Free Broken by Erin R Flynn Page B

his hands down his shorts roughly, obviously not liking that he was being put on the spot.
    Too. Fucking. Bad.
    “Think of it as healing. Your body takes damage over time. Either from toxins or impurities in foods, the fact you smoke, the shit in the air. Stress hurts the body, all of it. Our touch heals. It’s a little at a time, but it’s best to think of it as a reversal of the clock so bringing your system and body back closer to where you were maybe at eighteen. The side effect is the loss of an ounce or two of fat each time we touch you and we can do it a few times a day, each of us.”
    I nodded as he spoke and mulled it over. “So it’s a clean slate starting from this moment. I won’t instantly gain all the weight back or go into withdrawal if you stop.”
    “Why would you—” Teak almost asked but shut it when I snapped at him.
    “Correct,” Cypress wisely answered. “Your body is probably now where you were at twenty instead of thirty. You will simply be twenty and a day tomorrow or whatever. That’s all.”
    “Okay,” I whispered, bobbing my head as I stared at my bare feet, bracing my hands on my hips and mulling all this information over. I’m glad I knew now, but fuck , I still had a mess to clean up. Maybe one day I would be grateful for the gift they’d given me.
    Maybe. And one day. But not that day.
    “Okay, what , Cara?” Teak asked carefully.
    I sniffled and raised my head. “Okay, get the fuck out of my house and don’t ever come back. Not for dinner, not in the middle of the night, not ever . Don’t call me, don’t wave at me, don’t touch me, don’t speak to me, don’t even look at me.”
    “What?” Aspen roared as he jumped to his feet. “Because we’re elves ?”
    “I could give a shit that you’re elves ,” I whispered as tears burned my eyes.
    “Then what? Helping you? You wouldn’t ask for any so—”
    “Helping me?” I choked out as I closed my eyes and covered my face with my hands as I screamed. “That’s what you call what you’ve been doing? Are you fucking kidding me? You have fucking blasted my life apart!” I fell to my knees and moved my hand away, opening my eyes, the tears falling and not able to hide them. “I’m about to go bankrupt.”
    “What?” Teak whispered as he slid off the sofa and onto the floor. I held up my hand, and he got the idea, stopping. “Cara, how ?”
    “How?” I laughed and not in that good way, in that hysterical I was not keeping it together well kind of way. “Because for months I’ve been going to see every doctor in the area to explain the inexplicable weight loss I’ve been having. It’s not normal to lose eight to ten pounds in a month and that’s even with serious dieting and exercise which I have not been doing and I’ve been losing that in a week . I thought I was dying , you assholes! That’s normally why humans have drastic, rapid onset weight loss.”
    “Oh shit,” Cypress hissed as he joined Teak on the floor.
    “Yeah, oh shit ,” I giggled, wiping my eyes. “But do you know what they’ve found? Nothing . Abso-fucking-lutely nothing. So they would send me somewhere else. They would do different tests my insurance only partly covers or others they don’t cover at all , but well, what else was I going to do, just die ? Because obviously something was wrong because a person doesn’t just start losing eight or so pounds a week without a reason! I went to Chicago to see a rare disease specialist that cost me four grand just to get through the door.
    “My parents are talking about taking a mortgage out on their house and they paid that off years ago all so they can help save me from this mysterious illness. And this is all while I’ve been thinking I’m losing my fucking mind ! Things I wrote down aren’t there. Jobs I knew I had to do are done. Things aren’t where I left them and appear in different spots. I didn’t know if this was related to the weight loss or, on top of whatever was