“You scared me,” I said.
The words were too small.
He had done more than scare me.
He had ripped time open.
He had turned me into every version of myself at once. The girl in the desert. The birthday girl in Cabo. The woman on the Santa Monica sidewalk. The nurse in the OR watching his heart stop.
“I saw you come through those doors, and for one second, my brain wouldn’t let me know you. It showed me the blood first.The patch. Nate. The stretcher. Everything except your face. Then they said your name.”
My fingers tightened around his.
“Dylan Degan.”
I closed my eyes.
“I hated hearing it like that.”
His monitor kept a steady rhythm.
I stared at it because looking at his face hurt too much.
“I always wondered how I’d see you again,” I said. “Isn’t that stupid? I used to pretend I didn’t. I’d tell myself I was too busy, too grown, too healed. But sometimes I’d catch myself making little movies out of nothing. You at some gas station when I stopped for coffee. You outside a concert. You walking into a restaurant in San Diego while I was there with friends. You at my graduation, maybe, standing in the back like some idiot who thought I wouldn’t notice.”
My laugh broke.
“I always noticed you.”
The ventilator hissed.
In.
Out.
A machine breathing for the man who had once taken my breath away by saying one word.
Beautiful.
I leaned forward, resting my elbows carefully near the bed rail, still holding his hand.
“You were supposed to show up tall and annoying and alive,” I whispered. “Not like this. Not with surgeons saying fifty-fifty like that was supposed to be comforting.”
My gaze moved to his face.
Even under all of it, he was Dylan.
Too pale. Too still. Mouth obscured by the tube. Dark lashes resting against his skin. Beard rough along his jaw. Hair a messfrom blood, sweat, hands, surgery, and probably God himself trying to drag him somewhere I refused to let him go.
I reached up slowly and touched his hair.
Just once.
Then again.
My fingers slid through it with painful tenderness.
“I used to remember your hands in my hair,” I whispered. “At the grave. In Cabo. You were always so careful with me. It made me crazy because I wanted you not to be. I wanted you to forget every reason you had to stop.”
