She almost laughed at herself. She’d been coasting for the past day or two, hanging in limbo. Whether she wanted to admit it or not, she’d been confused the whole time, with no idea of what she was going to do next.
It’d been easy to let him tell her what each step would be. Sure, there’d been good reasons for it. He was keeping her safe. She’d run from her hometown. She’d gone into hiding with him. And she’d come through almost dying multiple times without truly facing the reality of it all.
She could have died.
And before that? She’d done everything she was supposed to do according to her parents and elders and everyone else in her life. There were always sensible, logical, practical reasons for doing what people told her to do. And she reassured herself that she was a strong, independent, self-sufficient woman because she carefully thought out each action and decided to do what they said.
But that’d still been the easy way out, the path of least resistance.
It’d been like taking a multiple-choice test all her life. Choices were presented to her and she got to pick the best of the options. She’d fooled herself into thinking she’d accomplished so much, built a career for herself. But multiple-choice tests required less thinking, less effort, than coming up with the answers from scratch.
Maybe she should start challenging herself.
She didn’t know what the next step would be, but she shouldn’t wait for Brandon to come back into the room and tell her what her options were. She needed…no, she wanted to think for herself and decide based on that.
No more going with choice C just because it had the highest percent chance of being the right answer. No more choosing the longest answer of the choices available because that had the highest potential to be the right one.
No more pretending life was a standardized multiple-choice exam.
Brandon returned then with an ice pack.
She reached out and accepted it from him. “Thank you.”
He stood, hovering, while she loosened her medical boot and arranged the pack on it. “Maybe we should take it off.”
“No.” She didn’t want to get snappy, but she tried to keep her tone firm. “I think it’ll swell if we do. Better to ice it while it still has some compression for now and I’ll get it looked at by a doctor for humans when we get the chance to go to a human emergency room.”
His eyebrows rose but he didn’t argue.
Instead, an awkward silence hung in the air. She was tempted to ask him what needed to happen next. After all, he was the expert in dealing with people who tried to kill other people.
No. That wasn’t fair. Okay, maybe it was accurate, but it was unnecessarily snarky and frightening. When it came to what she wanted to do with her life, she didn’t need her answers right away, and she didn’t need to get pissy about them. She just had to break the habits she’d identified.
“You’re thinking hard.” He moved to lean against the wall next to her, facing her with his arms loosely crossed over his chest. His biceps and forearms were criss-crossed with tiny scratches.
“I have a lot of questions piling up.” Yes, that felt right. She did want to know what to do next, but the old her would’ve just asked him for next steps. The new her needed information in order to form her own ideas. “I guess I’m wondering if we need to talk to police after this or if we can go to a human emergency room.”
Unfortunately, sleep seemed a long way away and there was no actual bed anymore.
Brandon continued to study her, and she thought she caught the ghost of a smile playing over his lips. “The police are probably going to want to talk to us, but if we manage it correctly, I think they’ll talk to us while we’re at the emergency room.”
The thought of those lips sweeping over her skin heated her most intimate parts. Imagining him hovering over her with that ghost of a smile just before he dipped his head to…only she had real-life experience to enhance the imagination and now was so not the time to be indulging in the fantasy.
It took effort to drag her very naughty mind back to the present. She nodded. “Are we likely to get arrested?”
Her stomach did a flip-flop as she considered the possibility. She’d just managed to survive with actual professionals trying to kill her. Getting in trouble with the law, and potentially going to jail, was a horrible way to end this. It seemed insanely unfair. Or just insane. Maybe she was finally losing her sanity under the strain. She wasn’t sure.
“Not likely.” He definitely sounded amused.
“Okay.” She drew in air and blew it out slowly. “How long before we can go back to the cabin and look for Tesseract?”
There was a long pause and Brandon slid his back against the wall until he was sitting on his heels, his arms balanced on his knees. “Hours.”
“I want to go look for her.” The decision settled in her mind and felt right. Then another question popped in her head. “Is she…is it possible that she died in the cabin?”