Page 147 of Stay With Me

She cut him off with another chuckle. “I just wanted to clarify. I’m sort of starting to see someone that I really like so I don’t want to screw it up. Know what I mean?”

He let himself sink into the stool. “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.”

“So you’re seeing someone or you have a girlfriend now? I guess that means no more restaurant flings.”

He forced a laugh. “There haven’t been any restaurant flings for a while.”

“But no girlfriend either,” she deduced.

He lifted his palms. “There’s something, but I don’t know what it is.”

She pushed his glass toward him. “Try me. I’m a great sounding board.”

He took a long sip, then swirled the ice in the glass.

“I had an experience.”

“What kind of experience?”

He shook his head as he attempted to put words together that could articulate the whole thing, without pushing his emotions over the edge. Merely thinking about it in his borderline intoxicated state caused him to seemingly tap dance along that tiny sliver of an edge.

“I was hiking out in the desert and I ended up falling off a cliff,” he finally said.

Her jaw dropped. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re alive!”

“By some miracle, yeah.”

Her eyes were huge. “Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you get hurt?”

“I broke both of my legs and was unconscious for almost thirty-six hours or something like that.”

“Holy shit!” she exclaimed. “How’d you ever get out of that? Were you alone?”

“No,” he replied, noticing a small surge of emotion in his chest that caused him to lower his voice. He stared at his glass while he continued to swirl the ice.

“No, I had a uh … a friend with me. She stayed with me. We were stuck in the bottom of a canyon for eighteen hours, and she stayed with me. Managed to flag down some help. She basically saved my life.”

“Basically,” Leah scoffed. “She totally saved your life.”

“Yeah. She did.”

“So that’s her then?” Leah asked.

Nick instantly jerked his head up and looked around the club, causing Leah to laugh and pat his knee. “No, I mean, the girl you were talking about. You said there was something going on, but you didn’t know what it was.”

“Oh,” he uttered, blatantly disappointed. “Yeah. That was her.”

“What happened? Where is she?”

“She’s still around,” he replied listlessly. “She actually works for me now.”