I Pucking Love You (The Copper Valley Thrusters #5) - Pippa Grant Page 0,44

takes a big breath, like she’s about to say something profound, then sighs. “We should get to sleep. Funeral plus long drive home equals sucky day tomorrow.”

The bed shakes and the headboard rattles the wall again. My eyes are adjusting to the darkness, and I can make out the curve of her neck, up her shoulder, down her arm, over her hip.

I wonder if she usually sleeps on flat pillows and hard beds, or if she’ll wake up refreshed tomorrow.

“I had a bad experience with a not-dead body when I was little,” I hear myself say.

I don’t mean to, but given how much I’ve asked her to tell me today without giving her anything in return—other than passing out at the funeral home—it only seems fair to confide in her.

And maybe I need to change tactics if I want her to talk to me about whatever it was that happened to her here, and maybe I need to do something nice for her if my dick is ever going to work again.

The sheets rustle as she half-turns toward me. “Not-dead?”

“My grandpa had a zombie moment. The whole family was there at the hospital with him. Kidney failure. He flatlined. Everyone cried. The nurses unhooked all the machines, and everyone left, but I stayed because it was sort of morbidly fascinating. Until he…well, he came back to life. He rolled over, gasped once, looked me straight in the eye, said DIE!, and then he died again. He might’ve said Ty. I don’t know. I just know he died, again, with his eyes and his mouth open, staring straight at me, and it was the fucking scariest thing I’ve seen in my entire life. My mom thought my dad had me, and my dad thought my mom had me, and they left me at the hospital, so I had to sit outside the room with a hospital security guard while they tracked my parents down. When they transported my grandfather’s body out of the room, the whole thing was shaking like the casket did tonight, and I—I don’t like death, okay?”

“Oh my god.”

“I don’t watch zombie movies. Or movies where there are corpses. I can’t even make it past the first sequence in Up.”

“Oh my god,” she whispers again. “So at the funeral home—with the casket moving—you basically—”

“Man down. Yeah.”

“I’m so sorry. I should’ve told you where we were going. I didn’t know.” She strokes my face, then freezes like she’s realized she’s touching me, and she jerks back. “Sorry,” she stammers again.

I’m sorry too, because I wouldn’t mind if she kept touching me, but I’ve been giving her all the right leave me alone signals. “I knew where we were going by the time we got back to the funeral home.”

“But what were you going to do, wait in the car?”

I don’t answer.

I wanted to wait in the car.

But when Muffy ran into that guy and went the same pallor as my dead grandfather, there was no way I could bail on her.

You don’t abandon friends just because you don’t want to come face-to-face with a dead body.

Even when you don’t know what the whole story is with why they don’t want to be there in the first place.

If she’d said I don’t want to go to a funeral, that’s one thing.

Who doesn’t get that?

But there’s more to this story.

“It’s my turn, isn’t it?” she says in the darkness.

“Are we taking turns?” Are we friends? Do I want to be friends with Muffy?

Holy hell. I think I do.

But she’s suddenly still as actual death.

Not kidding. I’m starting to sweat.

After a moment, she takes a deep breath. “I was drowning in student loans and credit card debt and I didn’t get matched for a residency so I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do for a job or money or if I’d ever be able to be a doctor at all, because without a residency, you can’t become a doctor, so I auctioned off my virginity and then couldn’t follow through because—just because—and then I was so mortified that I left town and never came back. I didn’t even get my clothes from my apartment. I just went.”

No small part of me is nodding along, thinking this makes sense because it’s Muffy, but who does that? “Seriously?”

“No more talking. And if you ever repeat that to Kami, or anyone, I’ll—okay, I don’t know what I’ll do except for probably move to another state, without my clothes again, and start