Page 90 of Stay With Me

He reached for her hand. “No, I don’t need that. I think I’m kind of out of it still, I guess.”

“Do you want to call your parents?”

“My parents?”

“Yeah,” she answered, gesturing at the phone. “All of our stuff is still at the campsite, and I had no number for them.”

“Oh. Um, no not yet,” he replied. “My mom will freak out. Probably yell. I’d rather wait until I’m not so foggy.”

“Yeah, my mom cried.”

His eyebrows lifted. “Oh no. There’s nothing worse than when Mom cries.”

“I know. But she only cried because I cried first, and you know how that can be. It’s like yawning. One person cries, then another person cries, and before you know it, the whole room is in tears.”

He clutched her hand. “I amsosorry, Sammie.”

Again with theSammienickname. She wasn’t sure where it came from, but she liked it. Nobody had ever given her a nickname before.

“You don’t need to apologize,” she assured him. “I’m just a big sissy. I’m sure if I was the one who fell, you would have handled everything much better than I did. I’m—”

She abruptly stopped speaking as she became emotional again out of nowhere with a brief recollection of the entire ordeal. His appearance seemed to reflect her sudden brittle state so she fanned her face in a futile effort to keep herself under control.

“What’s the matter, sweetheart?”

She shook her head, causing more stupid little tears to trickle down her cheeks. “Oh, I cry super easily when I’m tired. It’s fine.” She forced another smile. “I’m really glad you’re okay. The whole thing was just scary.”

“You can talk to me about it,” he offered, wiping her cheek. “It might make you feel better.”

Her shoulders sagged.

“Well.” She cleared her throat and attempted to put on a brave face. “After you fell, you were totally out. I tried yelling at you, but you were just out. And I thought—”

Don’t talk about thinking he was dead,she told herself.You’ll upset him more.

“Anyway,” she went on, “I remembered you told me there was a trail that led into the bottom of the canyon so I retraced our steps and managed to find it and get to where you had landed. And when I found you, I—”

Out of nowhere, her throat clenched shut so she swallowed a couple of times in an attempt to defuse it. Nick looked at her through an empathetic face of lifted eyebrows and a soft frown, as he held her hand with both of his.

She eventually managed to continue, but the words came out in a whisper.

“I knew we were in big trouble.”

“Trouble how?”

She gestured with her head to his legs.

“Because you were hurt. You wouldn’t wake up. And even if you did, there was no way I could get you out of there without help. And I had no idea how to find help. All I could do was try to stay calm and stay there. Like you told me in the car if I ever got hurt or lost in the desert to stay put. So that’s what I did. I just sat with you, and tried to keep your injuries clean, and hoped that someone would eventually find us. And fortunately, they did. But it wasn’t until the following afternoon and all night long—”

Once again, keeping her emotions in check became fruitless so she turned her gaze to the floor and as the tears gushed out of her eyes, they were accompanied by pinched words that attempted to articulate her sheer terror at the whole situation.

“There were all these weird noises coming from all around us, mostly from animals that I was praying wouldn’t try to attack us. It was pitch black and freezing cold. And then I thought I was going to die because I was convinced the scorpion sting was a snakebite since I couldn’t see anything around me. I got sick and dizzy and weak so I laid down on the ground next to you and tried to wish and pray hard enough that we could just get out of there.Or at least live long enough for someone to find us. Then when the sun was up again, it got so hot.We ran out of water, but I was too sick to drink any anyway, and I had only managed to give you a little because I thought I’d drown you on dry land. And the whole thing was horrible,and I was the worst hiking partner ever because I nearlykilled youwith my incompetence.”

Well, now she’d said it. It probably didn’t matter. He was high and she was exhausted. Maybe they’d both fall asleep and forget she’d said anything.

She hung her head between her knees and sobbed, feeling a weird combination of wishing she’d never met him so the whole wretched event never would have happened, and wanting to climb into bed with him and curl up against his side like she had during the long, horrible desert night.

Almost immediately, she felt Nick’s hand on the back of her head and eventually arrive at the base of her chin, which he used to lift her face.