I stop in the doorway.
She’s propped up in the hospital bed, hair messy, face clean now except for a faint shadow where smoke tried to claim her.She’s reading the little dry-erase board with her name and the date on it like it personally offended her.
She looks alive.She looks tired.She looks fucking beautiful.
Her eyes flick up at the sound of my knock on the doorframe.They widen in shock before she schools her features.
“Hey,” I say, suddenly weirdly nervous for a guy who runs into burning buildings for a living.“Told you I’d check on you.”
Her lips part.And just like that, the buzzing in my veins quiets, the world narrows, and every reckless instinct I have leans forward.
Yeah.No washing this one out.
Chapter Three
He’s Too Young.I’m Too Burned.
Olivia
Hospitals are worse than libraries.
And that’s saying something, because people think libraries are quiet, but they’re not, not really.They have sounds stacked on sounds if you know how to listen.Whispered conversations, fingers sliding over paper, printers coughing out essays at the last minute, someone in the romance aisle pretending they’re not in the romance aisle.
Hospitals are like that too—layered noise, but every layer is sharpened by fear.
Machines beep in strange off-rhythms.Carts rattle down halls.Intercom announcements blare like disembodied gods giving orders that no living person can decipher.Someone cries somewhere down the corridor, raw and broken and trying not to be heard.
And beneath it all?That smell.Bleach and plastic and something metallic that sits on the back of your tongue like a threat.I fucking hate it.
I hate the walls, the windows, the ceiling tiles, the scratchy gown that opens in the back like a cruel joke.I hate the IV pole with its little bag like an accusation.See?You couldn’t even breathe properly without help, could you?
Mostly, I hate that I’m alone again.
The nurse was nice.She told me I was “lucky,” which is hilarious in a cosmic, bad-comedy way.Twice in one lifetime, two separate men, two separate fires, and I lived both times.
Such a lucky fucking girl.
