I suck in air. It trembles on the way down.
He wipes gently under my eyes, across my cheekbones, around the curve of my jaw. His hands never stop moving. Never stop grounding. He doesn’t ask me to talk. He keeps washing my face like he’s trying to scrub the panic out of me with warm water and touch. “You scared the shit out of us,” he says after a while. “I thought you were gonna break the door. Or me.”
“I almost did,” I rasp.
He huffs a soft laugh, then leans in and bumps his forehead gently against mine. “I know,” he says. “But you didn’t. You’re here. You’re breathing. And he’s alive. You got him back.”
My throat burns when I whisper, “What if he doesn’t remember me?”
Cole stills for half a second, then pulls me in and wraps both arms around me. “Then we make him fall for you all over again,” he says. “Because there’s no way in hell any version of Damian Kade looks at you and doesn’t go mine.”
I grip him harder because I hope to god he’s right.
Cole slings an arm around my shoulders as we walk. I don’t fight him anymore. I let him steer me. My feet feel like bricks, my chest like concrete, but I move.
We pass the vending machines on the way and Cole stops, digs into his pocket, curses when he realizes he’s still wearing his blood-streaked hoodie from the crash, but somehow, he still finds a few coins to slam them into the machine. “Don’t make a joke about the water costing more than my dignity,” he mutters.
I don’t. I can’t. I just stand there blinking while he presses the buttons and grabs the bottle when it clunks down.
“Here,” he says. “Hydrate or die-drate.”
I actually snort. Just a little. It still comes out broken.
He hands me the bottle, and I cling to it. We head for the front entrance, pushing through the rotating doors and into the thick, heavy night air. It’s not cold. But I shiver anyway.
And there it is, Damian’s car, still parked like a ghost on the edge of the lot. Engine off, headlights dead and the driver-side door is wide open.
Cole whistles low. “You left it like that?”
“I didn’t care,” I mutter, hoarse.
“No shit,” he mutters. “Could’ve been robbed.”
“Don’t care.”
He nudges me toward the open door, then leans against the hood and exhales.
I climb in slowly. The seat still smells like Damian. That mix of leather and cologne and something sharp, peppermint or pain. My throat closes up again. I clutch the bottle and stare out thewindshield, letting the silence settle between us. Cole doesn’t break it right away.
When he finally does, his voice is low. “He’s gonna wake up, curls.”
I don’t answer.
“He’s gonna wake up and the first thing he’s gonna want is you.”
I grip the bottle harder. He leans down, arms folded over the open window. “And when he does? You’re gonna be right there. Got it?”
I nod. Barely.
Cole knocks once on the hood. “Good. Drink your water. And then we go back.”
The parking lot hums with distant traffic and bad lighting, the kind that makes everything feel like a dream just sideways of real. I twist the cap off the water bottle and take a sip. Then another. My throat still burns from crying, from screaming, but it helps. A little.
Cole doesn’t say much. He watches the sky, one foot propped against the bumper, arms crossed like a sentry guarding what's left of me.
After a few minutes, I whisper, “Let’s go back.”
He nods, pushes off the car, and falls into step beside me again.
