Off Plan

by May Archer

  “Fuck yeah!” Maddie said, standing up. “Alright, Fenn Reardon. What do we do?”

  “Well.” I swallowed. “I have an idea.”

  Then I went on to sketch out the lamest, hokiest, cheesiest plan ever. But it just might work.

  “You know,” Rafe said, clapping me on the shoulder. “For a guy who had no experience with pep talks, you gave a damn good one. I credit myself, really, for teaching you how it’s done.”

  I snorted. “Now we just need to get back out there, find your dad so we can figure out where the fuck Mason is, and get him back.”

  “Easy peasy,” Rafe said, and I grinned just as Rafe’s phone rang in his pocket.

  “Beale,” he crowed as he checked the display. “Ha! Now we’ll get to the bottom of this mystery, Shaggy.”

  “Does that make you Scooby, Rafael?”

  “Fuck you, I’m Fred. The handsome one.”

  “Sure you are.”

  Lety bustled around the counter and smiled at me approvingly. “Ese chico te ama, Fenn. Encuéntralo y tráemelo de regreso. Es pan comido. Okay?”

  Something about bread and eating? Sounded just about right.

  “Okay,” I agreed solemnly, pretty sure in that one shining moment that I could achieve just about anything.

  Then I turned and saw Rafe’s wide-eyed, stricken expression.

  “There’s been an accident,” he whispered.

  “Oh fuck. Beale? Is he…”

  Rafe shook his head. “Not Beale, Fenn. Mason.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Mason

  Searching for service…

  Searching for service…

  Searching for service…

  No service found.

  “Motherfucker,” I grumbled at the phone I’d propped on the dashboard, aware I sounded like Fenn. “Search harder, damn it.”

  The sky was sloshing down rain like I was at a car wash, and the sky was pitch-black. I could barely see a hand in front of me, and I’d turned the radio off to concentrate, so the only sounds were the swish of the wiper blades as they flew across the windshield and the pounding of rain on the hood of the car.

  I took the exit for Cooter Key Bridge, and the traffic lights and glowing signs looked like watercolor images, hazy and surreal. I touched my brakes—Fenn’s brakes—as the traffic light turned red, and the Charger fishtailed just a little in the standing water before coming to rest in the perfect spot in front of the white line.

  Figures he has the best brakes in the world, I thought with a relieved sigh, and I refreshed my phone to see if it could catch a fucking signal finally.

  To say that I was in a hurry to get home was an understatement and…

  Whoa. Huh. Apparently Whispering Key had become home?

  But the more I thought about it, the more right it felt. I just needed to talk to Fenn. Like, really, really needed to talk to him.

  Taking Gloria to the hospital had been an eye-opening experience. Up in New York, I’d gotten spoiled by how close things were. Even growing up in a small town where folks complained about how it took twenty-five minutes to get to a decent mall, we had access to EMTs who’d arrive within ten minutes—as I had reason to find out on more than one occasion. So while I’d always enjoyed my job and found it fulfilling, I’d never had a visceral understanding of how important I could be to someone, just by being in the right place at the right time.

  I’d gotten it that afternoon.

  Keeping Gloria (and Rafe) calm in the car, explaining her condition to the ER doctors—including the elevated white blood cell count on her last test and my concerns about the petechiae in her feet—had helped her get diagnosed with pericarditis, an infection of the lining around her heart, and put on a powerful antibiotic that much faster. I felt accomplished and needed in a way I’d never felt while working at my suburban practice.

  Taffy had asked how many people I needed to be important to, and sitting in that emergency room, I’d known the answer: exactly one. One patient I could help, one patient I could comfort, one patient I could someday save. That was exactly as important as I wanted or needed to be.

  And of course, as soon as I’d realized that, I’d wanted to call Fenn and share this revelation, the same way I wanted to share all my happy and sad things with him. Except, some idiot (yeah, it was me) had deleted his number from my phone. And it was Murphy’s Law that Rafe had left his phone at home. And none of my calls to Beale or Taffy had gone through either. And every moment that passed where I couldn’t get in touch with Fenn was fucking excruciating, because he’d become that important to me that fast.

