Free Broken Juliet by Leisa Rayven Page A

much speed, zero self-esteem. I took a curve too fast and slammed into the guardrail. My bike went cartwheeling across the road as I flew over the rail and crashed down a steep embankment. Pretty sure I hit every damn tree on the way down. By the time I’d reached the bottom, my helmet was cracked, my leather jacket was shredded, and it felt like someone had shoved a dagger into my ribs.”
    “Oh, God…”
    “I lay there for a while, just trying to breathe. When I moved, I was hit with so much pain, I almost passed out. I managed to pull off my helmet, but that was it. There was pain in my shoulder, my wrist, my chest. I could feel blood running down my leg.”
    “What did you do?”
    He shrugs. “I tried to figure out if I was dying. And when I seriously thought I was, I took a moment to try and figure out if that was a bad thing.”
    “Ethan…”
    I take his hand and he lets out a shaky breath. “It’s weird, you know, facing your own mortality. People talk about their life flashing in front of their eyes, but I didn’t get that. All I got were flashes of you. They were so vivid, it was like I could reach out and touch you. I wondered how you’d react if I died. Would you mourn me? Or would you be happy I’d never hurt you again?”
    As I listen, anxiety begins to coil in my chest. Thinking about him dying makes my throat close up.
    He strokes my face. “Hey, it’s okay.”
    “How could you think I wouldn’t mourn you?”
    “I was in a dark place. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
    “God, Ethan, if you’d died…” I can’t finish the thought, let alone the sentence. Even at the height of my enmity, I couldn’t imagine living in a world without Ethan. The mere concept was distressing beyond words. “Okay, tell me what happened next before I freak out about the death thing.”
    He wraps his arm around me and pulls me in to his side. “I don’t know how long I was lying at the bottom of that hill. Most of the night, at least. I slipped in and out of consciousness, and as time passed, I realized no one was going to find me down there. Unless I did something, I was going to die. I had to get back to the road.”
    “But your injuries…”
    “Yeah, I found out later that I had a dislocated shoulder, a fractured wrist, three broken ribs, and a punctured lung, as well as a concussion and multiple lacerations.”
    “Oh my God! How did you even move?”
    “Willpower. Stubborness. The thing is, I knew that climbing up that hill was going to be the most painful thing I’d ever done, but it was necessary. I had to survive, because if I didn’t, I could never get you to forgive me, and that was not fucking acceptable.”
    He touches my face, soft and reverent. “So, I climbed. Every step made me scream in agony, but I kept moving, one foot in front of the other. By the time I reached the top, I was sure I’d died and gone to hell. The pain was blinding. I managed to crawl over the guardrail before collapsing on the road.”
    “How did you get out of there?”
    “A delivery driver found me a couple of hours later and called an ambulance. When I woke up, I was in a French hospital, tubes everywhere, dosed up on morphine. Elissa and the company manager were there. They told me I’d been out for a couple of days. Elissa was fucking furious. She’d been lecturing me for months about my drinking and self-destructive habits. When she was done yelling, she started sobbing. I’d never seen my sister cry like that before.”
    “Of course she was upset. She could have lost you. We all could have.”
    “But the ironic thing is, the way I was living … it was like I was already dead. It took the accident to bring me back to life. While I was recovering in the hospital, I had a lot of time to think. It occurred to me that, for most of my adult life, I’d had this thing for self-sabotage. When I broke up with you the second time, it was me slamming into the barrier of my goddamn issues. I knew if I didn’t do