Free Crash Into You by Cara Ellison Page B

luscious-looking breasts, and said, “Thank you.”
                  “Let me know if you need anything,” he said.  He walked out and shut the door behind him. 
                  As soon as he was alone in the hallway, he paused, waiting for his face to cool down and his heartbeat to get under control.  What the hell was that?   He was not treating her like a patient at all. A body is a body is a body.   Or it had been until he’d gotten an eye-full of her sweet, scrupulous shape.  Trying to shake off the feeling he had done something wrong, he went downstairs to check on dinner.
                  He threw together a salad that he called the Kitchen Sink because it contained every ingredient he had on hand: arugula and iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, blue cheese, crumbled bacon, black olives, green olives, and pieces of jamica, topped with his own homemade vinaigrette.  He slid a loaf of garlic bread in the oven to cook for the last five minutes with the lasagna, then set the table.  Practical work.  It kept his hands and mind busy, at least.
                 
    Aimee stood under the hot spray and billowing clouds of steam in Mark Spanner’s shower, letting the water from six shower heads pound into the tortured muscles of her back and shoulders. The intensity was painful at first, like a good Swedish massage, but soon the knots in her began to crumble and melt. The gauzy steam felt wonderful too.
    She experimentally touched some of the buttons on the digital display, playing with the intensity of the flow and the temperature.   The shower began to fill with a most pleasant eucalyptus scent.  She wasn’t sure which button had made that happen.  It was lovely.
                  She picked up the only bottle of hair product available – a shampoo/conditioner combo for men – and drizzled some in her hand.   A man who must have spent ten thousand dollars on a shower only used some rather crappy shampoo?  She smiled at the contraction.   As she lifted her arms, a stab of pain shot through her left shoulder and forced a surprised cry from her lips.   Her left side seemed to have taken the biggest hit.   She still felt tender pain in her rips, her hip and her legs, especially her knee. Her upper left leg was black and purple with a patchwork of contusions.   She still had two small band-aids just below her navel where the surgeons had used laparoscopy to mend her spleen, but the bandages were peeling, and with a little relief she let them wash off.
                  She did not remember much about the crash.  She remembered checking in her bags of money and then boarding the flight, eager to put as much distance between herself and Seth as possible.   Then nothing until she came to, still buckled into her seat, with the entire front of the plane missing.  
    From behind her , red-orange flames roared and hissed, yet nobody was running from it.   Because, she supposed, they were all dead.   She understood, with some alien intelligence, that it was important to keep her mind empty, because she would never be able to handle what she was experiencing if she actually had to think about it.   
    From her huddled position , she unfastened her seatbelt and stood up on legs that felt weak as water.  A giant hole in the fuselage opened to the vault of night, where before there had been two hundred passengers.   Sounds churned through the curling black smoke, which might have been the crackling of the fire, or might have been people coughing,  But looking around, she didn’t see anyone else alive. Nobody was moving.
    As if in a dream, she stepped over a bloody, slumped woman in the aisle who appeared to be missing the entire left side of her body.  Don’t think.   Focusing on just making it to the opening in the fuselage in front of her, she stumbled forward over the debris.   The air was full of thick black smoke and poison