“I’m—Delilah, I’m sorry,” I say immediately, the words tumbling out rough and urgent. “I shouldn’t have done that. I wasn’t thinking. After everything they did to you, I—fuck, I can’t even imagine what that—”
I stop.
Because she isn’t shaking.
She isn’t angry. She isn’t distant or panicked or folding in on herself the way I expect, the way I dread. She’s not recoiling from me like I deserve.
She’s staring at me.
Wide-eyed. Breathless. Like the ground just shifted under her feet and she’s still deciding whether it’s going to drop out entirely. Her lips are parted. One hand is still half curled in the air between us. There’s color in her face now that wasn’t there a minute ago, and the sight of it makes guilt cut even deeper.
That somehow makes it worse.
“Listen to me,” I say, forcing steel back into my voice because if I don’t, I’ll unravel. “You are not going back out there right now. You’re going to therapy—every session, no excuses. And until medical clears you, you will be working the med bay. That’s not a punishment. That’s me keeping you alive.”
Her jaw tightens, but she doesn’t argue this time. That silence feels more dangerous than yelling ever did. Like the whole room is holding its breath around the thing I just did and the fallout neither of us is ready to name.
“And if you want to help,” I add quietly, meeting her gaze, “that’s how you do it.”
The room hums with unspoken things—what that kiss meant, what it didn’t, and what it can never become. The air feels thick enough to choke on. Her scent is still on my skin. My mouth still remembers hers. I hate that I remember it as clearly as I do. I hate more that some part of me already wants it again.
I turn away before I cross another line, because I don’t trust myself not to reach for her again.
And this time, I know I wouldn’t stop.
Chapter 15
Delilah Barrinheart
The med bay smells like antiseptic and ozone and something faintly metallic that clings to the back of my throat no matter how many times I breathe through my mouth. It’s too bright, all white walls and reflective steel, the kind of place where silence feels louder than screaming. I move through it on autopilot, hands steady even though my head feels like it’s packed with fog, following muscle memory more than thought as I clean and wrap a gash along a soldier’s ribs.
He hisses when I press gauze into the worst of it, and I murmur a quiet apology out of habit, though my voice sounds distant to my own ears. I don’t look at him for long. I don’t look at anyone for long. If I do, I might anchor myself too firmly in this moment, and I don’t know if I can handle that yet.
My hands know what to do even if my mind doesn’t. Clean. Assess. Wrap. Secure. Move on.
The soldier and his buddy keep talking like I’m not there, like I’m part of the furniture instead of the one stitching him back together. Normally that would bother me. Normally I’d say something dry, something clipped, just to remind themI exist. Today, I let it happen. Their voices blur together, a low background noise I cling to because it’s better than the alternative—because the moment the room goes quiet, my thoughts get louder.
“…sparring went sideways,” one of them says with a chuckle that doesn’t quite land. “Jon’s gonna lose his shit when he hears—”
My fingers falter for half a second.
I force them to keep moving.
It’s ridiculous. One kiss shouldn’t do this. One reckless, infuriating, absolutely wrong kiss shouldn’t live in my head the way it does, replaying in flashes of heat and breath and the way my entire world went still for just one stolen second. The way he grabbed my face like I was the answer to a question he’d been refusing to ask. The way I kissed him back just enough to ruin us both.
I try to drown it out by focusing on the conversation, on the talk of upcoming ops and shifting schedules, on the familiar rhythm of military life continuing like nothing happened, like I didn’t break and get put back together with a thousand invisible cracks. Like I’m not standing in the med bay because he said I would, because he decided this is how I help now.
But my brain doesn’t listen.
It drifts, traitorous and soft, to other kisses.
Other missions.
Other lies we told together.
The memory slides in uninvited, vivid and sharp, and suddenly I’m not in the med bay anymore.
I’m pressed against a brick wall in some nameless city, night heavy and close around us, the air thick with smoke and neon and too many watching eyes. Music pulses from somewhere inside the club behind us, bass threading throughthe pavement. I’m in a dress that isn’t mine, heels I hate, a persona that fits too well. Jon’s hand is warm at my lower back, steady and sure, his body angled just enough to shield me from the crowd while making it look like he owns the space between my legs and the wall.
