29
JASON
I help her lie down on the bed and put two pillows behind her back. Then I take a chair and go to sit next to her when Alex grabs my hand.
“Here, stay here next to me.”
“Don’t you think they’ll really kick me out if I do that?”
“At this point I don’t think anyone will disturb us again.” She smiles in embarrassment. “I don’t know what Patrick did, but I’m sure you owe him something.”
I laugh and sit on the bed and put my arm around her and she rests her head on my shoulder.
“You have no idea what that guy is capable of,” I say, thinking back to what he did when Erin was in the hospital to let her visit with the baby in the middle of the night.
Alex relaxes against me.
We are in a fucking hospital waiting around for the last hours before her operation, a procedure that could either improve her life or else take her away from me forever.
I can’t hide my anxiety or the fact that I’m having a hard time breathing normally, because I’m scared that breathing in too deeply would lead me to sobbing like a child.
“I tried, you know.”
“What’s that?”
“To keep you away from this. To keep you away from me.”
I look at her without understanding what she’s trying to tell me.
“When I woke up in the hospital after my heart attack, I was confused and scared. I had my family with me but the only one I wanted to see was you.”
I grab her shoulder and squeeze it, feeling guilty for having abandoned her.
“The more time passed, the more urgent it became for me. But you weren’t there, you didn’t call, you didn’t—”
“Please, Alex, don’t go back there. Not now that we’re together.”
She shakes her head. “The more I realized how much I needed you with me the more I understood it wasn’t right. That none of it was right and that I couldn’t do it to you.”
“What the heck are you saying?”
“I’ve never been afraid of you Jason, not one second in my life. I trusted you, I trusted you and I knew that I would always be safe with you, that you would do anything to be by my side, even if it cost you your life.”
She looks at me and touches my beard absent-mindedly.
“But I couldn’t allow it to happen. I didn’t want you to live in constant fear that things could end in any moment, that I could leave you like your mother did. You deserved more than that. You deserved to live your life, to have a woman that loved you and took care of you and your heart. To have a family and be truly happy. And you could not have had those things with me.”
“Alex,” I interrupt her, moving away just enough to allow me to look her in the face. “Do you really believe that I could ever have a life away from you and that I could be happy? Darling, I’m just starting to live now. Now that I can hold your hand, to watch you breathe. I can live only if I hear your heart beating for me. I can only live now that I am allowed to love you.”
“I’m sorry…I never wanted you to suffer, I thought that with time…”
“For some things, Alex, time can’t do anything.”
“I know,” she confirms, looking down.
“When I came to you in the hospital, when you told me those things, you broke my heart, and it stayed like that, in pieces until you smiled at me again. Until you let me hug you, until we made love, because in that moment, Alex, I really understood that I would be yours forever.”
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