Free Diary of a Crush: Sealed With a Kiss by Sarra Manning Page B

my feet and I decided I was now far enough away from Dylan to exhibit huge signs of being in pain. I started crying, not that anyone would have been able to tell thanks to my fabulous impression of a drowned rat.
    My front door was in sight but it seemed so far away…
    ‘Jesus wept, Edie!’ It sounded like Dylan or maybe I was suffering from a mild delirium but yes, it was Dylan scooping me up, which would have been very romantic in a completely embarrassing way if I wasn’t cold, wet, in pain and with a ton of snot dribbling out of my nostrils.
    ‘Put me down,’ I bawled, even as I rested my head against his sodden chest. ‘You’ll give yourself a hernia.’
    ‘You are a bloody pain in the arse, do you know that?’ Dylan shouted at me. I nodded slowly because it did pretty much sum up the whole situation and his features shifted, melted, softened out and he kissed the top of my head before shifting me slightly.
    ‘Can you get my keys out of my pocket?’ said Dylan.
    I managed to tug the button on his jacket pocket undone, though the wet leather was stubborn.
    Dylan bent his knees so I could negotiate the lock.
    ‘You can put me down now,’ I told him once we’d got inside but Dylan ignored me and took a deep breath before he began to slowly climb the stairs. He shouldered the door to my room open, dropped me on the bed and walked out without saying a word.
    I collapsed back on the pillow and then wished I hadn’t as the tears that were still spilling from my eyes ran into my ears.
    I thought Dylan had decided to carry on with the whole disappearing act but then I heard him opening drawers and cupboards in the kitchen.
    When he came back I’d hauled myself into an upright position and was examining the very icky soles of my feet, which were filthy and bleeding.
    ‘Don’t touch them,’ Dylan snapped, putting a bowl of water down on the floor. ‘You’ll just make it worse,’ he added in a more mollifying way. ‘I put some Dettol in here.’
    I shuffled to the edge of the bed and gingerly put my feet in the almost scalding hot water. ‘Ow, ow, ow!’
    Dylan was scrabbling through the piles of junk on my dressing table until he found my tweezers, which he held aloft and my heart sank. ‘Oh no!’
    ‘You’ve got pieces of grit in there, which need taking out before they cause an infection,’ he said sternly.
    ‘I don’t mind having an infection,’ I informed him with a slight edge to my voice because I suddenly realised that this was All His Fault. ‘I can live with an infection.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Dylan reasonably like he was talking to a retarded kid. ‘Then you’ll get gangrene and then they’ll have to amputate your feet and you’ll expect me to push you round in a wheelchair, so…’ He clicked the tweezers together in a very uncomforting manner.
    It hurt a lot. Really a lot. Dylan knelt in front of me with a towel on his lap and picked out all the tiny bits of glass and grit, while I bit my lip and clenched great handfuls of the duvet and tried not to scream. He kept making soothing noises and talking to me about… I can’t really remember. I think it was where we were going to go when we got to the States, something about Memphis but I was too busy waiting for my endorphins to kick in to pay much attention.
    Then he slathered my feet in Savlon, gave me a couple of Ibuprofen for the pain and tucked me into bed.
    ‘Don’t leave me,’ I whimpered and my voice was all broken from crying. The words seemed to hang in the air between us, more loaded and desperate than three words had the right to be.
    Dylan reached down and stroked my still damp hair back from my face. ‘I’m not going anywhere. Well, just to the kitchen.’
    I rubbed my cheek against the back of his hand. He felt cold. ‘You promise?’
    ‘I promise. And sorry for being such a drama queen,’ he smiled ruefully.
    I snuggled down under the covers. ‘I thought
I
was the drama queen in this partnership.’
    ‘We might