I press my mouth to the top of her head and breathe her in, and the ache in my chest isn’t pain anymore. It’s the feeling of a door creaking open in a heart that’s been shut up too long.
“It is,” I say.
The longer we dance, the worse she seems to be at it, and I don’t care. She trips over her own feet during the “Electric Slide” and grabs my hands to steady herself. When she looks up at me, grinning and gloriously imperfect, I understand with total clarity what I’m going to tell her.
I’m hers, and she’s mine. And I’ll love her forever.
I won’t say it tonight in this bar. I’m not that much of an idiot. But soon. Cody’s right. I’ve been a coward, and Sloane deserves more than a man who hides behind usefulness because he’s afraid of being seen.
She deserves someone who shows up with everything he is. The mess and the music and the fear and the feelings that have been building since the first night I heard her laugh in that booth at The Alcove and thought,Oh. There you are.
As the song changes to a slow one, she melts against me, and I hold her tighter.
“For the record,” she murmurs, “I’m glad you came to Tahoe.”
“For the record,” I say, “there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”
In this moment, I feel more at home than I have in years. Because home was never a place. It was always going to be her.
27
SLOANE
Three hours ago,I was on a dance floor with Jensen’s hand on my lower back and my cheek against his shoulder. He didn’t care that I stepped on his feet at least four times, and I laughed so hard my abs hurt. I felt like myself. Just a woman having a great time with a man she can’t stop wanting to be near.
By the time we got back to the rental house, I had a headache. Not a big deal. I’d had a long day. The bar was loud. I took two Advil, drank a glass of water, brushed my teeth and went to bed thinking about how nice Jensen’s arm felt around my waist during that last slow song.
Now I’m on the bathroom floor with my face pressed against the tile, the world shaking so hard I could argue for an earthquake. My teeth are chattering, and I’m drenched in sweat, which doesn’t make any sense when the shivers won’t stop.
I press the back of my hand to my forehead. I’m burning up.Shit.
Fevers are no joke when you’re immunocompromised. They aren’t a wait-and-see proposition. Your body doesn’t have the white blood cells to fight whatever is attacking it, and by the time you figure out what’s wrong, you could already beseptic.
My oncologist drilled the protocol into me after I spiked a fever that landed me in the ER during my first round of chemo. Then,at the start of every new round of treatment, Jeremy made me repeat it back to him like a kid memorizing multiplication tables.
Given where I am in my cancer journey, the fact that my skin is on fire probably doesn’t mean anything. It could be a virus, or even dehydration. My body throwing a tantrum because I pushed it too hard on a trip that involved backpacking through mountains, a long-ass day of driving, followed by emotional devastation, and then closing down a bar like I’m a normal, healthy twenty-eight-year-old woman.
God, how I want it to be nothing.
But I can’t stand without the room tilting sideways. The headache has morphed from a dull throb behind my eyes into a vise grip around my entire skull. Hands shaking, I manage to retrieve the thermometer from the first-aid kit sitting on the vanity.
103.8. Not nothing.
For a few moments, I lay on the bathroom floor and let myself sink into the rage that simmers underneath the physical misery. It’s exhaustingly unfair to be yanked back into the limitations of my body after a few days of forgetting it’s a problem. For the first time in over a year, I felt like a person, not a patient.
It’s not a high bar, but I appreciated every moment of it.
And because of it, part of me wants to wait and see. Down a couple more ibuprofen and another glass of water, hoping the fever breaks on its own. That’s what a normal person would do. Tonight, more than anything, I want to be normal.
But I’m not. A fever is tap dancing across the mine field of my immune system.
I pull myself up and grip the edge of the bathroom counter until my vision stops swimming. Then I shuffle into the bedroom and force myself to pull on pants and shove my feet in the Birks.The thought of walking down the hall to Jensen’s room with bare legs right now feels like exposing too much when I already have to let him see me in this sickly state. I move like someone three times my age, one hand trailing along the wall because without it I’d be on the floor again.
I knock twice and push the door open.
The room is dark, a sliver of moonlight cutting across the floor from where the blinds don’t quite meet. I can make out Jensen’s shape under the covers. He’s face down with one arm hanging off the side of the mattress. Even with my fever-addled brain—or maybe because of it—I register how deeply my body connects this man with comfort. Such a slippery slope.
“Jensen.”
