“Just becauseyou’dspend it all on weed doesn’t mean he would.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“You’rean asshole.”
Their voices fade down the hall. I slip out of the classroom and knock softly on the chemistry lab door.
“Go away, Carter,” Tavi calls. “I don’t need your kind of painkillers.”
That’s as much permission to enter as I expect I’m gonna get, so I twist the knob and slip into the room, my heart in my throat.
Watching her face-plant in that sawdust, then seeing the pain on her face as she coughed it all up, and then seeing her not leap to her feet—my world stopped.
My entire world. It just stopped.
She’s the woman who’s shown me thatI’m okay. That I don’t have to stay trapped in old patterns that were a result of even older patterns. That Idoget to wake up every morning with a clean slate and do my best.
That I’m allowed to look for something bigger.
To be happy. To find joy.
She’smy joy.
And she’s shown me that I’m good enough to be someone else’s joy. That I’ve been holding myself back because of who I used to be without even realizing it.
I want to beherjoy.
I glance around the room, looking for her.
Back when I had a class here, this place was lined with workstations, all of them hooked up to gas lines and sinks. I got called in to shut off the valves for gas and water the day Estelle made an offer on the placeearlier this summer, but I haven’t been up here since, and honestly, I was expecting it would’ve changed.
The moon’s soft glow, illuminating the room just enough that I can navigate it, suggests that it hasn’t.
The rows of workstations are still here. The cabinets are still here. Even the warning signs talking about what to do if you get chemicals in your eyes and how to shut off the gas in case of fire are still on the walls.
Crumbling and faded, but still there.
The only thing new is the privacy screen around where Mr.Lueker’s desk used to sit.
“Tavi?” I whisper.
“Isaid—Carter?”
I follow the sound of her voice around the privacy screen. “I’ve been a dickhead a time or two, but that’s a little insulting to a guy who snagged a box of the best chocolate chip cookies you’ll ever taste to go along with a goat-cheese-and-beet salad.”
She slams a laptop shut, which should theoretically cut the light in the room, but not with her in it.
She’s my light. My hope. My fresh start. Reclining on a stack of pillows on a twin-size bed with her foot propped up on another pile of pillows and her dog snuggling next to her. Pretty sure she’s in nothing more than a T-shirt and panties, but while my cock wants to go there, the rest of me desperately needs to know that she’s not in pain.
“Are you okay?”
“Dylan.What are you doing here?” she whispers.
The next-best thing I know to do when I’m terrified to touch her but needed to see for myself that she’s okay. “You didn’t answer my texts.”
“Gigi took my phone at the hospital.”
I sink to one knee next to the bed. “Does it hurt?”
