“Sir, please wait here.”
Wait? The word feels obscene. I pace, boots scuffing, the plastic chair rings when I push it back too hard and the sound startles me. People try to be polite, offer half-steps of space, like someone might hand me back the person I lost if I just asked nicely. I am not patient. I have never been patient when it comes to things that matter.
A man in scrubs comes out, one of those clean, calm faces. “Mr. Hale?”
“Yes.” My throat closes. “Where is he? Is he?—?”
“He’s been cleared to go,” the man says, and my knees nearly give out. “He had minor bruises, some scrapes; not anything like they’re reporting online. Someone pulled him out of the way in time. He’s awake. He’s… We actually discharged him a short while ago. He should be in the lobby if he’s still here.”
My chest constricts with a combination of relief and a new, slippery fear. I go toward the exit like I’m a man at the end of a rope. The lobby is a horizon of seats and people and a televisionmounted on the wall blaring some daytime show. I scan, frantic, until I see someone leaning against a pillar, hood up, face angled down.
He looks smaller than the headlines make him. He looks raw. The hood is up but it doesn’t hide the bruise blooming along his jaw or the dried flecks of something at his hairline. His lips are swollen, his eyes rimmed in red—the look of someone who’s been scraping at the bottom of something that used to be a life.
“Magnus,” I say before I can stop myself.
He starts, head whipping up. For a beat we just look at each other and the weight of the last week drops like a stone between us. Then he’s moving. Stumbling forward with a kind of ferocious speed that makes the hair on my arms lift. He wraps his arms around me and the world collapses into the press of his chest and the smell of him—stale whiskey and sweat, and under all that, faint and stubborn, that clean, impossible scent of him I can never quite scrub from my memory.
“Al, what are you doing here?”
I pull away, checking his body. “I saw on the news that you were hit by a fucking car.”
“You know the media likes to be dramatic.”
Hot tears well in my eyes. “Shut up.”
He bends down to look at my face. “Hey, hey. I’m okay, baby.”
I break. Tears spill, hot and unexpected. “I left everything,” I say, because it needs saying. I need him to know. I need him to understand what I was willing to throw away. “Dad. He said he’d cut me off if I left. If I left for you.” My voice trembles. “I told him—” The sentence breaks. I close my eyes against the memory of my father’s flat, cruel voice. “I said fine. I said fine and I left. I left. I came here. I came to you.”
Magnus can’t hide his surprise before looking around. He pulls me into an empty stairway with cold blue lighting leaking from some vending machines.
For a heartbeat Magnus is still, like he’s processing the weight of it. Then he laughs, the sound brittle and almost painful. “You did what?”
“I gave it all up,” I say, the words burning. “Money, advantages—everything. I don’t care. I can’t—” My fingers find the bruise on his cheek, light as if touching a mirror that might shatter. “I can’t find a way to be anything other than yours. I can’t?—”
He interrupts me then, voice quieter, so low I have to lean in to catch it. “I thought you wanted to be safe. I thought you wanted his life. I thought you’d rather—” He gulps, eyes pleading now. “I thought you’d rather never feel as messy as I make you feel.”
“That’s not true.” I cup his face with both hands and feel the grit of the day under my palms. “I love you, Magnus. I don’t care about safe. I don’t want safe if safe means losing you. I—” My voice cracks, and I squeeze his cheeks like I can stop the words from spilling all at once. “I am here. I chose you. I’m sorry about all that shit I said. I didn’t mean it.”
He covers my hands with his own, fingers trembling. From this close, I can see where the bruise spreads purple across his jaw, and there’s a dark crescent at his temple where the skin is broken. He looks tired in a way that isn’t just from the accident. It’s the exhaustion of someone who’s been at war with himself for too long.
“I thought you didn’t want me,” he says into my hair, voice raw. “I thought you walked away. Thought you chose…everything else over me.”
I let out a sound that’s half laugh, half sob. My hands go to his back and hold him like I could anchor him to me and keep him from floating off into whatever dark he keeps falling into.
“No,” I whisper. “No, you idiot. My father said he would get you kicked off your team. That he’d never let you play hockey again. I couldn’t...I couldn’t take that from you.” The words choke out. I can feel the blood pricking behind my eyes. I am not composed. I am unmade. “I’m sorry. I love you,” I barely manage to whisper.
“Shh.” He presses his forehead to mine, breathing hard. “You look—” He hitches, and I see the self-flinch behind it, the way he’s used to people recoiling, judging. “You look like shit, Alaric.”
I pull back to look at him properly. “Youlook like shit. Why do you look like this?” I demand, each word an urgent, pleading thing. “Is this alcohol? Are you—have you been drinking again?”
He tries to laugh, an automatic deflection. “I’m fine. It was nothing, Al. Just a stupid night. I’m?—”
He falters. There’s a flinch I know well—the attempt to minimize, to sugarcoat, to keep me from seeing the full mess of him. “I’m okay,” he says. “I can handle it.”
I have no patience left for platitudes. My chest is raw with fear and fury. I push his shoulder, enough to make him take a step back and meet my eyes. “Don’t lie to me, Magnus. Don’t pretend. I know that look. You were drunk when it happened, weren’t you? You were out drinking because you couldn’t—” The words tumble, jagged. “Because you couldn’t stop thinking about me getting away. You could have died.”
He opens his mouth, stammers, tries to correct me with a joke or a shrug, anything to take the edge off. “It was nothing. Someone pulled me out of the way?—”
