Bowen found people here. These loud, chaotic people. And they welcomed him in with open arms and ample threats. The bittersweet sting lands somewhere in my chest.
“So,” I say, trying to walk like a normal person that wasn’t just stuffed with more food than I normally consume in a whole day. “Was that punishment? Feels a little like I got chewed up, spit out, then called pretty.”
My cheek is still warm from Jo’s kiss.
Bowen smiles at me when we climb into his truck. Smiles. It’s soft and beautiful, the closest thing I’ve seen to the Bowen I used to know. “It will feel like that every single time.”
He says it like…like there will be many more Bennet dinners.
I find myself smiling back.
Bowen
“It's Kit,” Tucker says. Two words, but I can hear a dozen emotions in them.
“Where is he?” I ask, already sliding out of bed and stumbling into the jeans I left discarded on the floor of my bedroom.
“St. John's.” The already nauseating fear I've lived with for days is nothing compared to the pit that opens at his words. Every fear, every anxiety. Every middle of the night, worst-case scenario. It all pours in until I have to place my forehead on the cool wall to stop myself from puking.
“Is he…”
“Alive?” Tucker supplies, a forced laugh that's all bitterness born from the same exact fear that lives in me. “Yeah. He's lucky.”
Lucky.
The word replays in my mind on a loop as I drive to the hospital. Park my truck. Stagger on legs that are close to giving up with every other step. I've gotten scraps of sleep all week and have been running on pure guilt and thesickening sort of dread that lives with a gut feeling and enough life experience to know that it very much can happen to you. The Universe can take and take and take until you're nothing but a chewed-up version of who you used to be.
All I can hear as the nurse points me in the right direction is, “Your fault. Your fault. Your fault.”
He looked like I punched my fist into his chest and tore out his heart before he went running from my house. The things I said…
My. Fault.
Tucker meets me in the hallway. He's saying things about Kit being in a medical detox all last week when we couldn't find him. He had wanted to get better.
He was trying.
“My fault,” I grit out. Tucker is shaking his head and places a hand on my shoulder.
“Not your fault, man. He chose to relapse.”
But it is. I upset him. I told him to get the fuck out.
That's when their mom opens the hospital door, eyes red and swollen from crying. And I see Kit, lying in the bed.
He looks so small. So pale. Deathly pale.
My kitten.
The memory releases me with the same clammy hands and racing heart as a nightmare does. I blink, bleary-eyed at the figure next to me. For one tense, agonizing moment, the moonlight on his pale skin looks haunting.
I reach for him, pulling his sleeping form away from the slash of silver light and into my chest. Kit makes a soft noise, placing his hand over mine on his tender stomach. The same guilt that drove myfeet away from him that night in the hospital has my hands moving against his stomach. The memory of him, small and broken down, has my lips quivering through every kiss against his warm skin.
Guilt for ever letting him go a day without understanding what he means to me. Guilt for not being strong enough. For walking away in the first place. For still being so fucking scared, it steals the air from my lungs.
“Boe?” he asks, hushed in the quiet of the night. My breaths are panting out of me like I've just run a mile.
Kit lets me roll him over, let's me hover over him. Looking at his eyes, no purple bags hanging under them. No shadows of the fight he used to battle from sunup to sundown. No chapped, bitten lips or gaunt cheeks.
