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I ignored him as I aggressively toed out of my sneakers, then made a beeline for the bathroom.

“Halley,” he called after me.

“I’m fine.”

I wasn’t fine, but I would be. I just needed to slap on a few Band-Aids and scrub the gravel from my skin. I’d be all right.

He was hot on my heels as I swerved into the hall bath and tried to shut the door in his face.

He barreled through. “What the hell happened?”

When I looked in the mirror, my heart sank—it was worse than I’d thought. “I fell,” I said.

“Did you fall into a meat grinder? Jesus Christ.” Reed joined me in the small bathroom, quietly closing the door behind him.

“I was running.” I turned the faucet on warm and dipped my frozen, shredded hands underneath the stream of water. Glancing at my reflection, I scrubbed wet fingers over my face, erasing the drying blood caked all over my jaw. “I slipped on a patch of ice.”

“Let me help.”

“I got it.” He reached for my hands, but I yanked them away.

His shoulders sagged. “I’m just trying to help,” he said softly.

My bottom lip trembled when I finally caught his wounded gaze. I hadn’t meant to be a jerk, but getting too close to Reed would be far more tragic than any stupid fall.

I was halfway in love with him—that fall would be the killing kind, and I’d come too far to crash and burn now.

Softening, I blinked up at him as the water trickled from the faucet. “I’m okay. Really. Nothing is broken, except for my pride.”

He reached out and gently cupped my chin in his large hand, tilting my head to the side. His brows furrowed deeper, jaw ticking as he inspected the damage. Then he reached over my head to open the medicine cabinet and snatched a box of bandages and a tube of ointment off the shelf. “Is it just your hands and face?”

I swallowed through the gravelly lump in my throat as he flicked open a bandage wrapper. There was a pulsing ache along my abdomen. “Nothing serious.”

As he peeled open the wrapper, I inched my tank top up to take a peek.

When my eyes landed on the full-length scrape and mottling of bruises that were already forming on my torso, my stomach turned. It was bad. Panic crept inside me as I pulled the shirt higher and higher, my fingers shaking. “I-I’m okay. I’m fine,” I stammered, chanting the words to myself more than to Reed. With a squeak of anguish, I yanked the top over my head and tossed it to the floor, assessing the wounds that traveled up to the edge of my sports bra. “It stings,” I breathed out.

I was standing half-naked in front of him, but the terror trumped the embarrassment.

Frazzled, I tugged a hand towel off the bar and shoved it under the running water, dampening it, squeezing out the excess liquid, then pressing it to my wound. I wheezed as my eyelids slammed shut, holding back a wave of biting tears.

Reed was inches away from me, dabbing ointment onto the padding of the bandage. “I should take you to the hospital.”

My eyes pinged open. “No, please. I’ll be okay. I swear nothing’s broken.”

He stepped forward and took over holding the rag, setting the bandage beside him on the sink. The warmth of the water had cooled, but the warmth from his proximity only heightened. Lightly patting the towel to my skin, he let the fabric soak up the remnants of blood as his gaze lifted to mine. “It’s okay to break sometimes,” he said. “You’re allowed to be vulnerable, scared. You don’t have to fight it.”

I covered his hand with my trembling fingers. “I’ve spent my whole life being weak.”

“It’s not weakness. It’s a strength of its own. Facing your fears, embracing your emotions—it doesn't make you weak; it makes you human.”

I inhaled a shuttered breath, and somehow the feel of my hand over his overpowered the pain slicing through me. I squeezed harder, lowering my focus to our clasped hands. My thumb brushed his knuckles, and the tension congealed. I could feel it, a palpable force crammed into the tiny bathroom with us.

Then, almost as if the stroke of my thumb had unlocked something inside of him, he drank in a tight breath. The mood shifted, and his own walls felt like they were deconstructing, block by block. “You know, my brother and I…we grew up close.” He untangled his hand from mine, leaving me with the rag. Reaching for the bandage again, he found my unoccupied hand. “Best friends, in every sense of the term. We played ball and board games together, swam down by the lake in the summer, went on family vacations and stayed up talking and going through baseball cards till dawn in the hotel rooms.”

I held the towel to my abdomen and watched as he carefully outstretched my fingers and studied the bloodied, torn skin on the heel of my palm. His touch had me lightly swaying, undulating, almost as if the sound of his voice was the most hypnotizing melody in the world.

His eyes found mine, skimming across my face.

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