Page 28 of Moonstriker (The Summertide Chronicles #4)

Chapter 28

Aubrey

I woke on the third day of our mountain trek in pain.

That was pretty terrible, compared to how I’d felt when I’d gone to sleep. I’d been lighter, happier than I’d been in months when I’d fallen asleep. Maybe...maybe happier than ever.

The pain wasn’t my head or my throat, though, it was my darned ankle again.

Kit was curled up next to me, warm and naked and so very beautiful, I wanted to just ignore it all and turn to him, ask if he was up for another go before we started walking for the day.

I could see it becoming an addiction— him becoming an addiction—all too easily. His soft white hair was in his face, and sleep made him look...not less sharp, exactly, but maybe less...ready.

That didn’t make sense.

It was just that when he was awake, Kit was always ready. Ready for attack, or earthquake, or any other number of threats or irritations. There, like that, he didn’t look ready for anything, other than maybe a day of lounging around in bed.

Lying beneath me, taking me in, and . . .

His cloudy eyes flickered open, and in the pre-dawn light they looked like liquid silver.

When he smiled at me, I almost melted back into the blankets. I could have just stayed there, content, forever.

Except that we couldn’t do that.

Something about what we’d done already wasn’t quite right. Wasn’t enough.

It seemed like I’d already bonded Slate, yes, because he was talking directly to me, responding to me as though we were bonded, but I was sure it wasn’t done yet. We weren’t in the clear, and we had to get...somewhere, do something.

Which was incredibly unhelpful.

But at least Kit seemed to know where we were going, so I wasn’t just following my own instincts, largely fumbling in the dark like I was searching for a light switch in an unfamiliar house.

“Morning,” he said, then bit his lip. Like he was worried. Him, worried.

That was weird.

Had I been terrible at sex? Well, I’d fallen asleep right after, so that probably hadn’t been too impressive. I winced. “Sorry I fell asleep on you. I...”

“No,” he denied immediately, shaking his head, then stretching languorously. “I don’t care about that. You’ve been hiking for two days, which you don’t usually do. You’re also in the middle of bonding a whole mountain, which no one ever does. It’s a wonder you’re conscious at all.”

“So it, um, wasn’t disappointing?” I didn’t remember it being disappointing, at least not for me. I remembered it being perhaps the most incredible experience of my life, and I finally understood what all the fuss was about, but still, I had instantly fallen asleep afterward, so maybe I’d missed something important afterward.

He grinned, shaking his head and burying his face in my chest. That was a good sign, right? Him being unthinkingly close? Touching me without it being awkward? I tugged him closer, turning to?—

Pain shot through my ankle, reminding me of my issue upon waking up.

Kit sat straight up, looking down on me, his eyes wide and, I realized as I stared into their swirling depths...worried. He was concerned for me. Likely, he thought I was going to have another seizure.

It was decidedly strange, being considered fragile in any way. I’d never been that before, in any relationship. Well, not since I was a child, taken care of entirely by my mother.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, already patting me down, starting at my neck.

I decided that today, I was going to swallow my pride. My mother had always been right, and letting it get in the way was silly. Also, it saved Kit some time in his pat down, even if I might have enjoyed the experience.

“It’s my ankle,” I said, and my voice came out strained. “I think it’s worse than before.”

Did it hurt that much? I hadn’t thought so. It hadn’t interfered with our activities the night before, and I’d walked on it for hours yesterday, so?—

But when Kit threw the top sleeping bag back, he revealed a serious problem.

“Worse” hardly covered it. The ankle was swollen to twice its usual size even through the bandage, a large purpling bruise on one side and redness...well, everywhere.

I stared at it in shock, and he groaned. “Aubrey, why didn’t you tell me it was hurting you yesterday?”

I shook my head, just staring at the mess in silence for a moment before realizing—he thought I’d been doing the same as that first day, keeping it from him out of sheer stubbornness. “I didn’t, I swear. It didn’t hurt yesterday. It didn’t hurt at all until this morning when I woke up.”

He met my eyes, mildly skeptical, and I couldn’t blame him for it. I’d been trying to hide it once, why not again?

He slid down to sit at my feet, unwrapping the bandage that we’d left on overnight to reveal the mangled mess I’d made of myself. Gently, he pulled my foot into his lap and prodded the swelling, his fingers cool and clinical, almost like he knew what he was doing. Of course, he’d passed me off to a doctor when I’d been having seizures, but an injury? He probably had experience with that kind of thing.

I winced and had to hold back a yelp at the manipulation of my swollen ankle, but as I’d suspected, he backed off before I even made a sound, seeming to know when it hurt.

“It must be broken,” he said, scowling at it. “A hairline fracture, since I can’t feel a break, but this kind of swelling doesn’t happen for nothing.”

I almost hesitated to ask, but we needed to discuss it. “How far are we from where we need to be?”

He looked away, not an avoidance tactic, but thinking, his eyes scanning back and forth as he considered. “A few miles. We’re close. I could go ahead and bring someone back to help?—”

I shook my head. “No. We have to go. We have to get there. Today. As early as possible.”

