Her breath caught. But she didn’t pull away.
“I thought—” My voice broke, and I tightened my grip on her without meaning to, fingers curling into the fabric at her back. “I thought I wasn’t going to make it to you.”
Her hands slid down, framing my face now, thumbs brushing under my eyes, along my jaw, like were was making sure I was real.
“You did,” she said softly.
My laugh came out wrong. “Yeah,” I muttered. “Missing a piece.”
“You’re still here.” Her hand tightened slightly. “You are here, and you are safe, and you arewhole, Des.”
“I lost my leg.” It came out flat. There was no fight to the words — was there any fight left in me?
“I know,” she said softly, moving to rake her fingers through my hair. Her touch soothed me and kept mehere.
“I can’t even—” I exhaled sharply, looking away from her for the first time. “I can’t even stand up in the middle of the night without thinking. Every step is—” I shook my head. “Wrong.”
Her hand slid down, covering one of mine, where it rested against my thigh. “Not wrong,” she breathed. “Just different. New.”
I huffed a breath, brow furrowing. “That’s a nice way to say it.”
“It’s therightway to say it.” But her expression shifted. And it wasn’t pity. The way her face twisted… it was so much worse.
Guilt.
“You shouldn’t have been bringing me anything,” she said quietly. The words were so soft I almost missed them.
I stilled under her touch. “What?”
“The coffee,” she said, her voice tightening just slightly. “You were on your night off. You shouldn’t have been out. There were still patches of ice. You should have?—”
“Hey, wait.” My hands came up to her wrists, stopping her before she could spiral any further. “No.” Her eyes dropped anyway. “This didn’t happen because of you.”
“You were coming to me.”
“I was coming toseeyou,” I corrected, softer now. “Because I wanted to. Because I had just spent four straight days with you and I was going crazy without you by my side, kid.”
Her throat moved as she swallowed. “That’s not the same thing.”
“It is to me.” She shook her head slightly, like she didn’t believe it, like shecouldn’tlet herself believe it.
I tightened my hold on her, pulling her closer until there was no space left between us, until she had no choice but to look at me again. “I lost my leg because a bus slid off the road,” I said, steady now, both of us. “Not because you would have liked coffee.”
Her eyes flickered. “Oh my god, the burns.” I watched, in real time, as she processed parts of that night I would probably never remember. “You came in with superficial burns on your neck and arm.”
“I don’t remember?—”
“They were mostly superficial… I didn’t even try to?—”
“You focused on the biggest problem. You and the teamsavedme.” I exhaled slowly and rested my forehead against hers again, my grip loosening just enough to be gentle instead of desperate.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I could hear the tears thickening in her voice, could hear her own pain bubbling up.
“About the coffee?”
She nodded, wrestling her wrist from my grasp to quickly wipe the tear tracks from her cheeks.
“Seemed inconsequential after… everything.” I tugged her hand closer to me, pressing a kiss to the heel of her hand.
