Driven(book one)(111)

I take in his words, grateful that he’s said them but still not believing them. “We came around a corner on this winding road we were driving on. There was an elk in the road and Max swerved the car to avoid him.” I can hear Colton suck in an audible breath, knowing where this is going. “We veered into the oncoming lane and the tires grabbed the edge of the road because Max had overcorrected too much. I don’t know. It all happened so fast.” I shudder again and Colton holds me, his arms squeezing tighter around me as if their strength can ward off the inevitable. “I remember seeing the first trees as we went over the edge and started down the ravine. I remember Max swearing and it struck me as odd because he rarely swore.” My stomach lodges in my throat as I remember the weightless feeling as the car lifted from the ground and the centrifugal force that tossed me around like a ragdoll as the car tumbled down. I reach up and wipe the single tear that has slid out of the corner of my eye. I shake my head, “I’m sure you don’t want to hear all of this, Colton. I don’t want to put a damper on our evening.”

I can feel him shake his head as it’s resting on my shoulder. His arms are wrapped across the top part of my chest, from shoulder to shoulder, and I bring my hands up to hook onto them. “No, please continue, Rylee. I appreciate you sharing with me. Letting me get to know and understand you better.”

Maybe if I open up to him, then he’ll feel comfortable enough to explain his past to me as well. Is this my subconscious reasoning for telling him this? Am I hoping that it’ll turn into a quid pro quo? I think about this for a couple of seconds and realize that as much as I can hope this might happen, the reality is that I feel relieved to be talking about it for the first time in a long time.

I draw in a shaky breath before I continue. “The next thing I remember is coming to. It was getting dark. The sun was already past the crest of the mountain so we were in the shadows of the deep ravine we were in. The smells—oh, my God—they were something I will never forget and will always associate with that day. The mixture of fuel and blood and destruction. We were at the bottom of a ravine. The car was sitting on an angle and I was on the high side while Max was on the low. The car was mangled. We had rolled so many times that the car had crushed into itself, making the interior almost half the size it should have been.

“I could hear Max. The sounds he made trying to breathe—trying to stay alive—were horrifying.” I shudder at those sounds that I can still hear in my dreams. “But the best part about those sounds were that he was still alive. And at some point in those first moments of waking up, he reached over and held my hand, trying to take away my fear from regaining consciousness in the hell we were embroiled in.”

“Do you need a minute?” he asks sweetly before pressing a kiss to my bare shoulder.

I shake my head. “No, I’d rather just finish.”

“Okay. Take your time,” he murmurs as we start to walk again.

“I panicked. I had to get help. It was only when I went to release my seatbelt that I felt the pain. My right arm wouldn’t work. It was visibly broken in several places. I let go of Max’s hand with my left hand and tried to undo the belt, but it was jammed—some freak thing the manufacturer studied after the fact that was a result of metal jamming in the mechanism from the crash. I remember looking down and feeling like it was a dream when I realized I was covered in blood. My head and arm and midsection and pelvis were screaming with pain so intense I think I would rather die than ever feel that again. It hurt to breathe. To move my head. I can recall Max mumbling my name, and I reached over groping for his hand. I told him that I was going to get us help and that he needed to hold on. That I loved him. I grabbed a shard of glass. Tried to use it to cut through my seatbelt but only ended up slicing my hand some and stabbing myself in the abdomen. It was brutal. I kept blacking out from the pain. Each time I would come to, the blinding panic would hit me again.”

We reach the steps up to his house, and I watch Baxter bound up with endless energy. Colton sits on the bottom step and pulls me down to sit beside him. I use my toes to make mindless imprints in the sand. “The night was freezing and dark and terrifying. By the time the sun started to lighten the sky, Max’s breaths were shallow and thready. He didn’t have much time. All I could do was hold his hand, pray for him, talk to him and tell him it was okay to go. Tell him that I loved him. He died several hours later.” I run the back of my hand over my cheek to wipe away the tears that have fallen and try to erase the memory in my mind of the last time I saw Max. “I was beside myself. I was losing my strength from all my blood loss, and I knew I was getting weaker and worse off by the hour. That was when the panic set in. I was trapped, and the longer I stayed in the car, the more I felt like it was closing in on me.

“When night fell near the end of the second day, the claustrophobia was smothering me, and I completely lost it. I couldn’t deal anymore with the pain and the feeling of defeat so I thrashed around in fear, in anger, and in defiance that I didn’t want to die yet. All of my movement somehow dislodged my cell phone that had gotten stuck up under the dash amidst the tumbling down the hill. It fell to the floor beneath me.” I take a deep breath remembering how it took every ounce of determination and strength that I’d had left to get that phone. My lifeline. “It took what felt like hours to reach it and when I turned it on there wasn’t any service. I was devastated. I started yelling at everything and nothing until something clicked in the back of my mind about a story I had heard on the news. About how they’d found some missing hiker by following the pings on their cell phone despite a lack of service.