Things We Burn Read Online Anne Malcom

Categories Genre: Alpha Male, Contemporary, Sports, Virgin Tags Authors: Anne Malcom Advertisement1

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I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was almost having fun.

It didn’t happen in slow motion. It was a frantic, horrible, terrifying blur. He was up in the air one moment, just like before. But unlike moments earlier, he didn’t land smoothly with a cheer from the crowds. No, he crashed.

Crashed.

A normal word from the past. I’d heard about people getting hurt, killed in accidents before, and I’d had a detached kind of sympathy for them, knew crashes happened. They were a part of life.

But not this life.

Not my life.

Not Kane’s life.

Surely, that couldn’t have been what happened, but it seemed like all sound had been sucked from the stadium. I was in an abyss. Everyone around me ceased to exist.

There were no more screams, no more pulsating crowd. There was nothing but the replay of Kane in the air then being on the ground.

I started moving, obviously. Because at one point I was standing in our little section, and then I was moving. Sprinting. Pushing past people, elbows, hips, arms. Then I jumped over fences, over the barriers between the course and the crowd.

I couldn’t be sure how long it took me to get from my spot to Kane. There were already people around him, but not the paramedics who needed to be there. Not the army of people who needed to be there to ensure Kane was okay.

I half collapsed, half skidded on my knees when I made it to him. I noticed from a faraway place that there was a dull sting in my legs. But that was nothing compared to the burn in my lungs as I struggled to breathe around the image of Kane, prone, lying on the ground.

Brax was there.

I didn’t know why Brax was there and not an army of doctors. I didn’t know how he’d gotten there first. Maybe because there was a portion of time between the crash and me moving when I froze. When I was a thirteen-year-old girl being told her father was dead. I was experiencing loss again, preparing for it. Brax hadn’t done that. He’d obviously moved quicker than me, and I didn’t like that.

He was trying to pull off Kane’s helmet.

“You’re not supposed to do that,” I hissed over the buzz in my ears, swatting his hands away.

Brax glanced up at me. Still in the midst of this, there was a cold annoyance in his gaze. And in that moment, I loathed him. I wanted to stab him in the eye, punch him in the face. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to kill him.

“He’s good, he’s fine. Aren’t you, bro?” His tone was infuriatingly casual, light.

“You don’t just fucking ‘rub some dirt’ on this situation,” I snapped at Brax. “He fell. From the sky. On a motorcycle.”

My eyes turned to Kane, though I was terrified to look at his face in case it was pale and lifeless or there was blood coming out of his ears.

But I locked on to sapphire eyes. Open. Awake. Aware.

A part of me relaxed. Slightly. My teeth were no longer in danger of immediately snapping from the force I was grinding them.

“Chef.” Kane’s voice sounded normal. Not like he’d plummeted from … how many feet in the air on a motorcycle?

I crawled closer to him, not glancing at Brax but having the strong urge to elbow him in the gut. Or in that pretty face of his. How is it he was here first? Protecting his investment.

I swallowed my bitterness toward Brax to focus on Kane.

“Kind of envisioned being a bit more impressive the first time you saw me ride,” he joked. He sounded like himself, but there was a tension to his voice, a straining around his eyes that told me he was in pain.

“I’m plenty impressed,” I said honestly, forcing myself to be calm. “You fell from a thousand feet and are talking to me, still handsome as ever.”

He let out a laugh that turned into a cough that sounded wet.

My heart dropped out of my chest, right there onto the dirt.

I ripped my eyes from Kane’s to look for someone to help so I wouldn’t watch him die there, in front of thousands of people.

Like I’d conjured them, the paramedics made their way to us.

“Give us some space, please,” one of them said.

Though it felt wrong at the very core of me, I let go of Kane’s hand and stood up to let them do their work.

Brax was somehow beside me.

He touched my shoulder in a way that maybe was supposed to be reassuring, but it felt controlling, his hold was too firm, bordering on painful.

Kane’s eyes were on us, on me, which was likely why Brax made the gesture, to keep up appearances.

I didn’t flinch out of his grip as I so wanted to; I didn’t want to give Kane a reason to worry about me.


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