Waking Up to Love by Evan Purcell Page A

scream ripped through the silence, and Ramona recognized the voice right away as Scott’s younger coworker, Terry. She’d talked with him a few times in the past, but his voice had never sounded that terrified.
    Right in front of her, Ramona saw a large figure dive head-first into the river. She didn’t see his face, but she could tell from his wide frame and her own panicked intuition that the figure was Scott.
    Scott McInney diving into dangerous waters.
    Scott McInney playing the hero.
    Her
Scott McInney.
    In the sudden rush of fear, she didn’t realize that the Tupperware fell from her hands and landed on sandy ground. She didn’t realize that she sprinted toward the dock like an Olympic gold medalist. She also didn’t realize—and this was probably for the best—that she was screaming bloody murder.
    Quinn rushed toward the water. Terry ran for help. And the river’s surface didn’t break.
    He was down there, and he wasn’t coming up.
    Her first thought was:
What will Debra think?
She pictured herself walking back to McInney Manor, breaking the bad news to Debra. “I’m so sorry,” she’d say. “There was an accident.”
    She pictured Debra’s face as it crumpled in horror.
    Don’t jump to conclusions,
Ramona told herself.
He knows what he’s doing.
    Her stomach twisted around itself, wringing out all her gurgling stomach juices like a wet towel. She could barely breathe. Scratch that. She couldn’t breathe. She could only stand, and pray, and wait.
    He didn’t break the surface.
    The Colorado River swirled and rushed and churned. It moved south, just like it had for thousands of years, frothing around the edges and hiding countless branches and rocks.
    She waited.
    Oh God. She could feel the hope slowly deflating from her breathless body.
    She waited.
    He wasn’t coming up. There was no other way to look at it. He’d dived into one of the deadliest sections of one of the deadliest rivers in America, and he wasn’t coming up.
    She waited.
    Ramona felt like she was having a near-death experience, except Scott’s life flashed in front of her eyes instead of her own. She saw glimpses of him as a kid, chasing after her, laughing, being a wild child. She saw a teenage Scott walk down the hallways of their high school, waving casually at her and lugging his football equipment. She saw—
    She saw the surface break. She saw a shape appear out of the water. She saw Scott.
    Scott walked onto the rocky bank, while Miguel limped along next to him. Water dripped down both of their breathless, heaving bodies. Miguel could barely breathe. Scott looked exhausted, but otherwise okay.
    Something must’ve hit Miguel across the forehead—A rock, perhaps? Or a submerged tree branch?—because his forehead was gashed open and blood trickled into his eyes.
    “Get the first-aid kit,” Scott shouted toward his coworkers.
    Quinn, the gray-haired guy with the trucker mustache, already had the first-aid box opened and ready to go. Scott eased Miguel onto the sandy ground, and Quinn dabbed the moisture away from his forehead before applying a bandage.
    The younger kid—the surfer dude whose name Ramona always forgot—gave Scott a towel of his own. “You did good, man,” he said.
    Scott tried to answer, but he was too out of breath.
    At that moment, as she watched Scott use the towel to wipe river water off his face and arms, Ramona came to a realization:
I can’t live without him.
The thought was as terrifying as it was liberating. She needed Scott McInney in her life, and not just as a friend.
    It wasn’t just a hero fixation, either, although the way he rose out of the water like a muscle-bound Aquaman certainly didn’t hurt. No, Ramona wasn’t the type of girl who needed a man to dive in and save her.
    When Scott dove into the water, she’d had the awful feeling that she’d never see him again. She’d pictured him trapped under the current, thrashing and thrashing and then going still. And it was that image