  For once, I wasn’t concerned about whether it was okay or normal to care about Fenn that much. I wasn’t spiraling over whether the feeling had come on too fast to be trusted or would all go away tomorrow. I wasn’t overthinking any of that. Watching Gloria’s eyes fixed on Rafe’s above her oxygen mask, seeing Rafe consciously synchronize his breathing with hers, was the very best kind of gut check, and it was startlingly easy to see how none of the shit I worried about was important in the grand scheme of things.

  It occurred to me that normal and too fast weren’t words we used to talk about our own realizations and decisions, anyway; they were the words we used to judge other people’s. Deep inside, I knew how I felt about Fenn—that he’d been the truest thing in my life from the very second we’d met, breaking down all my damn walls faster than I could throw them up, and that loving him was very, spectacularly real. I was done giving headspace to how other people viewed my life. I was done avoiding risks.

  Now, I just needed to find Fenn and convince him to take a risk on me, which I would do as soon as…

  The ring of my phone was startlingly loud as I drove down the dark and quiet streets of Cooter Key.

  Unknown caller. Could be Rafe at the hospital. Could be Fenn.

  I quickly accepted the call and put it on speaker.

  “Dr. Mason Bloom.”

  “Um, hey? Mase?”

  Jesus. I huffed out a breath. “Victoria. Hey. Now’s not really—”

  “I’m so excited you answered! I wasn’t sure if you would, since I’d changed my number, and um, I sent you flowers from that florist I love that does those ultramodern arrangements? But they couldn’t be delivered because you’re still in Florida or whatever, and I tried to DM you on Insta, but you didn’t answer, and I couldn’t call your family for your new address, because you know I have never been a favorite of theirs, so I wondered how you were.”

  I almost snorted. I, I, I… How had I never noticed that Victoria talked this way?

  “I’m great,” I said. “Thanks. Not a vacation, I live in Florida now. But now’s not an awesome time to chat, honestly, Vic. I’m driving and the rain is pouring, so… was there something you needed?”

  “Oh. Well.” She cleared her throat. “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry about the way things ended, Mase.”

  For half a second I wondered if she was going to want to get back together, and I couldn’t restrain my shudder at the idea. The Mason who’d been so content with her was a completely different person than the man I was now, and I had no desire to go back to that.

  “Gunner and I were talking. I, um, told him I regretted some of the things I said, and he reminded me that it wasn’t too late to tell you the things I should have said instead.” The affection in her voice was clear, and I actually smiled in the darkness. I was glad she was happy.

  And Gunner was still a stupid name.

  “Vic, I don’t expect—”

  “No, I know. This is for me.” She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry that I made this out to be your fault, Mason. It wasn’t. You’re a very passionate person. You’re passionate about your family, and about medicine. You just weren’t very passionate about… me. And it hurt. But until I met Gunner, I didn’t have the… the strength, I guess… to be honest with myself about that. About wanting more.”

  “I get it,” I said quietly. “And thank you. Because if
you hadn’t been the one to make that break, I don’t know that I would have. I was sleepwalking.”

  “And now you’re not.”

  “Now neither of us is, sounds like.” Definitely not asleep. Not when the mere fact that I’d passed over the bridge and was now on Whispering Key made my stomach flip.

  “Yeah.” She paused. “The guy on your Insta…”

  “Fenn. My boyfriend.” I think. If he’ll let me be.

  “He’s cute,” she said, and I could hear the smile in her voice. “What did your family say about him?”

  I snorted. “Nothing yet. None of them are Instagram regulars, and I figured this was a conversation I wanted to have in person, anyway.”

  “Yeah. For what it’s worth, I’m really happy you’re happy, Mason. You deserve that. Take care.”

  I clicked the disconnect button and lifted my ass to shove my phone in my pocket.

