His thumb pressed gently against my lips.
“Hey,” he said, his voice carrying a steadiness that anchored me even as everything else inside me came apart. “You’re saying it now, love.”
I let out a shaky, fractured breath that fogged against his thumb, my chest still heaving, my heart still hammering, my eyes still blurred with tears that kept coming no matter how many times he wiped them away.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “I am.”
He watched me for a long moment, his thumbs still moving. Something in his face changed, and then he leaned in until his forehead found mine again, until I could feel his breath warm against my lips, until there was nothing left between us but the small, charged distance.
“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with this,” he admitted, his voice rough and honest. “I’ve spent my whole life not getting attached to anyone. Kept things simple. Kept things temporary. Convinced myself that meant I had it figured out—that everyone else just made it complicated for no reason, and I’d found the cheat code.”
“Clearly, that worked out great.”
“Yeah,” he said, the corner of his mouth turning up just barely. “Stellar results across the board.”
His thumb traced along my jaw, tilting my face up slightly.
“But somewhere along the way,” he went on, the humor fading from his voice, leaving something quieter in its place, “I got attached anyway.”
“When I stood on that shore,” he said, his voice dropping further, “and looked up to see you on that boat—to see your face, to witness what watching me go down did to you—”
He exhaled slowly, his breath unsteady, pressing his forehead harder against mine.
“It destroyed me, Libby. Not the dead. Not the hands. None of it. Your face. That’s what almost killed me. That’s what I couldn’t survive—not the thought of dying, but the thought of leaving you.”
My hands tightened against his face, fingertips pressing into the stubble along his jaw. I held him close, feeling my breath grow shallow and uneven, my eyes burn, and something in my chest pull taut like a wire about to snap—yet I didn’t look away.
“Good,” I said softly, my voice barely holding together. “Because it destroyed me too.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I figured. I saw it on your face then. I saw it just now when you woke up.”
“Don’t,” I whispered, my eyes closing. “Don’t make me think about it. I can’t go back there. Not right now.”
“Okay,” he said immediately. “Okay.”
His hand slid back into my hair, pulling me closer.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said against my forehead, his lips brushing my skin between words.
I opened my eyes and searched his face—every line, every shadow, every flicker of light in those silver eyes.
“You can’t promise that,” I whispered. “Not now. Not in this world.”
“No,” he admitted. His honesty—the refusal to lie, to offer a comfort he couldn’t guarantee—was stark. “I can’t. I can’t promise you the world won’t try to take me again. I can’t promise things won’t go sideways. I can’t promise I’ll always make it back.”
His hand tightened in my hair, just slightly, just enough.
“But I can promise I’m going to fight like hell to stay,” he said. “Every time. Every single time. I will fight anything—dead, living, the ocean, whatever stands between me and getting back to you—and I will not stop fighting until I physically cannotmove. That’s what I can promise. And I need you to know that it’s more than I’ve ever promised anyone in my entire life.”
My eyes burned, my throat closed, and new tears spilled over, a joy so sharp and sudden it almost hurt as much as the loss had.
“Don’t scare me like that again,” I whispered into his neck, my lips moving against his pulse point, each word a warm brush of air against his skin.
He pressed a kiss into my hair, his lips lingering, his breath stirring the strands.
“No promises,” he said quietly, and I could hear the faint ghost of a smile in his voice. “But I’ll try.”
I pulled back just enough to meet his gaze again, my hand rising to cup the side of his face. My palm covered the bruise along his cheekbone, and my thumb traced the edge of the cut above his brow with careful, aching gentleness.
