A Time for Us - By Amy Knupp Page 0,73
amount of training necessary for the job,” she joked.
Cale chuckled and tugged her backward, and she allowed herself to sag into him, relishing the uncommon moment of comfort after an emergency. He wrapped his arms loosely around her middle.
“I’m glad they’re both okay,” he said.
“Thanks to you.”
“And you.” They stood there coming down off their adrenaline rushes for several minutes as evening turned dusky and the light gradually faded. “Ready to go back?”
“I never wanted to come in the first place,” Rachel confessed.
“Don’t you hate it when a medical emergency forces you to speak to the one person you’re trying to avoid?”
Rachel couldn’t prevent a half grin. Then she scoffed good-naturedly, shaking her head. “Pretty much. You were doing a good job of avoiding me, too.”
“There’s a big difference between avoiding and giving someone space.”
“We still wouldn’t be talking if none of that had happened,” she said, waving toward the part of the beach where the girls had nearly drowned. If she had her way. She straightened and stepped away from him.
He grabbed her forearm, pulled her around and looked into her eyes. “Rachel, I’ve missed you. I want to go back to being friends.”
She cared about him so much that it hurt to stand there with him, knowing she couldn’t have him the way she wanted him. “It sounds good in theory, Cale, but...”
“But what?”
Rachel stared out at the distant waves. From here, they seemed quieter, less vicious than when she’d been standing in them watching two girls fight for their lives. “I don’t know.”
So many thoughts spun through her mind, dizzying her, making it hard to grasp any one thing.
She loved him. She was in love with him. Being friends was so damn hard, especially after what they’d done.
The very best thing for her to do would be to walk away from him forever, to tell him she couldn’t handle just being friends. To remind him why she could never, ever allow herself to be more, even if he changed his mind and wanted some kind of romantic involvement. But she couldn’t make the words come out. Any of them.
“Okay,” Cale said, “how about this. The benefit is a week and a half away. Say you’ll go to that with me and I won’t bother you before then. Afterward, it’s your call. You say what happens between us. I want you in my life, Rachel, but if you can’t handle being friends then, I’ll honor that.”
She stared at him, his kind eyes and perfect lips making her ache with an inner torment she’d never expected. Even when Noelle had planned to marry him, though Rachel had kept her distance, there’d been a comfort knowing he’d always be around, be a part of her family. The lines had been so much clearer then, and the possibilities of anything besides a siblinglike relationship eliminated. That, she realized in this moment, had been simpler.
She became aware that she was nodding to the arrangement he offered. A week and a half. Ten days she had to come to terms with the options: friendship or nothing. “I’ll go to the benefit with you. We should be there together. For Noelle.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“YOU LOOK LIKE HELL,” Rachel’s mom said the next day when Rachel came into the kitchen to grab some dinner before heading to her night shift.
“Yellow must not be my color,” Rachel said drily as she yanked at her scrub top. She rummaged through the fridge and emerged with a bag of soft tortillas and some smoked-turkey lunch meat.
“Pasta will be done in twenty minutes,” Jackie said as she buttered slices of French bread and sprinkled garlic over them.
Rachel didn’t respond, knowing her mom would be insulted by her plans to grab a wrap and call it good.
“Didn’t sleep well?” her mom continued as she worked.
“Didn’t sleep well.”
“I would’ve thought you’d sleep like a baby after the unexpected adrenaline rush—and crash—on the beach last night.”
“One would’ve thought.” Instead of sleeping soundly, though, she’d been tormented by her waking thoughts as well as her dreams. All about Cale, naturally.
She wasn’t sure what, exactly, he wanted from her. After she’d made an ass of herself on two different occasions, he still came back for more. More something. Friendship, he said. Rachel wasn’t the kind of woman that men—or anyone, really—looked for in a friend. She wasn’t good at friendship. She’d always spent more time with books than people. So...what did he expect of her?
“You and Cale sure seemed close last night after the ambulance left,”