"Tell me something," he said. "Something real. Something nobody else knows."
I thought about deflecting. Making a joke, changing the subject. But the darkness felt like a confessional, and his arm felt like safety.
"I almost quit nursing. After my first year."
"What happened?"
"Lost a kid." The memory surfaced—pink sneakers, gap-toothed smile, the flat line on the monitor that no amount of compressions could fix. "Car accident. She was seven. I did everything right, and it didn't matter."
His arm tightened.
"I went home that night and stared at the wall for six hours. Couldn't move, couldn't think. Just kept seeing her face." I exhaled. "The next morning, I got on my bike and rode until I ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere. Sat on the side of the road and cried for the first time in years."
"What made you go back?"
"I called Tyler." The name still ached. "He answered on the first ring, even though it was three in the morning. He said—" I smiled despite the pain. "He said, 'You don't quit because it hurts. You quit when it stops hurting. Because that's when you know you've lost yourself.'"
"Smart man."
"He was. Is." I shook my head. "I don't know anymore. I haven't heard from him in months."
Axel was quiet for a moment. Then: "You'll find him. Or he'll find you."
"You sound certain."
"Family has a way of coming back around." He turned me to face him, hands framing my jaw. "Even the family we lose track of."
Under the starlight, his grey eyes looked almost silver. I could see the shadows there—the things he carried, the things he'd lost. But I could also see something else. Something that looked like hope. "Your turn," I said. "Something real."
"Daniels wasn't the first."
I waited. He didn't look away.
"There was a guy, in high school. Before I enlisted. We were—" He swallowed. "We were each other's firsts. Everything. My dad found out, and..."
"What happened?"
"He beat me so bad I couldn't stand for a week. Told me I was disgusting, unnatural, a disappointment." The words came out flat, recited like a report. "Then he shipped me off to military school. I learned to bury it. Became the soldier he wanted me to be."
My chest ached for the boy he'd been. "And Daniels?"
"Daniels made me remember." A flicker of something—grief, love, guilt—crossed his face. "Made me realize I'd been lying tomyself for years. And then he died, and I buried it again. Told myself it was just a war thing. Just proximity and adrenaline."
"Until me."
"Until you." His thumb traced my cheekbone. "You walked into that parking lot with your purple hair and your steady hands, and I felt something I'd spent twenty years trying to kill."
"What did you feel?"
"Terrified." He breathed a laugh. "Alive.Wanting."
I kissed him.
Not desperate like before, not hungry. Slow. Deep. A conversation without words. His hands slid into my hair, tilting my head exactly where he wanted it. I gripped his cut, anchoring myself, drowning in the taste of him.
When we broke apart, we were both breathing hard.
"Take me back," I said against his lips.
