“What time is it?” I shift, my voice a groggy mess.
“Just past midnight. How do you feel?”
I take stock of everything. My head is more than okay; only a touch of pain remains. My ankle on the other hand is fucked. Not wanting to make him more worried than he already is, I simply say, “I’m fine,” and smile softly at him.
“I called Rachel and let her know what happened,” he explains as he fixes the blankets over my lap.
“Thank you,” my hand covers his, stilling his movements, “not just for calling her, but for taking care of me, of her, for understanding before with Austin.”
“Shh,” he picks up on the rising emotion in my words, “just relax, Con. There’s nowhere I’d rather be right now. Get some rest. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”
He wakes me up twice more throughout the night, following the doctor’s instructions to a T. When the smell of bacon and eggs wafts into the room sometime around ten, my stomach growls in protest, waking me from my deep sleep.
Moments later, Dylan is walking through his room, a tray full of food in his hands. “Hungry?”
“Starved.” He sets the tray on my lap and sits next to me, pulling his plate on his own lap. “Thanks,” I manage around a mouthful of food.
There’s no room for conversation as I devour my breakfast. Dylan looks on in horror as I clear my plate in less than five minutes. “Dude, calm down.”
“Whatever.” I laugh as I swipe a piece of toast from his plate. “You better hurry before I start on yours, too.”
After he clears our plates, he helps me in to the shower, making certain that the plastic shopping bag is carefully wrapped around my cast. Stubbornly, not once does he take the bait at my longer-than-needed touches or hotter-than-hell stares. “Cut it. You’re hurt. I’m taking care of you. That’s all. No fooling around.” I can tell it takes all of his effort to keep a straight face as he helps me step into a pair of boxers.
I give Rachel a quick call while Dylan gets dressed. She’s ecstatic that she’ll be discharged from the hospital in a day or two. When Dylan comes back with the good pain meds in hand, I end the call with her, telling her I’ll be up there later for a quick visit.
“Before you take these,” Dylan says, sitting next to me and dropping the pills into my hand, “I have something I need to say.”
“Okay.” I’m leery to say the least, his tone quiet and somewhat uncertain.
A deep breath of air fills his lungs and he looks at me. Something dances in his eyes. With a trembling hand, he brushes my hair out of my eyes. “If someone would have told me that you’d walk into my life and turn it completely upside down, I’d have told them they were crazy.” He drags my hand into his and brings it up to his mouth. “For far too long, I was far too happy to keep everyone on the outside. And then you came along, and for the first time in so long, I felt something.”
“Me, too.” Tugging at our hands, I bring them to my mouth, feeling the shaking in his hands relax marginally.
“I was too afraid to let myself love anyone, thinking that I’d lose them somehow. The fear of loss kept me closed off from my own life. And now, with you…it’s not like that,” he pauses, looking for the right words. “What I mean is,” he clarifies, focusing his deep blue eyes on mine, “that with you, it’s not about being afraid of losing you.”
“I’mthateasy, huh?” I joke. The look of growing frustration on his face tells me I’ve misunderstood him, and that now is not the time for jokes.
“No, that’s not what I mean. I’m petrified of losing you. When you fell yesterday, the only thought I could put together was one of sickening concern.What if he hits his head? What if he’s permanently injured? What if he blacks out and never comes back?But then, when I saw you were okay, theonlythought going through my head was that there was no way in hell I could ever go through the rest of my life without you.”
His words cut through me. Stripping me bare, they reflect the exact same way I feel about him.
“You see, with you, the thing that scares me isn’t the thought of losing you. What scares the shit out of me is not having you in my life in the first place,” Dylan says, softly.
He lowers his face to mine, cradling my jaw, and searching my eyes. “I love you, Conner. You brought me back to life simply by just being here. And I don’t ever want to picture a life that you’re not a part of.”
With the softest of caresses, he strokes his thumb against my lower lip before pressing his own in the same spot. As his forehead rests against mine and our breaths mingle in the small space between us, I inhale him. This sweet, angry man who turned everything I thought I knew about my own life completely upside down.
“I’m not as good with words as you are, but know that I love you, too.”
With hands and hearts joined, we fall asleep, a sense of peace that, before this moment, was foreign to both of us, covering us like the warmest of blankest on the coldest of nights.
He lets me nap the rest of the day away and before we go to the hospital to visit Rachel, I take a chance. Based on all the things we said earlier, I feel pretty confident about what I want to ask, but based on Dylan’s history, I’m also scared shitless.
“Rachel wants to move out.” I toss that out there and wait to see if he has anything to say. Slowly, Dylan turns from the kitchen sink, his hands covered in a soapy foam.
“Okay,” the word drags, filled with uncertainty. With my good foot, I kick out the chair next to me.
Dylan rinses his hands and dries them as he sits. “I don’t want her to have to start from square one.” It’s a lame front, one that I think he sees right through.
