"You're going to be alone again." Barely a breath now. "Because of me. I'm so goddamn sorry."
The hall tilts — me or the room or the world, and Cole's the fixed point, bleeding out on cheap carpet twenty miles east of a town that never deserved either of us. His hand is still on my wrist. His eyes are still on mine, and what's in them isn't a question. It's an answer — the one that's been there since two boys in a twin bed neither of them brave enough to cross the gap, and the gap is closed now, and it closed on a bullet, and I cannot let that be the last word.
The words have been stacked behind my teeth for twenty years. Since the round through my shoulder. Sincethe night I came back and he opened that door and looked at me like I was the best and worst thing that ever walked up his steps. They've waited so long that saying them should be the hardest thing I've ever done, and instead it's the easiest, because there's no version of this where I let him go into the dark thinking he loved alone.
It cracks on the first syllable and doesn't recover.
"I love you too."
His eyes hold mine. The grip on my wrist eases — not gone, eased, the difference between a man letting go and a man finally setting something down. His mouth moves. No sound comes, but I read it, because I've been reading him my whole life:yeah.Like he knew. Like he's known all along and only needed it out loud once before the lights went low.
"Stay with me." I've got both hands on the wound and my forehead nearly to his. "You said it, so you don't get to leave. That's the rule. You said it first, so you stay."
His eyes flutter. His chest still rises — shallow, but it rises. The blood still comes, but his heart still drives it, and a heart that's still driving is a heart still in the game.
Then Mick's voice, sharp over the ringing: "Sirens." He doesn't turn from the window. "Somebody's coming. Hold." He fires again, and under the noise I catch it too — far off, climbing, more than one of them. State police, it has to be. Wiseman came through after all. Late — later than I'd have bet thirty seconds ago, late enough that somewhere in the last minute I'd quit believing he was coming at all — but coming, and the only question left in the world is whether late and too late turn out to be the same thing this morning.
Out in the lot the firing falters, then stops.Engines. Doors. New voices, sharp and stacked with authority, the word police and the word down and the word now, and the standoff behind the cruiser breaks apart into shouting and surrender, the particular collapse of men who held a town for years discovering, all at once, that the rules have arrived from somewhere they couldn't buy.
I don't look up. I keep my hands on Cole and my eyes on his face and the words going out of me low and steady, over and over, the ones I waited twenty years to say and now can't stop saying, as if the saying itself is pressure, as if it could close a wound, as if love spoken late enough and loud enough could do the one thing it has never once been able to do.
"Stay. Stay. I've got you. Stay."
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Cole
The first thing I register is the sound. A fluorescent tube buzzing overhead with the flat note of a light that's been doing the same job too many years and started to resent it. Then the smell — antiseptic, industrial, the chemical bite hospitals pump through their vents to sell you on cleanliness, which isn't the same as clean, and the difference lives in your sinuses for days. Then the drip. Steady. Mechanical. A rhythm so regular it might as well be counting seconds, and seconds are what I've got, apparently, because I'm awake and the ceiling above me is the beige of a room painted once in 1997 and regretting the color ever since.
My mouth tastes like someone shook a bag of pennies into a bottle and made me drink it. My tongue feels twice its size and half as useful. I try to swallow. It makes it halfway down and stalls, like my throat's decided hydration is a negotiation and it's still reviewing the terms.
Then the pain. Not the sharp, electric kind — the dull,stitched-up kind. A wall of it along my left side, below the ribs to somewhere above the hip, a map my brain draws in careful detail because my brain has always been an asshole about cataloguing damage. Through-and-through. Entry and exit, both stitched, both pulling when I breathe, which I'm doing, apparently, my chest rising and falling at a rate that feels too deliberate, like my lungs are being run by someone who read the manual and skipped the diagrams.
I blink. The ceiling steadies. To my left a machine beeps at intervals, monitoring my heart or counting down to something I'd rather not think about, and the ambiguity is its own small dread, so I let it go.
I turn my head. Slow. The muscles in my neck feel disconnected and put back by someone in a hurry. The room comes in pieces — pale walls, blinds drawn, a sink with a paper-towel dispenser bolted above it, the spartan logic of a space built for recovery, not comfort. Then the chair.
Vinyl. Beige, or it was before something stained the left armrest, coffee or blood, and at this point the difference is academic. Pulled flush to the bed, close enough that the armrest touches the mattress, close enough that the man folded into it could reach me without trying.
Trevor.
Head tipped back against the wall, a crumpled jacket bunched under his skull for a pillow. Eyes closed. Mouth slightly open. One hand rests on the mattress near my hip, palm up, fingers loose — a man who fell asleep mid-reach and let his body call it close enough. His knuckles are scraped raw, the skin split across the ridges, dark with bloodnobody cleaned, because cleaning wasn't the priority. Sitting in this chair and not leaving was the priority, and the proof of it is written across his hands too plainly to misread.
He never left.
I stare at him. Something in my chest shifts — a settling, the weight of a thing I've hauled too long finally finding a place to set down, and the setting-down hurts almost as much as the hauling did. His face is unguarded in sleep the way it never is awake. The bruise along his jaw has faded toward a sick yellow-green at the edges. The butterfly strip over his eyebrow is gone, replaced by a line of stitches neat enough that whoever did them took pride in the work — more than I can say for most things in this county. The stubble's gone past stubble without reaching beard, the look of a man too busy staying alive to find a razor, which is accurate.
I can't stop looking. The light buzzes. The machine beeps. Down the hall a cart rattles past, wheels on linoleum, institutional motion with its own rhythm that doesn't care whether I'm awake to hear it.
Then Trevor jolts.
Not the civilian jolt — the soldier one. One second under, the next eyes open and scanning, body half-upright before his brain's logged the change. His hand closes on the mattress. His eyes find mine. Hold. A man running damage assessment in real time, reading my face the way he reads ground.
He straightens. Drags a hand down his face, fingertips rasping over stubble. His eyes are bloodshot, both of them, a man running on reserves that aren't what they werewhenever yesterday was, because time's become something I'm no longer qualified to measure.
"Hey." Rough. Flat. The voice of a man who's been awake too many hours straight and quit bothering with volume.
"Hey." Mine comes out worse. Scraped. Vocal cords that haven't run in however long I've been under, and the under was apparently long, because my throat feels lined with felt that's been set alight and put out with something that left a residue.