  As I drove through the center of town, which appeared completely deserted in the dark and lashing water, I marveled that today was officially the most surreal day of my life. Except that this was my life. And I was pretty fucking happy about—

  It hit without warning as I went around the curve in the road by the motel. The pothole I’d forgotten from earlier was suddenly no longer a pothole but a crater in the center of the road, nearly ten feet wide, three or four feet across, and God only knew how deep.

  I knew immediately that it was too big and I was going too fast to avoid it, even as I slammed on the brakes and steered into the left lane, and then suddenly I was on a roller coaster, flipping ass over head, falling falling falling… And all I could think was that I couldn’t let this be the end because I hadn’t gotten to tell Fenn I loved him.

  “Mason! Mason! Ah, fuck fuck fuck. Fenn is gonna freak when he gets here. Mason! It’s Beale! Help is on the way! I called Rafe and I called the police. I’m going to get something to get you out of there, okay? If you can hear me, hang on!”

  I groaned and opened my eyes to the darkness—absolute, unrelenting darkness. No headlights. No flashlight. No moonlight. Nothing.

  Think, Mason, think.

  My ribs felt bruised, and my shoulder was a little numb and probably sprained. I could feel an abrasion throbbing on my hand. My knees were smushed underneath the dashboard and ached. All in all, not as bad as it could be…

  But it also felt like the weight of the entire earth was pushing down on the back of the driver’s seat, and the seat was forcing my diaphragm into the steering wheel, making it harder and harder to breathe. I pushed back experimentally and the seat moved, but so did the car, and I suddenly realized the steering wheel was the only thing preventing me from falling into the yawning crevasse into the earth’s core in the middle of Godfrey Pass. Breathing suddenly didn’t seem that important.

  I forced myself to swallow. Okay, yawning crevasse was probably a bit dramatic. It was likely more of a very wide pothole. Of unknown depth.

  Maybe.

  Or maybe it was exactly as bad as I imagined, because I couldn’t see.

  Don’t panic. Panic helps nothing, I reminded myself. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t help.

  Water poured in the busted windshield, soaking me to the skin, and I could feel it pooling up around my feet.

  Oh my God. How was this happening?

  I pinched myself, foolishly, wondering if I’d somehow fallen asleep, possibly on my bed back in New York, and I’d dreamed up my entire life on Whispering Key, both the beautiful dream that was Fenn and the horrible nightmare that was this right now.

  And then the nightmare and the dream were one and the same because there in the cold, wet darkness, deep inside the earth, I heard Fenn’s voice.

  “Mason! Mase! For fuck’s sake, you’d better be alive down there!”

  I sucked in the biggest breath I could, which was not very big, and managed to squeak out, “Fenn!” There was no way he could hear it over the pounding rain…

  Except he did.

  “He’s alive. He’s conscious! Fuck, Rafe, give me the rope. Oh, yes I fucking can! You stay back and— Listen to me! I know what I’m talking about here, okay? This whole area is unstable, and you need to stay back or it could collapse further. No more weight. Just hold the rope, and when Beale gets back with the ladder, you push it over to me, okay?”

  I couldn’t hear a damn thing Rafe said, if he replied; the only thing I was capable of hearing—the only thing I wanted to hear—was Fenn’s voice.

  “Mason! I’m coming down, okay? Can you talk to me, baby?”

  I was pretty sure I could do a whole lot of things if he kept calling me baby, but I didn’t say that. Instead, I managed a pitiful, “Yeah.”

  “Good! Okay, so what we have here is a sinkhole. Remember we talked about those, Mase?”

  Yeah. I remembered him saying they were super rare, the lying liar. “Yeah,” I managed, a little more strongly this time.

  Suddenly, there was light shining down from above, illuminating my hands on the steering wheel and the crumpled front end of the car. It was only the weak light of someone’s phone flashlight, but it was better than nothing and it calmed me slightly… at least until the beam swung toward the nose of the car, which was hanging over empty space.

  “This is good, Mase!” Fenn said, as calmly as if we were talking about television shows.

  I was glad one of us thought so. But it was hard not to respond to the overwhelming confidence in Fenn’s voice, hard not to feel like, as long as he was with me, everything wasn’t just going to be fine, it already was.

