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A dark, formless sky that hadn’t quite threatened rain had hovered over Red Falls all day. And Cole, the hood of his lucky hoodie up, his shoulders hunched, his head hanging, looked so cold all Mira wanted to do was get him into her arms and warm him up. But when she opened the door, when he looked up at her with gaunt cheeks and sunken eyes, she stumbled back, letting him inside.
“Are you okay?” she asked, following him toward the stairs before he turned back to face her. “Cole, are you—”
“No.” He pushed his hood down. “I am not okay.”
“Can I get you something? A coffee? Water? Do you want to sit?”
“I should go—”
“Go? You just got here.”
“—back to Seattle.”
Her heart stopped. Time stopped. “W-what do you mean?”
“Madigan’s here. He”—his voice broke, and a knife sank into her side—“got the kid back. So I should go.”
“When?” she asked, grasping at her throat, trying to keep it from closing up entirely.
“Now.”
“Now?” The knife twisted. She wasn’t ready. They were supposed to have another week.
“Mira, you wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen.” He shook his head, his eyes shot through with tiny red lines like the veins in her leaves. “The way he looked…” He brought his fist to his mouth, his eyes misting.
“Can you sit?” she asked, because if he didn’t sit, if he kept standing there like a man waiting for a feather to take him down, it was going to break her. “Please, let me take care of you. Let me get you something to—”
“I’ve been thinking, thinking, thinking,” he said, staring at his feet, maybe at nothing. “I’ve been trying to figure it all out, put all the pieces together, figure out how we got here.” She wasn’t sure he was talking to her anymore. Not until he met her stare. “And no matter how much I try to wrap my brain around it, around us. I can’t make it work.”
“Us?” She reached out, grabbing the counter so she didn’t fall through the floor. Was this it? Was this how they ended? He thought it couldn’t work just when she’d finally started to believe it could.
“Life is so short,” he said, taking a step toward her. “So fragile. We take so much for granted. We think we’ll have all this time, so we wait and wait and wait. But we don’t have time. The only thing we have is right now, and even that’s gone before we know it.”
He wasn’t making sense. He was distraught and not thinking clearly. She needed to talk him down, talk him into giving them a chance. But first, she needed him to sit. “When’s the last time you slept?” she asked. “Or ate?”
“I don’t think I realized how lonely I was, howaloneI was”—he took another step toward her, but he was still so far away—“until I met you.”
“Then why are you leaving?” she asked, her skin shrinking around her bones until she could barely breathe.
“I don’t want to leave, Mira. I don’t want to be away from you for a second longer than I have to. I don’t want to lose you.”
She couldn’t stand it anymore, the distance between them, the space pushing them apart. Willing her body to move, she crossed the room, taking his face in her hands and lifting his head when it dropped to his chest, her eyes burning when his cold hands rose to cover hers. “I don’t want to lose you either,” she told him, holding his head steady, making him focus on her. “Please don’t leave yet. Stay here. Stay with me for a few more—”
“You don’t understand,” he said fiercely, his fingers curling around hers, his focus suddenly sharp as glass. “I don’t want to leave you. Ever. I want to be with you. I want to be here, with you. Always.”
Always?She slid her hands out of his, lowering them to her sides.“What?”
“I want to fall asleep with you, wake up next to you.”
She stepped back. “Cole, this is—”
Every step she took away from him, he took another toward her. “I want to see you every day, hold you, touch you, run my fingers through your hair. I want to have breakfast with you every morning and make you dinner every night. I want to cuddle with you in our comfy clothes on Sundays. I want to stand in line for you at the grocery store so you don’t have to have a hot flash. I want to exist in your world, and not just over the phone.”
There was something wrong with her heart. It hurt too much, each beat more painful than the last. “Maybe we should…slow down for a second.”
“I don’t want to slow down.” He took another step, so close now she smelled the sea. “I don’t want to wait. I want to be here, in Red Falls—”
“Cole, stop.”
