A pause. The sound of breath catching. Then, sharper, words that felt torn from somewhere too raw to heal:
“I can’t lose you like her.”
The sound ripped straight through me, colder than the storm that nearly killed me, and left one question pounding in my skull long after his voice faded into the dark.
Who the hell was she?
The air around me twisted and blurred, flashes of snow, the roar of the storm, the memory of arms dragging me from the dark. Then his voice again, that hoarse rasp tearing through the wind.
I gasped awake, lungs heaving, heart clawing against my ribs. My fingers clutched the blanket near my throat as the hospital room swam into focus. Pale afternoon light pooled across the sheets, soft and unreal, too calm for the chaos still ringing in my head.
And then I saw him.
Hayden stood by the window, his shoulders rigid, one hand buried in his pocket, the other hanging uselessly at his side. The snow outside threw ghost-light across his face, outlining exhaustion carved too deep for sleep to touch. He didn’t look merely exhausted; he looked gutted, hollowed from the inside, held together only by the fragile force of his own will.
“…You stayed,” I whispered.
He turned slowly, and when his eyes met mine, something inside me trembled. The quiet between us stretched until it felt like a heartbeat—his heartbeat—the same one I’d felt against my cheek in the storm.
“I wasn’t going to leave you,” he said, voice breaking on the last word, gravel scraping against grief.
My chest tightened. “You should’ve,” I breathed. “You didn’t have to—”
His answer came before control could catch it, quick and cutting, stripped bare of restraint. “I did.” He took a step closer, his eyes burning with something that wasn’t anger, it was terror, stripped bare. “You don’t understand, Edwina. I thought I’d lost you. I fucking thought I’d lost you out there.” His jaw flexed hard enough to hurt, his hands curling as though holding still was the only way to keep from breaking. “I was too goddamn slow. I kept thinking—if I’d been a minute later…”
He trailed off, his breath shuddering.
“You weren’t,” I whispered, but it sounded weak even to me. “You found me.”
“I almost didn’t.” His voice cracked open then, quiet and furious in the same breath. “Do you get that? You were freezing in my arms, and I—fuck—I couldn’t feel your pulse, I couldn’t hear you breathing, and for a second I thought…” He dragged a hand through his hair, his composure fracturing. “I thought I was too late again.”
The last word hit with a tremor that made the air shift between us. I swallowed hard. “Again?”
His gaze fell to the floor, his shoulders sinking under an invisible weight. “You couldn’t have known,” I said softly, trying to fill the silence, but he only shook his head, the motion heavy, resignation sinking through every inch of him.
“No, I should’ve known. I should’ve stopped you before you walked out that door. I should’ve never let you go.”
He turned away, one hand braced against the windowpane as if it was the only thing keeping him upright. The light caught on the tremor in his fingers. “You don’t understand what it does to me, seeing you like that, thinking you were gone. I can’t—” His breath faltered. “I can’t fucking survive that twice.”
The room held its breath with him, and in the silence, I realized his terror wasn’t about failure or guilt, it was about me.
I watched him move, the air around us tightening until even my heartbeat felt too loud in the quiet. Each step he took toward the bed carried a tension that pressed against my chest until it was hard to breathe. He stopped beside me, his body close enough to feel but still holding that impossible inch of restraint. His hand rose, paused in the air as if he was fighting himself, then the back of his knuckles brushed against my cheek, a slow, deliberate motion that sent every thought in my head scattering.
My breath slipped out, shaky and uneven, and I closed my eyes for a moment before opening them again to find him watching me. His gaze was unwavering and full of something that burned, an ache buried deep, a need he could no longer silence. His fingers moved from my cheek to my jaw, his touch grounding me when everything inside felt as though it was about to collapse. “I don’t care,” he said, his voice rough, heavy with something he wasn’t trying to hide anymore. “I don’t care that it’s wrong. I don’t care that I’m your professor. I fucking don’t care.” The words cracked between us, not out of anger, but from the weight of everything he had been holding in.
He bent forward and kissed me, the motion unhurried, his lips pressing against mine with a depth that made the world blur out. There was no greed in it, no claim made through force, it was a surrender, a breaking point, the kind of contact that stripped away the distance we had been pretending existed.
I responded before I thought to question it, my lips moving against his, slow and certain, answering the confession buried in his breath. His hands slipped into my hair, his palms steady against my neck, pulling me closer until my fingers caught on his coat, clutching the fabric to keep from shaking apart. The kiss deepened slowly, driven less by hunger and more by recognition, a quiet surrender to something neither of us could fight.
When he drew back, it was only far enough to rest his forehead against mine. His breath trembled between us, his voice breaking as he spoke. “I thought I’d lost you,” he said, the words spilling out as if a wound had been reopened.
“You didn’t,” I answered, my whisper catching on the air. “You still haven’t.”
He stayed close, his voice quiet but carved through with everything he hadn’t said. “You’re mine, Edwina,” he said. “You always were.”
The words carried no hesitation. They were a confession pulled from the edge of breaking. And when he kissed me again, the restraint was gone. It was not careful anymore. It was the moment that had been waiting to happen, the point where want became truth.
Chapter Twenty
