“I mean, I took my first shower in years. That was pretty nice. As for the rest…I feel like I went through a meat grinder.”
“I bet you’re missing that whole non-corporeal thing right now, huh?”
His gaze lingers on my face. He shifts his legs, and his knee bumps into my back. We both freeze, and Finn’s eyes dart down to his knee, to my back, and back up to my face.
“You know, not really,” he says.
My breath catches. We’ve been closer than this but never close enough to matter. And now we are, and everything is different.
His hand slides across the sheets, bumps into mine. His fingers are cool and callused and there. Inarguably real.
I dragged him out of the tube with my two hands, pressed my mouth to his and pushed air into his lungs, and helped carry him down the hallway and out of the lab. But this is different. He has reached for me a dozen times and never found me.
For a moment, my reservations give beneath the weight of it all, and I come out the other side lighter than I’ve felt in almost a year.
I flip my palm up. Thread my fingers through his. Squeeze once. And he squeezes back.
“Thank you,” he says eventually. “You saved my life, Jo. You saved all of us.”
And with those words, the peace shatters. As beautiful as this moment is, it could all be taken away tomorrow. It probably will be.
It’s the way the world works.
The butterflies in my belly turn to dust, and I yank my hand back, rising half off the bed. I figure with an officer outside the door keeping him in and others out, it’ll be harder for him to corner me into a conversation I don’t want to have.
“Wait, Jo,” he says, a hand brushing my wrist. I do, against my better instincts. “Please don’t go.”
I shake my head. “I’m glad you’re alive, Finn. I really am. But Ican’t—” I’m scrambling for an excuse, something better than the real reason I have to walk away. “You still kept things from me. I don’t know if I can…”
He pauses.
“I wouldn’t blame you for not trusting me,” he says, “but don’t pretend that’s what this is about.”
I shake my head.
“What are you so afraid of?”
I’m not sure why I open my mouth. But once I start, I can’t stop.
“You,” I say. “I’m afraid of you.”
Finn reels back like he’d been slapped, his features twisting and pain flickering in his eyes for the duration of the breath it takes him to clear his expression.
“You scare the hell out of me,” I say, “because you’re kind, and you make me laugh, and you care what comes out of my mouth when I open it, and sometimes you look at me like I’m the only person in the whole world.” My breath rattles, and I can barely speak past the heat blazing over my cheeks. “Holden could have killed me, but you…you could destroy me.”
I sit back on the edge of the bed, far enough we aren’t touching but close enough we could. I’m pulled in two, warring over whether to run for the hills or stay and face the music.
Finn doesn’t say anything for so long I wonder if he’s decided not to.
“So, what, you’re going to spend your whole life hiding? Caring about nobody, not letting anybody care about you?”
“Maybe,” I say, and I know I sound like a petulant child.
“Sounds lonely as hell.”
I shrug.
“I can’t swear I’m not going anywhere. Or that I won’t, like,actually wander off and get eaten by a bear like half this town thinks,” Finn says, one side of his mouth lifting briefly. “But you can’t promise that either. You could get struck by lightning tomorrow or get hit over the head with a falling AC unit.”
