“I-I love… love y-you.” I mustered all of my remaining strength to tell him one final time how much I did. How much he’d saved my soul in the short span of time I knew him. He was the moon to my sun, and I hoped he’d see me with every sunrise and sunset as a reminder of my devotion to him.
With the finality of my words, that strength vanished, and my eyes closed… letting myself drift at least one more time safely in the arms of the person I loved.
CHAPTER THIRTY
THORNE
It’d been seven days.
Seven days since the bullet tore through Oren’s flesh. Seven days since his blood stainedeverything. Seven days since my heart shattered and my world stopped the second his breathing ceased as he lay in my arms. Seven days since I’d sat in the hospital room with him, unmoved from the chair I occupied, refusing to eat or sleep, and spending the entirety of my days praying to whatever would fucking listen to give him back to me.
I wasn’t a good man. I knew that. I was a fraud, a failure, a poor excuse of a human who only damaged everything he touched. Oren had been no exception. Because ofmycarelessness, my wrath, and my willingness to push him away, his life had ceased. And now? Now he was connected to medical equipment with no promise of waking up, the doctors stating that I had a week with him until we needed to pull the plug.
A week to try and get him to wake up, and I couldn’t even fucking do that… I was a failure… A failure… A failure… The days had passed, and he’d remained unconscious, no matter how hard I’d cried, no matter how many times I’d screamed and begged him to come back to me. And now… Now I would be the one to sign the papers to let him go… Forever…
“Thorne.” Matt’s voice echoed above the stillness, but it wasn’t the voice I wanted to hear.
Staring at the ground, I refused to move my eyes away from where they’d been fixated. “What…” My voice was raw, weak, unused: a mirror to my unwillingness to keep living a life without Oren in it.
“It’s time,” he said, his timbre wavering for the first time. “Liam… Liam and Simon are here to say their goodbyes. I figured you’d like them to go first so it’s just you and him after.”
My mind reeled, struggling to formulate words I couldn’t seem to find, and I failed. All I could gather was a broken sob, a plea attached to it. “M-Matt…”
“I’m fucking sorry,” he whispered before tears collected. “My fault… All of this is my fault.”
“I-I can’t…” I knew he was blaming himself, and internally, I was screaming at myself to comfort him, but I was falling apart. I didn’t have the fucking strength to be the backbone anymore. I couldn’t… “I-I-I can’t…”
A knock sounded at the door before Liam entered, a bawling Simon behind him. Liam’s face was red, but he was trying to hold on for Simon… to give him a pillar to cling to, a pillar I no longer had.
Running my hands down my face, I pushed myself up from where I sat for the first time in days. The room spun, whether from the lack of food or my impending panic attack, I wasn’t sure. “I-I’ll give you guys… s-some time… I need to go get… s-some air…”
“We won’t take long,” Liam answered, bringing Simon in for a hug. His hand rubbed his back gently, caressing a wound that would never heal.
I simply dipped my chin, unable to look at them any longer. Using the wall as guidance, I moved to the door, my fingers coiling around the metal handle before I tugged it open and rushed out into the hallway.
Trying to count my footfalls to keep myself from diving off the cliff I was standing on, I progressed toward the double doors that led outside. Fumbling through numbers, I gave up, my hand slamming into the bar as I forced myself outside. And it was only two more steps until my knees slammed into the cement, a shattered wail escaping me.
All of it…
All of it was unfair.
He was the brightness in the abyssal depths that had swallowed me; the light that finally appeared after I’d become so acquainted with darkness I never thought I’d see it again. Every time he laughed, I was reminded of what it meant to be alive. Every time he smiled, my soul reignited with a fire I thought had been snuffed out years ago. And every time he kissed me… Every time our lips met… he breathed life back into me when I’d begged for death…
And now?
Now he was gone…
And I had no pieces of him left, because I had been too senseless to hear him out… burning everything he drew for me. Every piece of our time together was destroyed by a mere flame, a fire that would vanish as soon as they took him off life support.
A decisionIwas forced to make.
Folding in on myself, I wrapped my arms around my body. My throat ached with each scream that tore itself from it, each more guttural than the last, each containing every fractured piece of my fucked up soul.
I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t think.
I didn’t want to live.
