Page 71 of Dark Endures

But I can’t.

Not with all these emotions welling up inside that bring me back to the hard parts of my childhood. There’s no way I can smush in between two men like I always had to do between my stepbrothers.

The sting of the times they pinched me still echoes on my skin. I almost reach up to see if I have a chunk of hair falling out from when they tugged on it.

It doesn’t matter what Maddox wants. I can’t sit between them.

A cab. I can hail a cab and follow them in. That’ll work.

Just as I open my mouth to tell Maddox, he leaps up into the seat.

I squish myself into the door, putting as much space as possible between Maddox and myself. Adonis lives on the other side of Urbium, so it’s going to be a long trip. I close my eyes and try to focus on something… anything else.

***

“Mindy, we’re here.” Maddox’s soft voice breaks through the nothingness of sleep.

“Maybe we should just let her sleep?” Canyon whispers. “You can carry her up to her apartment.”

Carry me! My eyes fly open. “I’m awake.”

The warmth surrounding my right side disappears, but my left is nice and toasty—I jump upright. How did I go from leaning against the window to sprawling across Maddox’s chest?

He must be livid with me. I can’t even bring myself to look at him.

Why would my body even do that?

Can this day get any worse?

Roommate

Maddox

Mindy climbs up into the truck and proceeds to smash herself against the door like touching me would give her the plague. She’s never overtly acted fearful like this.

What’s going on in that head of hers? Is it me?

Why?

“Are you going to do something before she falls?” Canyon asks in the tactical whisper Ethan taught us oh so many years ago.

Fall? I twist my head to look at Mindy. She’s fallen asleep so hard her body is sliding forward. In a minute, she’ll be on the floor of the truck with a nasty bruise on her head.

“She works too much,” I mutter to myself while carefully reaching over to move her.

Canyon jams on the brakes when and idiot swerves in front of us, and I’m barely able to stop her body.

This won’t work. Instead of trying to settle her on the door, I pull her into my side. She doesn’t even move. If I didn’t know how hard she's been working for weeks and weeks, I'd be afraid that she’s in a coma.

Getting her seatbelt on takes a little more maneuvering.

“She’s going to kill herself if she keeps working like this.”

I know. I just haven’t figured out how to make her stop without firing her. And something tells me if I fire her, she’ll just go looking for another job. “I need to figure out the why.”

“What you need to do is actually ask her out then fix her life.” That’s Canyon, blunt to a fault.

“The way she just reacted makes me unsure if my attention would be appreciated.”

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