For once, I wished she would slap me.
“Georgia is real,” I said. “She stayed. She wants the life I asked her for. I can’t just toss a grenade into that because you and I have heat.”
“Heat?”
The single word was ice.
I knew immediately I had chosen wrong.
Not the feeling.
The word.
Destiny stepped back.
Everything in her seemed to pull inward, away from me, away from the bed, away from the man who had kissed her and then reduced years of longing to heat because he was too scaredto call it love in a room where his fiancée could walk back any second.
“Wow,” she whispered.
“Destiny—”
“No. That was helpful.”
“It came out wrong.”
“No, I think it came out exactly the way you needed it to.” She looked at the monitor, the IV lines, the chart, anything but me. “Your dressing is intact. Your IV is running properly. Your pain is elevated because you tried to sit up like an idiot. I’ll notify your nurse.”
She turned toward the door.
Panic ripped through me harder than the bullet.
“Don’t leave like this.”
She stopped.
For one heartbeat, I thought she might turn around softened.
She didn’t.
When she looked back, there were tears in her eyes, but her face had gone calm.
Too calm.
The calm of a woman choosing herself because no one else in the room had the courage to do it.
“You’re right,” she said.
I stopped breathing.
“Maybe it is just a what-if. Maybe it’s trauma and timing and a first kiss dressed up as fate. Maybe if we had a normal date, you’d hate how I order fries and I’d hate how you refuse to read instructions. Maybe we’d burn hot and fast and leave nothing but ash.”
“Beautiful—”
“But I was willing to risk finding out.” Her voice broke then, just once. “You’re not.”
I had no answer.
That was answer enough.
