Page 54 of The Rebound
“I said I don’t—” I yelp as my left hand slips from the branch. Something hard whacks against my shoulder and suddenly I’m falling, the wind whistling past my ears for approximately two seconds before I land flat on my ass in the mud.
Ow.
“Abby?” Luke’s concerned face floats above me. “Are you okay?”
“No,” I moan. “I fell like twelve feet.”
“It was four feet. Don’t move,” he adds when I try to sit up. “You could have a concussion.”
“The chivalrous thing would have been to break my fall,” I mutter as he glances over me.
“Then I would be the one on the ground.”
I blink up at the foliage above. “Did you just make a joke? A joke when I’m dying?Ow.”
“Sorry,” he mutters, pressing lightly on my shoulder. He leans back, seemingly satisfied that I didn’t break every bone in my body.
“Did I get the egg?”
“No,” he says. “But you did do some damage.”
I ease myself into a sitting position as Luke picks up a sturdy branch near the trunk of the tree. No doubt I have that to thank for the pain in my shoulder.
I watch as he hoists himself onto the first branch before swinging it deftly above his head. Leaves rustle frantically and a moment later there’s a light thump on the ground.
The egg is ours.
“How’s that for teamwork?” I ask.
“I said don’t move,” he says, exasperated. “You might have broken something.”
“Besides my pride?” I wince as I shift into a better position. It hurts a little but I’m not too bad. The mud must have helped.
He crouches beside me, still looking worried as somewhere in the distance a horn blares, telling people to come back to the clearing.
“We should get back,” I say. “Tell everyone how heroic I am and then get our money.”
But Luke doesn’t budge. “What do you mean you lied about having a fiancé?”
I sigh, wiggling my toes to see if they still work. “Exactly that. Tyler broke it off a few weeks ago.”
“But Louise said—”
“She thinks we’re still engaged. I didn’t tell anyone except a few friends. That’s why I wasn’t wearing the ring and then I was wearing the ring and then I wasn’t again. It’s because I dug a big liar’s hole for myself and I couldn’t get out of it.”
Luke Bailey does not have a poker face. Not like Tyler, with whom I was constantly trying to guess what he was thinking. With Luke, I can see every emotion clear on his face and so I don’t watch as he processes what I just said to him. Mostly because I’m scared of what I’ll see.
“I just didn’t want you to think I was cheating on him,” I say. “I’m not that kind of person. But I guess you don’t know what kind of person I am because you don’t know me. And that’s because—” I break off when he touches me, brushing a hand by my temple.
“Leaf,” he explains, holding it up as proof.
Leaf.
He drops it to the ground, his brow creased. “I had a girlfriend in college,” he says after a beat. “She broke up with me the day before she was supposed to meet my parents, and instead of telling them, I went alone and pretended she had the flu. Mam did a surprise visit a few weeks later and I told her she moved to Lithuania.”
“Lithuania?”
“It was the first place that came into my head. To this day, I have no idea why. I came clean then, obviously, but my first instinct was to lie. I didn’t want to have to deal with their reaction, not when I didn’t know my own yet.”
