He nodded, wincing as the bandage tugged on his neck. “Yeah. A real one. Not a midnight rendezvous or whatever the hell we were doing before. An actual, honest-to-god date. With food and… talking.”
I leaned back, gave him my best skeptical look. “In public?”
His eyes didn’t leave mine. “Yes.”
I couldn’t help it—I laughed. It came out loud, almost a bark, and startled the nurse in the hallway. I clapped a hand over my mouth, shaking my head. “How hard did your head get hit?”
Floyd rolled his eyes, but there was a warmth in them I hadn’t seen in months. “Not hard enough to make me forget what I want.”
It shut me up. I didn’t have a comeback.
He squeezed my hand. “I want you, Ransom. That hasn’t changed.”
I looked at him, really looked, and saw that it was true. He was still the same infuriating, impossible man I’d fallen for, only now he was softer around the edges, like getting broken had sanded off some of the sharp.
For the first time since I’d walked out of his house, I let myself believe it was possible. That we could have something real, something that wasn’t a secret or a shame or a thing to run from.
“Okay,” I said, voice barely above a whisper. “Let’s do it. Let’s go on a date.”
He smiled, and it was everything.
The sun climbed higher, flooding the room with gold. Floyd closed his eyes again, but he didn’t let go of my hand.
Neither did I.
We were a mess—bruised, battered, stitched and scarred—but for the first time in my life, I felt whole. It wasn’t perfect. But it was real. And that was enough.
The thing about hospitals is they’re never quiet for long. There’s always some mechanical hum, some urgent voice on the other side of a curtain, some metallic clatter as a cart veers down the hall with more purpose than most people muster in a lifetime. In that racket, it’s easy to forget that you can make a silence bigger just by refusing to speak.
Floyd made it a whole ten minutes before he broke.
“Do you know what it’s like, chasing a ghost?” he asked, his eyes still closed, lashes stuck together like he was glued to the past. “Because that’s what it was. The second you left, I knew exactly where you’d go. I drove to the farm—thought maybe you’d want to see your family before you left. But you weren’t there. I tried the shop, even though the lights were off. I walked the block twice, just in case. You’d already gone. The bike wasn’t anywhere.”
His voice was steady, but there was a hitch at the end, a little catch that made my own ribs clench.
“I thought you’d circle back. Or call. Or do that thing where you pretend you don’t care, but show up at my house and eat all my cereal.” He let out a rough, low sound. “But you didn’t.”
I watched the way his hand flexed on the blanket, the way the nails dug half-moons into the cheap, pilled cotton. There was a line of red under his cuticles, like he’d been trying to dig his way back to me with just his hands.
I wanted to reach out, to fix it, but I didn’t know how. So I just listened, let the words fill the air between us.
“I spent three days driving the county,” he said. “Patrolling, even when I wasn’t on shift. I thought maybe if I just kept moving, kept looking, I’d find you.” He laughed, but it wasempty. “When I finally accepted you were gone, I went home and sat on the couch for so long that Latham called a wellness check on me.”
“Did you pass?” I said, aiming for a joke, but my voice broke on the last syllable.
He looked at me then, really looked, and there was nothing left of the old Floyd—the wall, the badge, the unflappable authority. Just a man who’d lost something and was terrified it wouldn’t come back.
“I thought I was going to die,” he said, pressing a fist to his chest like he could hold himself together by force.
The ache behind my ribs doubled. I gripped his hand, hard enough that my knuckles went white.
“I never meant to make you feel like that,” I said. “But I can’t—” I stopped, started again. “I can’t be someone’s dirty little secret. I’m just not built that way. Maybe I wish I was. But I’m not.” The words felt dangerous, like they might cut through more than just the air.
Floyd nodded, the motion slow, deliberate. He brought my hand to his mouth and kissed my knuckles, one by one, like he was reading them for clues.
“I know,” he said. “I know exactly who you are. And that’s why I want to do this right. I want to show everyone that you’re not a secret. You’re the man I love. The man I want to be with.”
The way he said it—simple, matter-of-fact, without an ounce of the old shame—nearly unmade me. My throat went tight, my vision blurry at the edges. I swallowed, hard.
