“The doctor explained to me that I’d been in a coma for about ten months and—”
My hand flies to my mouth. “I left only days before the ten-month mark.” Shannon’s phone call, when she’d asked for Warren’s concert shirts… He’d been awake then.
Warren’s fingers tighten around mine. “I’m not mad at you for giving up. I was told someone in my position should have been a lost cause.” An empty chuckle rises from his chest. “They call me a miracle.”
“I’d call it miraculous.” I want to ask him what his family told him, if he knows about the bakery, but now isn’t the time. “Do you remember the stroke?”
He shakes his head.
I don’t know what else to say. What does someone talk about with their ex-fiancé who was in a coma and now is not? Politics? The rate of global warming? The new giraffe born at the zoo?
A burning sensation starts behind my eyes. This is all too much.
Warren sees the tears starting. They haven’t even tipped over onto my cheeks yet, but he is there, ready to cradle me, banish the tears the way he always did when I came home upset. Toourhome. The one I rented out. The one currently occupied by someone else.
My hands touch Warren’s back as he holds me, and I feel the jutting shoulder bones, my fingersbump, bump, bumpingover the backside of his ribs. His atrophied muscles will regain their strength, the fibers regrowing and binding into the sinew he stood in front of the bathroom mirror and flexed when I was nearby. I’d once told him that his back muscles were a turn-on, and it was all the encouragement he needed. He had no qualms using against me the ammunition I’d handed him.
“I’m here now, Addy love. We’ll get through this together.”
I stiffen at the nickname. Months ago, I’d wished he would wake up and call me that. Prayed for it.
I pull away, replacing my hands in my lap. “Warren, you should know that—”
Warren stops me with a shake of his head. “Whatever you did while I was out, it’s okay. These last ten months are like a black hole. For me, and for you. For us.”
He takes my left hand, raising it to his lips and kissing the space where my engagement ring should be. He swallows hard and looks into my eyes, his gaze intense, deep and penetrating. I know Warren, and this is how I know he is about to deliver a speech he practiced the whole flight here. “I love you, Addison. I woke up as in love with you as I was the last night I went to sleep in our bed. I know you’ve been working to move on since you were told I was a hopeless case, but I’m right here, and I’m going to get us back to where we were. I’m going to put that ring back on your finger, maybe not today, but soon. When you’re ready for it. You’re going to fall in love with me again.”
I stare, caught, his words slipping into me.
Tell him about Brady.
I should tell him how Brady makes my heart soar, how he breathed life into me when my oxygen supply was low. Tell him about what it feels like to be loved by Brady, like being in a misty rain, the vapor settling gently onto my skin. Soft and cool, all-encompassing and refreshing.
I should tell Warren it’s not as simple as he thinks, that his return doesn’t come with a broom, sweeping away the detritus of the life that went on while he slept. His well-meaning declarations can’t polish us, make us shine once again.
I look into his eyes, knowing he deserves only the truth.
But then I see the small crescent-shaped scar on his hairline, the one he got when he lifted me on his shoulders at a concert and I got scared and gripped his head, my pinky nail digging into him.
And I lie.
* * *
“We’ve checkedin at the hotel down the street.” Shannon shades her eyes from the sun with one hand and points with the other.
She rejoined Warren and I not too long after I opened my mouth and said, “Okay.”
Okay.
Okay, you can try to make me fall in love with you again.
Okay, you can put that ring back on my finger someday.
Okay, I’ll give you hope, even when I’m in love with another man.
Shitty. I’m a shitty person.
“That’s nice,” I tell Shannon, unsure of what to say in response to the hotel.
