “Do you have any idea how annoying it is to have everybody calling you a hero and making a big fuss over you when you know that there were other people involved and you personally don’t deserve nearly as much credit as they’re trying to give you?”

I laughed out loud. “Um… yeah. As a matter of fact, I do.”

He stopped pacing. The scowl left his face. “Oh. Right. But that’s different! You—”

I cut him off with a glare.

“Okay,” he conceded finally, cracking a grin at me. “Point taken. No more standing ovations in front of the whole school.”

I grinned back. “Much appreciated.”

We smiled at each other for a moment, but he stepped no closer. The rain had slowed to a sprinkle. He looked out over the valley and released his breath with a sigh. “It’s been one hell of a week, Lace.”

I could not agree more. “Yeah.”

His phone buzzed. He pulled it from his pocket, glanced at it, and shoved it back in. “I have to get home. Like, now.”

He stepped out of the gazebo and onto the path, then turned around to face me again. “I’ll see you soon.”

I gazed out at him. He was filthy, bloody, freaked out, and wonderfully alive. How he would feel about me after he’d processed all this — after he’d had a hot shower, a good meal, and a full night’s sleep — I had no idea. But whenever he was willing to see me again, it would not be soon enough.