Page 10 of Deacon

The same cruel, unfair mouth that had ruined me for every man who tried to kiss me after him.

I stopped beside the bed and crossed my arms over my middle, seeking balance more than comfort. “Well,” I said softly, because the room was too quiet and I couldn’t stand inside it without speaking, “this is a hell of a way to come back.”

He didn’t move.

I hadn’t expected him to. Still, some foolish corner of me had believed my voice might reach him. That if I said his name, if I stood close enough, something inside him would recognize me.

The monitor continued its steady rhythm. The ventilator breathed for him in calm, measured intervals.

I swallowed, looked away from his face, then returned to it because apparently, I had no interest in sparing myself. “You always were stubborn, but this?” My laugh came out thin and brittle. “This feels excessive.”

My fingers closed around the rail beside his bed. Cold metal pressed into my palm. Solid. Real. Something I could hold that wasn’t a memory.

Seventeen years.

They sat between us almost as heavily as the machines. Seventeen years since Jackson walked out of Wicker Falls and never came back. Seventeen years since I woke up aching, happy, and certain my life had changed in the best possible way, only to discover I had already become something he could leave behind.

I had carried my anger so long that I stopped noticing how much grief lived beneath it.

Grief was harder to hold with dignity. Anger had sharp edges. It gave my hands something to close around and kept anyone from seeing how badly he had hurt me.

Standing beside him now, with Jackson unconscious and broken, neither emotion fit as neatly as it once had.

“You almost died,” I whispered. “Do you understand how unfair that is?”

The words slipped free before I could stop them. Once they did, the rest followed with frightening ease.

“You don’t get to disappear for seventeen years and come back like this. You don’t get to roll into my trauma bay half-dead and make me…” I bit down on the rest, hard enough to hurt, then shook my head. “God, I hate you for this.”

It wasn’t exactly true.

Maybe it had been once. Maybe I’d wished it was until the lie wore smooth enough to resemble truth, but it didn’t survive this room. I dragged a hand over my face and stared at him through the blur of everything pressing against my ribs.

“I had a whole life by the time you came back,” I said. “I built one. I had to. You left without an explanation, a note, or any warning, and I learned how to live with that.” My fingers tightened around the rail. “I got good at it.”

The room remained still.

Jackson had always been good at silence. Better than me. Better than nearly everyone I knew. He could carry whole storms inside him without allowing more than a flicker to cross his face. When I was young, I mistook that for strength.

Later, I understood it had made him impossible to reach.

“There’s something I need to tell you.”

My throat tightened around the words.

I looked down at my hand and found my knuckles pale against the metal. “And I have no idea where to start. Maybe I should hate that too.” I drew a slow breath, but it did little to loosen the pressure in my chest. “Maybe I do.”

His face gave me nothing.

“You should’ve been here,” I whispered. “If you don’t know, that’s on you. It isn’t on me.”

The bitterness came out rougher than I intended, but I refused to take it back. Maybe he couldn’t hear me. Maybe some part of him could, and he hadn’t earned gentleness from me yet.

I couldn’t decide which possibility hurt more.

“You don’t deserve to know.” The words felt thin the instant I said them, stretched over everything I was still afraid to name. “Maybe you don’t.”

My voice broke.