New Life by Bonnie Dee

eyes.”
    “How long before somebody found you?”
    “There was a car behind me. The guy called
nine-one-one.” Jason took another breath. “It could’ve been so much
worse. I might have killed somebody.”
    I could imagine the weight he carried and how
much heavier it would’ve been if another car had been involved. I
stroked the hair on his stomach. “But no one else was hurt.
No point in beating yourself up over what might have been. Seems to
me you’re already paying for your bad judgment every day. Don’t add
an extra helping of guilt on top of it.”
    “I guess. Anyway, you wanted to know about
the accident. That’s it. After that, I was in a coma and then rehab
for a long time. Lots of hospital stays, lots of bills, which my
parents paid, since I was a college student with no money.
Insurance only covers so much.”
    “That sucks,” was all I could think of to
say. His story was practically a PSA for not drinking and driving.
There wasn’t any response I could make that seemed more
appropriate. The pain in his voice roused an answering ache in my
chest.
    “I want to pay them back, but there aren’t a
lot of high-paying jobs for a college dropout with memory issues.”
Jason stroked a finger over my wrist. The tickling touch sent
shivers through me. “Enough about that. Tell me more about yourself
and growing up in Michigan.”
    “Okay.” I cast around for a funny story to
lighten the mood. “We used to have this cottage on a lake and spent
weeks there in July or August. I had summer friends who I only saw
at the lake. One summer, three convicts escaped Jackson prison.
Rumors were one of the men was from the area, and everyone talked
about whether he’d head for home. My friends and I embellished the
story all summer, inventing more lurid and numerous crimes than one
man could ever have committed.
    “One night, we went camping. Nothing would
make our horror stories scarier than telling them by firelight in
the dark woods with an escaped killer possibly stalking us. Shelly
and Brea were up for camping, but we had to coerce Crystal. She had
a huge crush on Shelly’s brother and we threatened to tell him if
she didn’t come with us.”
    Jason chuckled. “Mean girls, like my sister
told me about.”
    “I convinced myself it was in Crystal’s best
interest to stop being such a wuss. So we trekked out about a
quarter mile from Brea’s house—not too far, in case we needed to go
back for something. Let me tell you, it was scary in the woods once
the sun went down. We sat around our campfire and told all the
urban legends and horror-movie plots we could think of, and ate
more sugar than any human being should ingest in a day.”
    “Sounds like fun.”
    “It was…until we heard something moving in
the woods. We all screamed, but Crystal bolted up and started to
run. Unfortunately, she plowed straight into a tree branch that
knocked her back on her ass. The thing in the woods came crashing
toward us, and we were all screaming and trying to get Crystal up.
Then Shelly’s brother, Mike, and one of his friends burst into the
clearing, laughing. Or they were until they saw the gash on
Crystal’s forehead. Blood was running down her face like Carrie at
the prom.
    “Of course, we were furious at them, but in
the end it all worked out. Crystal was thrilled Mike had to carry
her back to the house, and Shelly was happy to have something to
blackmail her brother with. She promised not to tell their parents
about the prank if he’d give us rides to the mall for a month.
Win-win. Being a budding lawyer even then, I negotiated the
deal.”
    “So that’s the sort of thing lawyers do. I
always wondered,” Jason teased. “You feeling better now about being
a lawyer? You didn’t seem too sure when we first met.”
    “That was so two weeks ago,” I joked back.
“I’m fine now.”
    I traced around his navel with one finger,
making his belly twitch, and considered unfastening his jeans and
giving him a