Page 32 of Chasing Creed

She remembered throwing out her arms, bracing herself for an electric shock. Instead, it felt like a thousand knives. She had no idea where the pain was coming from. It didn’t stop.

“I can’t believe you walked all the way back to the Jeeps.”

She stopped herself from telling him it was no big deal. The thorns had driven deep into her flesh. Some had barbs on the sides that hooked in and under her skin. Removing them became a bloody mess of cutting, turning—sometimes twisting—before tugging them out.

Whenever he pulled out a particularly tough one, he glanced up at her, making sure she was okay. Even if it hurt like hell, she didn’t wince. Each sting, every prick and poke sent her mind to counting...daffodils. Beautiful yellow dots in a sea of green waving between the grass in a cool spring breeze.

Most of the time it worked. Right now, it was fifty-fifty.

She still wished Jason had left her to take the thorns out herself. He was being careful and gentle and meticulous, but still there was something uncomfortable about having him touch her in such an intimate way. It didn’t belong with the pain.

“I saw what happened,” he said, but this time without stopping to look up at her. “Your instinct was to shield Hank.”

The dog cocked his head at the sound of his name. He sat watching. His eyes never leaving. Even when Brodie held back a grimace, the dog had twitched. He knew. She couldn’t fool him.

“It’s a good instinct,” he told her as he grabbed the container of alcohol. “Another sting coming,” he warned and dabbed at the open wound with a freshly soaked cotton ball.

Again, he kept his head down, already preparing the bandage with Neosporin. Now, she realized he might be purposely keeping his eyes away from her face so she could wince.

“You know it’s okay. You don’t need to be brave 24/7.”

“What’s the alternative?”

He looked up. Met her eyes and said, “You can lean on your friends.” His face dipped again, intent on the work his fingers were doing.

Brodie couldn’t tell him that she had no idea how to do that. Instead, she asked the top of his head, “How’d you learn to do this?”

“The Army did a good job teaching me how to shoot with precision and then pluck out shrapnel if the bad guys shot back.”

Dark humor. She recognized it from hanging out with his veteran buddies. Several months ago, Jason invited her to play poker with the three of them. She liked his friends. They didn’t ask questions of her. They were easy to be around. They’d all come back with injuries of their own. Jason had lost half of his arm. Benny, both his legs. And half of Colfax’s face was now a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces misshapen and melted into place.

She’d gotten used to their jokes about their injuries. They never talked seriously about what had happened to them. Maybe they wanted those experiences to stay buried. That was sort of the way Brodie felt about her time with Iris. About her injuries.

“This one might leave a scar,” he told her, keeping his eyes and fingers at work.

Without his eyes, she couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic. Sarcasm was one of the things she still couldn’t quite grasp. When he didn’t glance up with a grin, she realized he might be serious. Like he might think it mattered whether the thorn left a scar. Suddenly, she was grateful she hadn’t gotten any thorns in her back or around her abdomen. She didn’t want him to ever see those scars.

In the books she read, and Brodie read a lot, when a male character was truly in love with a female character, there was nothing that made a difference. Being in love evidently helped make everything better.

Of course, she didn’t have that kind of relationship with Jason. They were friends. She was learning how to be one on a day-by-day basis. She never dreamed she’d be so lucky to have a friend like him. And she liked being friends with him. She enjoyed their daily kennel chores together. They shared conversations about books, dogs, and the stars.

But leaning on him? She’d need to work on that.

She’d witnessed how much stress and tension being in a relationship was and didn’t know why anyone would want that. Jason was in a relationship, and it seemed to bring him more angst than joy. At the same time, he was crazy about Taylor Donahue. She and her son, Will were spending a couple of months with Taylor’s mother on the West Coast, and Brodie knew Jason still thought about her all the time, because he talked about it. Sometimes Brodie wished he’d stop talking to her about Taylor.

“That whole place had a strange vibe,” Jason said bringing Brodie back to the present.

He dabbed alcohol on the last piercings, and Brodie barely felt the sting. He used wet wipes to clean blood from the rest of her skin. Only then did she notice that he was cleaning her up as he mended her wounds.

“I thought so, too,” she told him, remembering the ghostly images she’d conjured up. She could swear she saw a face peeking out from behind the trees. She’d hoped she was beyond seeing visions of Charlottes anywhere other than her nightmares.

“That drone bothers me.”

“Why? Because it obviously was still powered on?” She hadn’t paid attention to Jason and Ryder’s conversation on the way back to the Jeeps. She just wanted to get out of there.

Jason carefully applied another bandage. Her legs and right arm looked like a patchwork attempt to hold her limbs in place.

“Still running means still transmitting information to someone,” he said. "What's more unsettling is why did Grace alert to it.”