I did my best to obey. The edges of my vision were dark, and the pain was getting worse. “Hurts.”
“Where?”
I couldn’t name a place, so I just shrugged.
“That accident beat you up pretty badly. Do you remember much?”
“Mn-mm.”
His hand moved from my neck to my cheek, his gloved thumb stroking just to the right of my mouth. I expected the latex to feel awful, but it didn’t. When had he put gloves on?
Everything began to spin again, and I was starting to feel weaker, and for a moment, everything felt like a dream. How did I get here? There was the club. I sang. Then the snow and… “What happened?”
His eyes turned sad. “Car accident. Another ambulance picked up the driver. He was your friend, I’m assuming.”
I managed to lick my lips. “Strange…er.” I closed my eyes for so long, he began to squeeze my fingers again, and I opened them. “Not…Uber.” He looked at me, confused. I didn’t have the strength to tell him everything. “Help me.”
Everything felt so…foggy. So surreal.
“What can I do?”
“Don’t…don’t know.” I needed his name, so I asked for it.
His smile, what I could see of it, turned a little shy. “Ryan. Definitely not as cool as Atlas. Is that a stage name?”
I think I managed a smile. It felt like it anyway. “Mn-mm.” I tried to move my foot, but I couldn’t even tell if my foot was there. “Gone?”
Ryan—the name fit him so well—frowned at me. “Gone?”
“Legs? Can’t…” My breath felt weak coming out. “Can’t feel them.”
Ryan visibly paled and let out a trembling breath. “They’re there. Don’t you worry about that, okay? We have you strapped down and on the way to the hospital so the doctors can fix you up. Gracie, honey, how we doin’?”
“Best I can. Still stable?”
“BP has been dropping.” He began to read out numbers and say other words I couldn’t really process. I could only assume they were about my condition. The driver swore, so I knew it was bad.
I didn’t want to die. Not now, not here. Not like this. I wasn’t ready. I was done letting people make me feel like the world was better off without me. I didn’t want to find my heart again, and my purpose, only to lose it because a drunk fan made shit choices.
“Talk to me,” I whispered.
Ryan’s gaze snapped back to mine. He peeled off his gloves and took both of my hands, holding them up, my knuckles grazing the chest of his uniform. “About what?”
“Anything. Everything.” My eyelids were getting heavy again. “Don’t let me go.”
“I’ve got you,” Ryan murmured. He shifted so close I could feel heat radiating off him. “What do you want to know?”
“About you,” I rasped. I wanted to know everything about this fucking angel who was currently keeping me alive.
He gave me another shy smile. “There’s not much to me. I’m an EMT—obviously. I didn’t decide to cosplay for the night.” I grinned. “I’m good at my job, even though it’s not what I want to do.”
“What…you want?”
“It’s not important.”
“Is.”
He met my gaze for a long beat, then squeezed my fingers harder. “Keep squeezing back.” I did, and it must have satisfied him because some tension left his shoulders. “When I was a kid, I was wildly obsessed with Ancient Egypt. That eventually bled into Ancient Mesopotamia when I was old enough to understand more complicated textbooks. I developed a fixation on Babylon and then the Akkadian Empire. By my freshman year of college, I went through the typical Antiquities phase.”
