“I can’t just sit here,” he said as he tried yet another wall.
“Oh, rub it in.”
He sent her a glare worthy of a father to a teenage daughter trying to leave the house with a miniskirt and a biker boyfriend.
Instead of saying anything, he took a running jump to try to grasp an outcropping of rocks that was several feet above his reach. On the third jump, he managed to grab hold and hang above the ground. Monica didn’t see any possible place for him to make his next move. Trent noticed something and reached for it only to lose his grip and fall to the ground with a thud.
Monica winced but he bounced back up to try again.
“I get it,” she yelled at him. “You want to be the hero. But dead heroes aren’t a lot of fun.” Her insides crawled with every jump.
Why couldn’t he see it was useless? Even if he managed to make it up ten, fifteen feet, there was nothing to grab ahold of at that point. Nothing.
If he fell…
Monica pushed herself up against the wall, using her back to inch into a standing position. The movement spread hot pain up her leg and made her head swim. For a brief moment, she thought she’d be sick to her stomach. She hoped to hell that was because of the pain and not because the water they were forced to drink was bad.
Trent hadn’t noticed her stand and was still trying to climb a vertical wall without a rope.
She hopped on her good leg, using the wall for support. Monica needed to prove his foolishness to him. Damn testosterone brain. With one hand on the wall and the other gripping her scrub pants to hold her injured leg, she closed her eyes and tried to hop again.
“Crap!” she yelled when the movement made that white pain turn molten.
“What the hell?” Trent was off the wall and at her side with his hands around her in a second. “What the f**k are you doing?”
Tears, from pain or fear she didn’t know which, swam in her eyes. “Getting used to being alone, ass**le. You’re going to get yourself killed and I’ll be in here all alone,” she choked out right as the first tear fell. She hated crying. So damn useless. Solved nothing and only offered a headache as a reward.
Still, once the tears started there wasn’t any way to stop them. A sob escaped her throat and she punched the hard plane of Trent’s chest. “Asshole,” she said again just in case he didn’t understand just how upset she was.
With able arms, he lifted her off her feet and placed her back on the blanket.
She swiped at the tears in her eyes as if they were unwanted ants at a picnic and refused to meet his gaze. “Ass,” she mumbled again under her breath.
Trent plunked down beside her and released a frustrated breath. “I need to do something, Monica.”
“You can do something. You can talk to me; take turns yelling so someone searching for us can hear us. You can tell me we’re going to get out of here.” They were coming on twenty-four hours and their food wasn’t going to last. Thank God she’d carried a few protein bars and the Borderless Doctors version of MREs in her pack. But she’d only carried enough food to last a week while in Jamaica. She’d not eaten all of it thanks to the provisions provided by Trent while in his home, but no matter how one spun that bottle, her food was nearly gone. That left the lunch Trent packed the day before, the bananas scavenged off the tree, and that was it. Between the two of them, they had two days of food left.
After that, it was a slow death. Water would keep them alive for what, five days at most… under the best of circumstances. That was if the water… no, she couldn’t think about that. They’d both drunk the water over three hours before and neither of them showed signs of it causing any turmoil inside their bodies.
“If I’m going to die in here—”
“You’re not going to die.”
Ignoring his words, she pushed on. “If I’m going to die in here I don’t want to do it looking over your dead broken body. I’ve seen enough dead broken bodies.” With her last words, she made sure her eyes met his.
“You’re not going to die,” he whispered.
Avoiding his pointed eyes… eyes of a man who didn’t lie and had sounded so much more convincing when he’d uttered those words the day before, Monica’s gaze fell on her leg.
Blood soaked her small bandage.
The night was worse. The dark… the quiet.
Trent gave up his need to climb the walls and helped Monica redress her leg before the sun set. The inside temperature of the cave was warmer than it had been the night before. Yet even as the thought crossed Monica’s mind she knew the temperature of the cave was the same. It was her temperature that rose.
She had an open fracture and even though she’d jumped on cleaning it, dressing it… no use wondering what she could have done differently. Her leg was hot, her insides weren’t right.
Luckily, Trent seemed well enough.
“I always wanted to learn how to play the piano,” she said out of nowhere.
“Why didn’t you?” Trent asked in the dark, her head cradled in his lap. He insisted on staying alert in case he heard something in the night.
“We didn’t have money growing up. My mom still lives in the double-wide we grew up in. Jack offered to put her in something a little nicer, but she didn’t want it.”
His hand stroked her hair as they talked.
“Is there anything on your bucket list?”
He chuckled, thinking of something he wasn’t saying.