Five Years of Secret Love, He Married My Best Friend novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Fever

Willa's hands calm Jarrett's wound, he explains the cure, she refuses to wait, and Calla is on the porch at dawn.

Emmett caught him under the arms and I took his legs.

We got him onto the couch between us, and the cushions hissed where his skin touched them.

"Get the healer," Emmett said.

"The healer is at the Ridgeways'," I said.

"He's burning, Willa."

"I know."

I knelt by the couch and put my palm flat on Jarrett's chest.

It was like laying my hand on a stove.

Under it his heart was running wild, and the black veins pulsed along my fingers.

I almost took my hand away.

Then the veins moved.

They drew back under my palm.

First the ones on his collarbone, then the ones up his throat.

His breath came out of him in one long shudder.

The wolf in him, the one I had felt in the dark five hundred times, went quiet and turned toward me.

"Emmett," I said, and my voice wasn't steady.

"I see it."

"Is that normal?"

"I've never seen it before."

Emmett didn't say anything for a while.

He put a blanket over Jarrett's legs and went out on the porch and stood there looking at the dark.

I stayed on my knees with one hand over Jarrett's heart until the window turned grey.

Around six his eyes opened.

He looked at the ceiling, and then at me, and then at my hand.

"You're here," he said hoarsely.

"You're on Emmett's couch."

"I was walking to the cabin."

"You were walking to my door."

He shut his eyes.

"I'm sorry."

I took my hand away, and I saw him feel it go.

The fever came up through his skin again, slowly, and I put my hand back before I could stop myself.

He breathed out.

"Willa," he said.

"Tell me the cure," I said.

He opened his eyes.

"The silver in the blade was cut with something the healer calls bone-rot."

"It eats at the wolf."

"The healer tried everything for eight months, and Calla's blood is the only thing that has ever slowed it."

"Slowed it."

"She sat with me nine nights in August."

"Nine nights."

"The healer says if we make the vow, the bond closes the wound for good."

He looked at the wall.

"Otherwise I have until spring."

My throat closed.

"Spring."

"Don't tell anyone."

"I'm not telling anyone anything, Jarrett."

I made myself keep going.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because you'd have said you'd rather I didn't."

"I would have!"

"I know."

He turned his head.

His face was gaunt and sweat-wet, and it was the face I had loved for five years.

"I don't want this vow."

"Then don't take it."

"I don't have another year, Willa."

"You have me."

"I have you in a cabin where nobody can see us."

He said it so quietly.

"I have never been able to give you the other thing."

"What other thing?"

He didn't answer.

Five years, and he still couldn't say it.

I looked at his hand on the blanket.

I thought, that is all I am going to get.

"Stay until the vow," he said.

"Be near me."

"As what?"

"As anything."

"No."

He flinched.

"I mean it," I said.

"I'm not your secret anymore, and I'm not going to be your nurse while you marry my best friend."

"The fever."

"Then the fever's between you and Calla."

I took my hand away, and this time I did not put it back.

He sat up, white to the lips, and swung his boots to the floor.

Emmett came in from the porch without a word and handed him his coat.

"I'll drive you," Emmett said.

"I can walk."

"You can't."

They went out together.

I stood in the middle of the room with my hand still tingling.

I didn't cry until I heard the truck start.

I washed my face at the sink and stared at myself in the little mirror over it.

Then I went out on the porch for air.

Calla was sitting on the top step in her pale yellow sweater with two paper cups of coffee.

She held one out to me and smiled.

"Hi, best friend," she said.

"I think we should talk."

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