“You must be really great with your patients.”
“That’s what people tell me.”
He clearly doesn’t like talking about it.
My phone beeps.
“Just sent you a better picture,” he says.
I open the picture, and my eyes bug. “Oh, dang. That looks hard.”
“Nah, it shouldn’t be too bad.”
“It shouldn’t be too bad,” I mimic. “Uh-huh. I can barely string a chain together and here you are whipping up a whole freaking stuffed animal with wings and feathers and everything.”
He chuckles. “To be fair, I’ve been doing this since I was a kid. Give yourself twenty years and you might be at my level.”
“Twenty years, huh? How old are you?”
“Twenty-nine. You?”
“Just turned thirty-two.”
“Just? Dammit. That means I missed your birthday?”
“By about two weeks. May 7th.”
He sighs. “March 29th, which means you have ten months to figure my birthday gift out.”
I laugh softly. “Noted.”
Miles smirks.
“Do you want to go so you can work on the pattern?”
“Dude, I’m not even out of bed yet.” Then his brows furrow. “Doyouwant me to go?”
“No,” I say immediately.
His eyes soften, and he lowers his voice. “Do you want to stop talking, though? I can just keep you company, if you prefer. Like I said, I know what it’s like. How suffocating it is. We don’t need to talk if it exhausts you, but you don’t need to be alone in your feelings, either. Depression sucks.”
His words wrap around me like a warm blanket. I’ve never had someone offer to sit with me in the darkness. Declan doesn’t. Piper doesn’t. They care and they both check in with me on occasion, but they don’t know how to help either.
“I’d really like that,” I say softly. “Especially if you stay naked.”
He laughs. “Fine. Butonlybecause you’re sad.”
Miles shifts back to his side, resting the phone against the pillow again. He reaches for something offscreen, and a minute later I hear a barely detectable sound in the background, like he just turned on the TV. He curls an arm under the pillow and doesn’t say another word. His beautiful face fills my screen, calming me in a way I can’t describe. It’s not enough to push the darkness away, but it holds me steady.
For the first time in what feels like forever, I’m not alone.
I watch him until I drift to sleep a few hours later.
Miles calls me again the following morning.
“Before I get all chatty on you, be honest. Can you handle talking?” Miles asks. He sounds happy.
“I’m a little better.”
