Page 9 of Deacon

“This is dying slower.”

“You’re dramatic, Princess.”

“I’m being murdered by public recreation.”

She smacks his shoulder. He tightens his arm around her without thinking, then feels the brush of her body against his beneath the water and goes still. Lila feels it too. He sees the realization move through her face.

That is one of the first moments everything changes. The shift comes quietly, too small for anyone else to notice, but after that, keeping his distance starts requiring effort.

The dark presses in again, softer but stranger than before. The memories refuse to stay still. The lake folds into the driveway, then into the football field with Matty beside him after a win, both of them muddy and laughing while Lila watches from the stands in an oversized school hoodie. Her face slips through every scene, younger and older, changing before he can hold on to any version of her.

Her voice reaches him from somewhere he can’t find.

“Jackson.”

He turns toward it, but the darkness thickens.

Then she is closer, her voice rough and threaded with the kind of anger that could only belong to her. “You stubborn bastard. It just had to be my ER you wound up in, didn’t it?”

Warmth closes around his hand for one brief, impossible second. It vanishes before he can curl his fingers around it.

Still, he follows.

Even lost inside whatever this is, with memory and dream tangled around something darker, he knows that warmth. He knows her voice and the shape of wanting it badly enough to chase it through the dark.

Somewhere ahead of him, just beyond his reach, Lila says his name again.

4

Lila

The adrenaline had burned away and left me hollow before I finally made it upstairs to the ICU.

That was the worst part of nights like this. The rush ended. The blood was cleaned from the floor. The terrible, suspended moments when everything balanced on whether a body would answer what medicine demanded of it gave way to quieter work, and my mind, no longer trapped inside triage, muscle memory, and whatever came next, began reaching for everything I had shoved aside just to make it through.

The ICU was dimmer than the ER, the overhead lights lowered to something gentler. The air carried that expensive, overfiltered chill hospitals seemed to think passed for peace. The sounds were different up here too. Softer. More intimate. Monitors kept watch in low electronic murmurs while oxygen hissed somewhere nearby and rubber soles whispered along the hall.

I stood outside his room longer than I should have.

Then I went in.

Jackson looked wrong in a hospital bed.

The thought came blunt and useless, but painfully true. He had always been too alive for stillness. Even as a boy, he carried a restless energy inside him, some part of him constantly prepared to move before anyone else realized movement was necessary. He belonged beneath open skies, behind the wheel of his battered truck, or tearing across town with Matty beside him and trouble somewhere ahead.

He had never belonged in a silent room beneath white sheets while machines breathed for him.

Seeing him laid out under the hospital lights, tape against his skin and tubing at his mouth, felt like looking at something the world had no right to touch that way.

Someone had cleaned his face. The blood was gone, which should have made it easier to look at him.

Instead, I could see him too clearly.

Age had changed him. Of course it had. His face was leaner than the one I remembered, harder around the mouth, with faint lines beside his eyes that hadn’t existed when he left. His hair was shorter now. The years sat in the roughness of his skin and the hard shape his life had carved from him, but Jackson was still there beneath it.

The same dark brows.

The same stubborn jaw.