Page 45 of Deacon

Knowing better didn’t stop it from hurting.

“Seein’ you’s…” He exhaled. “Unexpected.”

My jaw tightened. “Yeah, same.”

His fingers flexed weakly against the sheet.

I noticed.

Of course I noticed.

I had spent years learning to notice everything about my patients while revealing nothing about myself, but Jackson had never fit neatly inside any category I gave him. Patient. Past. First love. Father of my daughter.

None of those words were large enough tonight.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said quietly.

The old reflex inside me pulled toward him so hard it made me angry.

“Don’t.”

He nodded once, immediately. “Okay.”

No argument. No attempt to push through the boundary because he wanted something from me.

Somehow, his acceptance made it harder.

The monitor gradually settled, the numbers easing closer to where they had been before he opened his eyes. I stood beside him with my pulse still beating too hard and tried to reconcile the man looking back at me with the one I had carried inside memory for almost half my life.

Nothing was fixed.

He had awakened. That was all.

A nurse entered a moment later with the doctor close behind, and the room transformed into something I understood again. Clinical movement replaced suspended emotion. Questions followed orientation checks, then came the penlight and blood-pressure cuff while the doctor evaluated how much of Jackson had returned with him.

I stepped back automatically and gave them room.

It should have offered relief.

Instead, I remained painfully aware of his gaze.

Every time the doctor turned away or the nurse adjusted something beside the bed, Jackson looked for me again. He never stared long enough to interrupt what they were doing. He simply checked.

There.

Still there.

The realization lodged beneath my ribs in a place I wanted left alone.

When the examination finally ended and the room emptied again, Jackson released a slow breath. Exhaustion had begun pulling harder at his face, but the faint edge of himself remained when he looked at me.

“Guess I’m harder to kill than I thought.”

“Don’t get cocky.”

The smallest flicker touched his mouth.

That nearly undid me more than everything before it because I knew that expression. I remembered versions of it from football fields and the Morgan kitchen, from afternoons when he and Matty came through the door already laughing about something that would eventually get one of them yelled at.