“I can see. A lot better than the last time you were here.” It was four days ago, and I’d been able to make out his features, but not with this kind of detail.
“Oh. I want to kiss you,” he breathed out.
I grinned. “Me too. But first, I need to say something. Again,” I added as an afterthought. I put my hand to his jaw. “Jonah. I’m in love with you.”
In the hospital, when I told him that, I’d imagined his face in my head. I imagined him lighting up, and trying and failing not to smile, and looking both a little shattered and elated.
All the things I’d felt when he told me.
But I was wrong. He looked even better. He was a fucking angel in the afternoon glow.
“I love you too.”
My heart moved into my throat, threatening to choke me with how fucking much I adored him. “Now you can kiss me.”
He pushed me against the wall, probably too hard for my current injury, but it was hard to give a shit when his lips met mine and he devoured them. His tongue pushed into my mouth, and he clung to me like he was afraid if he didn’t, I would disappear.
I kissed him back with the same desperation, fingers clawed into the back of his shirt, so even if he tried to pull back, he wouldn’t be able to go easily.
“I can’t wait to fuck you,” he told me, his mouth curved in a smirk.
I nodded. “I know. You’ve been so patient for me. So good for me. And I’m going to make sure I show you the moment I can.”
He pulled back. “I thought that was my line. In the hospital. Isn’t that what I promised?”
I grinned and tipped his chin up, tracing his bottom lip with my thumb. I looked at him because I could. Because I couldn’t stop. Because I never wanted to stop. “I don’t think it matters. It just matters that you’re here. That you don’t want to go.”
He pressed himself against me, burying his face into my neck. “No. I don’t want to go.”
Squeezing him tightly, I kissed his temple. “Do you want to go rot on the couch and be sad about your season for a bit?”
He hummed. “Just for a bit. Because I’m a little bit of a monster too, and I’m not that bummed about it.”
I laughed, then took his hands and guided him back to the comfy spot I’d created, and it was only with his weight against me, knowing that I loved him, and that he loved me, that I finally—for the first time in god only knew how long—felt like it was going to be okay.
I wasn’t really an expert on torture, but I was pretty sure the optometrist office was modeled after something really fucking medieval. Not just the creepy chair, or the weird mask I had toput on, or the light in my dilated pupils that hurt like fuck, but also the silence.
I’d been given the all clear from my neurologist, so now I had to make sure that the swelling in my head hadn’t done any real damage to my optic nerves or my retina. I was seeing better now, but the very edges of my periphery were still blurry, especially when I was tired.
My neurologist was pretty sure it was just the cortical injury, which would take time to heal—all of the summer and maybe even next season—but he wanted to be safe, not sorry he’d missed something.
“Alright,” the doctor said, sitting back.
The lights in the room were still low, but even those were painful. And the drops he’d put in my eyes made everything seem weirdly…wrong. It was hard to explain.
“Have you been having any bouts of vision loss, even temporary?”
“Like, apart from the head injury?”
“Yes, like any flickering lights, moments of rapid, temporary blindness?”
“No.” And that wasn’t a lie. I woke up every morning in a slight panic that it would happen. That I would suddenly be without my sight again, but it didn’t.
The worst moment had been when I woke up at three in the morning and thought it was midday, and the room was pitch-black. Then I’d noticed the glow of Jonah’s phone on the nightstand and realized I’d only been asleep a couple of hours.
He wrote something down, and my heart hammered against my ribs. After what felt like a literal eternity, he sat back with a hum. “Everything looks great.”
I almost sagged over my knees with relief. “Yes?”
