All Broke Down (Rusk University #2)(42)
Author: Cora Carmack

“Now for your legs,” I say. I remove the ice packs and place them on the coffee table. He lifts his feet for me, but only a couple of inches. I hook an arm under his calves to lift them higher so I can fit all three pillows under his knees. I hear him wince, and I pause for a second to look at the swelling before I replace the ice. His thighs are thick and muscled, and his knees are so inflamed that they’re only a little narrower than the rest of his leg. I make sure the hand towels are wrapped neatly around the cold packs, and then place them back where they were.

I look for something, anything else to do. “Blanket?” I ask. I glance around the room and see one tossed on the floor beside a recliner. I pick it up and shake it out as he says, “I’m fine.”

I bring the blanket back over with me, but he turns it down. I hug it closer to me and sink down onto the floor beside him. I lean back against the couch and stare straight ahead.

“I really am sorry. I promise I won’t make you—”

I don’t get the rest of my thought out because he sits up on one elbow, grips the back of my neck, and bends over to cover my mouth with his. His lips are warm, and when I don’t immediately open my mouth, he nips my bottom lip. I suck in a breath, and his tongue sweeps past my lips. My whole body braces for the onslaught that is kissing Silas Moore, but this time, he’s soft and sweet and patient, like we have all the time in the world. When I follow his tongue back into his mouth, he groans. The sound vibrates against me, and the sensation echoes out over the rest of my body. I shiver, and he pulls back until I feel only his breath against me.

“I told you I would shut you up the next time you apologized.”

He slides his hand around to cup my jaw and kisses me again. Once. Twice. And a third time. Hard. Then soft. Just my bottom lip. The corner of my mouth. His lips play over mine like he’s trying to uncover every possible way to kiss me and check them off the list one by one. I open my mouth immediately when his tongue flicks out, but I taste him for only a second before he pulls away, wincing. He falls back against his pillow, and I notice for the first time that one of his cold packs has fallen on the floor, and the other is lost somewhere in the couch.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were hurting?”

“Because then I would have had to stop.”

My heart is a spinning top in my chest, and now that he’s not kissing me and things are slowing down, I can feel myself about to topple out of control. I shake my head and get the ice packs back where they belong.

Now I just need to get everything else back where it belongs, too.

Except I’m starting to think that the idea of “belonging” anywhere is false. We go through our whole lives thinking that we belong in one place and not in another. We think certain ideas and actions have to be relegated to the tiny little boxes we place them in. What if we just react instead? What if we take whatever the world gives us and instead of focusing on what it isn’t, we enjoy what it is?

I lean back against the couch and don’t think as I begin to talk. I tell him about my journalism major, and how social media is changing the way news happens, changing the way the world interacts and reacts. He tells me about football, and how it’s been the only thing he’s wanted since a coach plucked him out of a standard PE class his freshman year. He pulls the rubber band from my hair, and I lay my head back as he spreads the long strands out over his chest. He combs his fingers through the waves carefully while he tells me about going to the state championship with his high school team and then losing.

“Before that . . . the world felt so damn small. Like a pair of shoes that didn’t fit right. We lost and there were all these guys on my team, some I liked and some I didn’t, and they were all crying and falling to their knees, and I was just standing there staring at the stadium around us, and all the people that came out to see these two tiny schools duke it out. And it didn’t feel like I lost. Instead it was like I kicked open some door, and crawled out of my cage, and could stand up straight for the first time in my life.”

“So that’s how you knew I was suffocating. That had been you, too.”

He picks up a lock of hair and twists it, and I shiver again.

“I think we were suffocating in different ways, but yeah. I guess that was it.”

His hand in my hair has me so relaxed that I could fall asleep right there beside him on the floor. I close my eyes and turn my head to the side to rest against the cushion. Quietly, I ask, “You don’t feel that way anymore?”

“I didn’t. But lately the world is starting to feel pretty f**king small again.”

“So kick open another door.”

He continues playing with my hair with his left hand, but his right slips down to drag a knuckle over my cheek.

“I’m trying.”

I WAKE UP when his roommates come home, but Silas sleeps right through it. I take them both in the kitchen to explain what happened.

“Hold up,” Torres says. “Silas is doing community service? Is this because of the whole arrest thing? Or the fight with Keyon? Is Coach making him do it?”

“No. He’s doing it because he’s trying to get better.”

The other roommate, Isaiah, is more serious, more intimidating. “Better from what?”

“I don’t know. Something has him all stressed-out, though. And now he’s hurt on top of that, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t add to that.”

Torres cracks the knuckles of one hand against his other palm. “We got this. Silas is our boy. You don’t need to worry about us, Captain Planet.”

I roll my eyes, and go back out to find my keys where I left them on the coffee table. Silas looks younger when he’s asleep. I mean, he’s still beautiful and powerful, but that dangerous quality that had both repelled and attracted me from the very beginning is missing.

Or maybe it’s just because I’m beginning to understand him. When I look at him now I don’t see the sexy stranger with bloodied knuckles. I just see Silas.

I remove the cold packs from his knees that have melted and gone soft. I take them back into the kitchen and return them to the freezer. Torres is gone, but Isaiah is there watching me.

“Why are you doing this?” he asks.

“Because he’s my friend.”

That’s what I say. I’m nowhere naive enough to believe things are as simple as that.

“Silas doesn’t know how to be friends with girls. Either he’ll break your heart or you’ll break his.”