But I don’t want anyone but the man driving ten miles over the speed limit and checking on me every thirty seconds.
“Jensen.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s probably just a virus or dehydration or whatever. It doesn’t mean?—”
“Sloane.” He sounds calm, but his knuckles are white on the steering wheel. “You don’t have to manage my feelings right now.”
The words slide beneath all my carefully constructed defenses, settling into the place I’ve been trying not to feel anything at all. He’s right. I’m reassuring him so he won’t worry, or look at me like I’m breakable. Through every stage of this cancer journey, I’ve been deploying my sunshine like a shield for everyone I love, and I’m so goddamn tired of it.
“I’m scared.”
The words feel like they cost me a year of my life. His hand finds mine across the center console, his grip almost too tight. Like he’s holding on for both of us.
“Me too,” he says.
The mountains fall away as we drop into the valley, and the lights of Reno appear in the distance. My head is splitting, and my body alternates between feeling on fire and like I just did a polar plunge. I lose track of the minutes as I try to hold onto consciousness.
Jensen’s thumb moves in slow circles on my hand, grounding me. When I start shivering so hard the blanket slips off my shoulders, he cranks up the heat and I see sweat dripping down his temples.
“Almost there,” he says, squeezing my trembling fingers. We take a final turn, and the hospital appears, a beacon against the middle-of-the-night darkness. The building feels familiar even though I’ve never been here. All medical buildings look the same after a while. He pulls up to the emergency entrance and puts the SUV in park.
“I’ll grab a wheelchair,” he says, already climbing out.
“I can walk,” I answer, the part of me that needs to prove I’m not the sick girl refusing to surrender.
I open the door, but my knees buckle as soon as my feet hit the asphalt. I grab the doorframe and manage to stay upright for about one second.
Jensen scoops me up before I sink to the ground and carries me toward the sliding glass doors of the ER. I want to protest. To make it clear that I’ve been carrying myself through worse than a little fever for more than a year. Most of my life really. But he’s holding me like there’s no chance of letting go.
My gaze tracks to his pulse hammering wildly in his neck, and I understand he needs this as much as I do. So I press my face against his shoulder and breathe in his warm cedar scent.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that hospital lighting makes everyone look half-dead even when they’re fine. I’m nowhere near fine. Jensen walks straight to the intake desk, and I can hear him talking, but the words are fuzzy, the world around me starting to slide in and out of focus.
A wheelchair appears, and Jensen lowers me into it. A nurse asks me questions I have trouble answering because my brain has decided that now would be the perfect time to go offline.
“Hey.” Jensen crouches in front of me, his face level with mine. “Stay with me, Sunshine.”
I force myself to focus, but that’s a mistake. Because when I really look at him, past the calm voice and steady hands, all I can see is the unguarded terror beneath. His whole face is tight with it, and I’ve never hated anything so much.
I didn’t want him to ever see me like this. It’s the reason I ran after those two nights in Nashville. Why I smiled through my trail exhaustion and took care of his blistered feet without mentioning how badly my own body hurt. I wanted him to know me as strong. Capable. Alive in all the ways that mattered.
But the look on his face tells me this moment is rewriting something between us. And my last thought before everything goes dark is that I don’t know if we can ever go back.
28
JENSEN
I knowthe smell of hospital rooms the way other people remember the smell of their childhood kitchen. I spent enough nights in places like this during my mother’s last year to have it permanently encoded in my DNA. The second I carried Sloane through those ER doors, a switch flipped like muscle memory as fear engulfed me.
Fear, along with a huge helping of regret for letting this happen on my watch. For not paying close enough attention. I won’t make that mistake again.
I nodded at the right moments and asked informed questions. Gave them as many details as I knew about her medical history, and then made a phone call so the people who know her better than me could fill in the rest.
Sloane’s brother doesn’t fuck around. Within fifteen minutes of dialing Avah’s number, Jeremy Winslow did whatever it is that billionaires do to throw their weight around. Sloane was transferred to a private room on the hospital’s oncology floor, with a team of doctors at her beck and call. Not that she realized it or asked for special treatment, but I’m damn grateful.
She’s been sleeping peacefully for almost six hours, ever sincethe IV antibiotics kicked in and her fever started dropping. The doctors said it was a viral infection, compounded by immune suppression and physical exhaustion. They used words like precautionary and manageable, delivered in a practiced clinical tone that has to be taught as part of the med school curriculum.