  “This side hasn’t collapsed entirely, so I’m sliding down to get you, baby. It’s slow going. Can you do me a favor and open the car door?”

  I felt for the handle and found it easily, but before I pulled it, I hesitated. “Safe?” I croaked.

  “Of course! It’ll be fine. Just push that door open gently, okay? Try not to rock the car too much.”

  Oh, sure. Just open the door without rocking the car. No prob.

  I did exactly as I was told and… shit. The water poured into the car even faster.

  “Fenn!”

  “Yeah, baby! Right here.” His voice was closer now. Almost right next to me.

  “I’m stuck.” No shit, Mason.

  “It’s okay. I’m coming!” His hand flew in the open door and smacked me in the face.

  “Hey!” I said, but I grabbed at that hand anyway and clasped it with bruising force like the lifeline it was.

  “Okay. Okay,” Fenn breathed, like he was reassuring himself more than me. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you, and I’m not letting go.”

  That sounded seriously fucking perfect.

  “Fenn! Got the ladder!” Beale’s voice called from somewhere above. “You sure this will work?”

  Fenn edged closer. “Absolutely positive. I’ve seen cave-ins like this before. This is standard procedure. It’s going to be fine. Lower the ladder down to me, just don’t come close to the edge, Beale. I’m gonna attach the rope to it, then you and Rafe are gonna pull the rope to get us out.”

  And that’s exactly what happened. Fenn helped push the seat back so I could squeeze out of the car, and then he positioned me flat on the ladder, which he used almost like an EMT’s spinal board. He laid himself on top of me, holding on to the ladder while I held on to him. And then Beale and Rafe, with much groaning, managed to haul us up onto the pavement where the headlights from Rafe’s Jeep and Beale’s motorcycle lit the place up nearly as bright as day.

  With the last dregs of my adrenaline rush, I rolled off the ladder, taking Fenn with me. The two of us landed in a puddle on the ground—well, more me than him, really, since he was on top of me, braced on his forearms.

  I stared up at him, at his shadowed eyes and his concerned expression, and my brain finally computed that I was okay—that we were okay—and maybe even more than okay, because Fenn had once again called me baby. Then my arms were around him for reasons that had nothing to do with being rescued and everything
to do with the man who’d rescued me.

  Who’d rescued me in so many ways.

  “You came! You came, you came, you came.” I ran my hands through Fenn’s hair, tugging him closer, and kissed him over and over.

  “Mason,” he breathed. “I will always come for you, okay? Always, always. And if you doubted that for a second, I—”

  Because this was my life, of course I started crying at that point, hot tears mixing with the cold rain, one tear for every second that I’d been so fucking scared not just after the accident, but earlier, too. I draped my arm over my eyes and let it happen with no shame.

  “Mason? It’s okay! Fuck. Are you hurt?” He lifted his torso up just enough to pry my arm away from my eyes and peer down at me, running the beam of his phone light over my face just to be sure… and blinding me in the process.

  “Ack! I’m okay! Shut it off, Fenn! Shut it off!” I closed my eyes and wriggled beneath him…

  And just like that, I felt like I was back in the stupid bathtub at the motel the first night we’d met: soaking wet and inappropriately aroused, with eyes only for the man above me. Unlike that night, though I knew exactly what I wanted from Fenn Reardon now. So I lifted my hips slightly, deliberately rubbing myself against him.

  I wasn’t quite insane enough to be hard under these circumstances, but still, Fenn froze, and I could almost feel his mind tracking backward, replaying the memory of the last time we’d been like this, under circumstances that were totally different and incredibly similar at the same time. We’d fought it for a minute, the two of us, but he and I had always been inevitable.

  I sniffled a little and ran a hand over my wet face. “Fenn Reardon,” I said. “We have got to stop meeting like this.”

  Fenn shook his head, shocked and amused and vaguely disapproving. “I’m not taking an ounce of responsibility. I’ll have you know, nothing like this happened to me until you wandered into my life, Mason Bloom.”

  “Wandered?”

  “Flew, then.” He settled against me more firmly. “Slid off a building and—”