Chapter Forty-Three
DREW
Eyes I’d craved to see again stared down at me.
Shades of blue I remembered well—the memory distant and groggy in my mind, but there nonetheless.
Shades of blue that reminded me of home: safety, warmth, passion, and strength.
She was smiling as tears fell down her rosy cheeks.
Her face was a dream.
A beeping noise grew faster somewhere to my left, but all I could focus on was Ayda as my body throbbed to life.
My eyes felt sticky, glued together by sleep—sleep that made no sense to me. I’d been away from her for too long.
I opened my mouth to speak, the word I wanted to say getting stuck in the back of my dry throat as I studied her beautiful face. It was a face an angel could only dream of possessing, and one I wanted to spend forever waking up to.
“A-Ayda?”
She released a chirp of sound before she leaned down, her lips now closer to mine.
“Oh, Drew. You scared me.”
I bathed in the sound of her voice. So real. So alive. “S-sorry,” I croaked, not really understanding what I wasapologizing for, but hating the pain that creased her face.
The beeping seemed to grow louder, the noise gathering momentum at the same speed of my aching heart.
“You came back to me,” she whispered as a loud commotion stirred behind her. “You did it, Drew.” She pressed her palm to my cheek carefully.
The contact made me suck in a breath.
More memories attacked.
Waking up to her against white sheets. The sunlight shining across her golden skin, prickling from the way I trailed a finger up and down her arm.
Ayda showering while I watched, taunting myself with a craving I was waiting to sate.
Her among my brothers, laughing and joking, her smiles like a galaxy of stars among an oily ocean of leather and darkness.
“You came back,” she repeated softly.
A soft smile tugged at my cracked lips as I looked into her bright blue eyes and whispered roughly, “You’re the only place… I wanna be.”
