It disturbs Bohdan, still in his suit, sitting against the wall across from my door, one knee raised with his elbow resting there, turning a worn paperback over in his hands, when he jerks his head up at the sound.
“Have you been out here all night?” I ask softly, sliding along the brocade wall to sit beside him.
“Yeah. I didn’t want—” He pauses with a sharp flinch. “Had visions of you somehow sneaking out in the middle of the night and taking one of the lifeboats to shore so you could get to the port earlier than the rest of us.” He gives me a dry grin and tosses the paperback down onto the floor beside him.
I poke at the corner of the book. “American Psycho?”
“It’s Talon’s.” Bohdan’s brows lift with the left corner of his mouth.
I snort. “Has he even read this?”
“I don’t think so.” Bohdan gives me a strained smile and drops his head against the wall. He swallows and rolls his neck, blinking bleary eyes at me, the lines tugging around them grooved deeper from a lack of sleep. “Are you okay?”
I give him a sad, tired smile. “No. Are you?”
His nostrils flare with an exhale and he shakes his head. “No.”
I reach out and try to smooth away the worry line etched between his brow.
It’s instinct, woven into the fabric of us, right alongside the running stitches that spell out the way we love each other, to want to take care of him. My worst fear came true last night, and that still didn’t change.
He stills at the contact, features softening before he speaks, voice low and rough. “What do you want, Sloan? I meant what I said. I don’t want to be without you.”
“I don’t either,” I murmur.
He raises a hand, holding it up with all the possibilities of all the things I think he would do for me if I asked. “You want me to follow you? I will. You want me to chase you? I will. You want me to move to a remote cabin in Alaska and never speak to another soul again while you live out your life? I’ll do that, too.”
“I want”—I close my eyes, take a measured inhale and try so hard to be brave—“to get off this ship. I want to move home. I want to go back to therapy. And for once in my entire life, I want to feel like enough for myself.”
“I want that for you, too. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.” He smiles, sad and quiet, knocking his head against the wall once before trying to toss me a grin. “I should probably increase my sessions with my psychiatrist. Add communication to the agenda.”
I smile back, but my eyes start to burn. “Bohdan Novotnak, soon-to-be expert communicator.”
“I’m sorry for what I did to us.” There’s a fissure in his voice like that trench between us, and he palms his jaw.
“It wasn’t you.” I reach out, fingers trailing gently across his forehead to rest against the raised edge of the scar. “Brains can be cruel.”
He exhales, sharp lines of his face turning rueful. “I wish I could have talked to you back then.”
“Me too.” I half laugh, wiping away a stray tear.
“Can I call you? When you get home?” He tugs on the ends of his hair, and I blink. He looks a bit like a boy again—softer, somehow. Not stoic and steadfast. A bit adrift, like me.
I hope we drift back together one day.
“I think ... I’d like you to wait. I’ll send word when I’m ready to hear from you.” I try to give him a prim nod.
“Send word, will you?” A grin cracks across his face, his eyes get lighter but all that does is show me that there are real tears, unshed and shining there. That maybe I am a person worth crying over.
“Expect a carrier pigeon,” I say through a wet laugh.
“There’s my girl.” He exhales and reaches up to cup my cheek, thumb pressing into each freckle in turn. “Jedna. Dve. Tri.”
We’re in two places at once again—then and now.
I’m eighteen and he’s twenty and he’s counting my freckles and telling me he loves me in a too-small dorm room.
I’m twenty-eight and he’s thirty and he’s counting my freckles on a cruise ship about to dock in Barcelona and I’m asking him to let me go.
