The word was not enough.
I stared at him. “What?”
“Go to the hospital.”
“No.”
“Bliss.”
“No. I’m going inside.”
“You’re going to the hospital,” Knox said, voice sharp enough to cut because he had stopped being gentle and started being useful. “Life Flight is landing on the football field. They’re taking Cade to County. Meet him there.”
Life Flight.
The words did not make sense at first because Cade was not the kind of person Life Flight came for. Cade was the person everyone stared at when he walked into a room. Cade was the one who took hits, shook them off, smirked through pain, and made other men look breakable by comparison. Cade was the captain. The future first-round pick. The boy who had told me he loved me like it was the easiest truth in his body.
Life Flight was for people on the edge of not staying.
“No,” I whispered.
Knox’s face twisted. “Bug—”
“No.”
“They’re working him now,” Knox said, and I could tell by his face he hated every word. Hated himself for saying them. Hated that he had to make us understand fast when I wantedhim to lie, to soften it, to say Cade was conscious and pissed off and calling everyone incompetent. “Ryan said he’s barely breathing and one of his stab wounds is the chest, Bliss. They’re flying him because it’s faster and because they need a trauma team ready.”
Barely breathing became Cade’s mouth against mine turning blue in my imagination before I could stop it.
Two wounds became my hands pressing uselessly over blood I had not seen.
Trauma team became strangers cutting away his suit, his jersey, his pads, whatever he had been wearing when Luke found him. It became machines and shouted orders and Ryan’s hands shaking while Cade tried to ask for me. It became a helicopter lifting him away before I could touch his face and tell him he had to stay because he had promised me without ever saying the words.
He had promised me in every way that mattered.
Every word carved a picture into my head I could not survive seeing.
Cade alone in some ugly hallway while the whole arena screamed his name for goals he had scored for me, while I stood outside laughing with his jersey stretched across my chest, waiting like time was something guaranteed to girls who had already lost too much.
I thought of his mouth against the glass. His glove pressed to my hand. The way he looked at me like I was the only person in the whole arena. I had smiled at him like we had forever. I had let him skate away.
And now my brain kept circling back to that moment with the cruelty of a blade, making me watch it over and over. His hand against the glass. My hand opposite his. His mouth meeting mine through something clear and breakable. Thecrowd screaming around us while I thought the worst thing that could happen was my brothers teasing me later.
I had been happy while he was walking toward blood and a sound came out of me that didn’t feel human.
Dad pulled me closer, but I fought him because my body did not understand comfort anymore. Comfort was Cade. Safety was Cade. Air was Cade, and he was somewhere inside the arena being packed into a helicopter because roads were too slow and breathing had become optional and no one would let me run to him.
“I need to go,” I choked out, trying to push myself upright.
“You are,” Knox said.
“To him.”
“To the hospital. That’s where he’s going.”
“I need to see him before they take him.”
“You can’t.”
