His proximity and the conversation have my body heating, and it’s impossible for me to ignore. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I know so much about you, and I need you to know me, too. I want to level the playing field. It’s not fair to you that I know that you want to be blindfolded, so now you know I want you to bite the fuck out of my ears.” He clamps his teeth onto my lobe with gentle pressure and groans, the sound ghosting across my ear and lighting my body on fire. “And to bite yours.”
I can feel him hardening, but he doesn’t grind against me or try to initiate anything. He seems content just holding me close.
“Tell me a secret. Something you didn’t even tell Sax.”
My stomach does a flip.
I told Sax almost everything. Of course, a lot of it was whispered in the dark over the phone, but I don’t know what he shared with the others.
Except for one thing.
Can I share my deepest, darkest secret with Grant?
I don’t really know him. He might as well be a stranger.
That doesn’t feel right. I’m not sure which parts of him I know, but Grant is not a stranger. He feels more like a lover I’ve forgotten.
My mouth is opening before I can talk myself out of it.
“Calvin and I got in a fight before he fell into a coma. He never woke up.”
Maybe that’s why I haven’t been able to move on from his death like everyone has expected me to. If I had kissed his forehead and told him how much I loved him instead of arguing with him, would I have been able to heal? Would I have opened his letter sooner?
“What about?”
Now that I’ve started the conversation, it’s impossible to hold my secret in.
“He said that he deserved to die with dignity. He was suffering, Grant. The pain meds weren’t touching what he was going through; he was lucid for less and less time each day. I refused to leave the hospital. I didn’t want to miss a second with him. Even if he was out of it most of the time. It hurt so much when he asked for his Alphas, and I had to continuously tell him they were on their way back. I wasn’t going to tell him every twenty minutes that they were dead. It would’ve been cruel.”
He squeezes my waist, but doesn’t interrupt me. A silent sentinel at my back.
“He…”
Am I going to do this now? Open my mouth, admit my darkest secret to the world? My parents?
Fuck, what are my parents going to say?
“He asked me to unplug his respirator. He wanted to choose when he died, how he died. I was sixteen, Grant. Icouldn’t. How could he have expected that of me? We fought over it for hours. It was one of his longest periods of lucidity there at the end, and instead of enjoying it, we were yelling at each other. He called me selfish. I said he was the selfish one. It was bad enough I had to watch him die, but he wanted me to be responsible for it?”
I’ll never forget the way he looked at me from that hospital bed. He cried so much, his voice was hoarse from begging. All he wanted was to choose when he left this world.
And I couldn’t do that for him.
I couldn’t give him the last thing he asked of me.
“Even though we were pissed at each other, I didn’t go anywhere. I fell asleep with my head on his lap, like I had every night. When I woke up, he was in a coma. And his opportunity to die with dignity was gone.”
Maybe that’s why the letter hit me so hard. He talked about his dying wish in it, but it wasn’t actually his dying wish.
That was written before we fought. Before he begged me to help him die.
“There was a PS on the letter he gave me asking me to forgive him. He wrote that letter while he was still lucid and setting up his estate. Was he asking me to forgive him for dying? Or did he plan this? Did he know he was going to ask this of me?”
“He was selfish.” Grant’s voice is hard. When I pull away from him, he looks furious. “Asking you to do that had to have been the most selfish thing he could have ever done.”
“But-”