In front of me, he froze, not moving a single muscle and staring at a fixed point. What was wrong? Was the world trembling again, and I hadn’t even noticed? Was?—

I followed his sightline to find my own hand fingers buried up to the first knuckle in the dirt next to the sleeping bag. Like I was trying to dig it up, almost. Or go bodily into the mountain.

Weird.

That was very weird. “I have no idea why I’m doing that,” I said, but suddenly I couldn’t seem to tear my eyes away from the spot. Nor was I removing my fingers from the ground.

I couldn’t seem to summon up the urge to move at all.

Kit turned then, tearing into one of the packs. A moment later, something hit me in the chest and dropped into my lap. Then another. Granola bars. Both of them the cherry kind.

“Eat,” Kit ordered. “Then we’ll dress and go. There are just a few miles left, but it’s going to be an ordeal on that ankle. I’ll be right back.”

He fiddled around with his phone and a huge block of a power bank before stalking out of the cave, still naked.

That was so hot.

I could barely focus on the granola bar packaging to open it up, especially one-handed. That was when I realized that I still hadn’t pulled my hand out of the dirt.

I looked back down at it, and...it didn’t make any sense. I’d been commanding that hand for as long as I recalled it existing, but the task of moving it suddenly seemed nearly impossible. Finally, I used the other arm to forcibly pry it away, dusting my fingers off on the sleeping bag and hesitating to touch the ground again. What if every body part I pressed into the side of the mountain suddenly refused to follow my orders?

I’d managed to unwrap and eat one bar and was just starting on the second when Kit returned.

Unsurprisingly, he was still naked. It wasn’t like he was going to have magically found clothes out there on the mountainside. But he looked really good doing it, so I wasn’t going to complain. On the other hand, he was carrying a handful of sticks.

“This is ridiculous, and a terrible idea, and we shouldn’t do it,” he said as he knelt down at my feet again. “We’re going to permanently damage your ankle, and we shouldn’t do this at all.”

“But . . . we’re going to?”

“Are you going to agree to sit here and wait for me to call in paramedics with a helicopter?”

I scoffed at the very idea, and he nodded. “That’s what I thought. So I’m going to splint this ankle, and we’re going to go slow.”

I shivered, glancing around. “I’m...I’m not sure we have time to go slow.”

His lips peeled back from his teeth in an angry near-snarl. “The fucking impatient mountain can wait a few fucking minutes on your frail mortal body. I am not going to let you kill yourself to do this.”

For a moment, I stopped trying to open the granola bar in my hands and just stared at him. He was worried about me. Not only that, but he was saying the fate of the whole world, and The Plan he’d spent his whole adult life working toward, could wait...on me. On my wellbeing.

I desperately wanted to kiss him again, but he was all the way at my feet, and I couldn’t just bend myself around to make that happen when my foot was in his lap.

“Eat your breakfast,” he insisted, and went back to working on tying the sticks in a pattern around my ankle. I worried he wasn’t going to be able to fit pants over it and I’d wind up wandering the mountain as naked as he was, but then I remembered: sweat pants. That should do the trick.

As I’d thought, once he was finished, he helped me get a new pair on over the splint, and then he worked my shoes into the mix, expertly arranging everything so that it was hard for me to bend my ankle in any direction.

It kind of stunk, but also, I thought it might work.

Then he finally dressed himself, and that was a near-tragedy.

I wanted a world where he could just wander around naked all the time, I decided. It would be the best world.

He knelt next to me, taking my temperature with his wrist just like my mother had done when I was a little kid and then nodding. Finally, he pressed two pills into my hand. “These will help with the swelling and any pain. . . but are you in pain now? You didn’t seem to be when I was splinting you.”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t hurt unless I move it.”

He cocked his head at me, seeming confused for a moment. “Is there pressure in your ears?”

I had no idea what the heck he was talking about, so I just shrugged.

Still, he spoke up a bit with his next words, which was a relief, since he’d been mostly muttering under his breath for half of the morning. “I think it’s Slate. Something about the bond is making you not notice that you’re in pain. Do tell him that’s bad, by the way. Pain is a good thing. It’s how we fragile humans know we should stop doing a thing. Say, walking for miles and miles on a broken fucking ankle.”

That would indeed be bad, if I stopped noticing I was in pain. I didn’t think it was that, though. I realized that the whole of yesterday morning was a little fuzzy around the edges, like my head had been floating away without my body.

Not like I hadn’t been in control of myself or anything so serious, just like I’d taken cold medicine, and everything physical had been muted.

Still, I wasn’t going to tell Kit that. He’d already been so down on himself. No doubt if I said that, he’d start thinking he’d taken advantage of me while I’d been in an altered state of consciousness. That had definitely not been what had happened, so I didn’t want to deal with even a second of him thinking it.

Even now, dealing with the pain of standing on the ankle, I wanted nothing more than to go back to the previous evening and hold him against me forever.

I could only hope that he’d let me, at some point in the future.

This time, when he reached for the rope to tie us together, I didn’t even argue.