The way I held onto all of it and dissected it, like if I just understood it well enough it would stop hurting.
It never stopped hurting.
I was the guy everyone could tell was drowning but no one wanted to risk getting wet for.
And then I think about this room.
About a single bed and a broken protein bar and delivery food and a man who doesn't say much ever pressing his lips to the top of my head in the dark because I needed someone to and he decided that was going to be him. About how different those two things feel in my chest.
About how one of them broke me for years and this one just — doesn't.
This one feels like being alive.
I fall asleep thinking about that.
About Jamie Nash, of all people.
About a kid somewhere who grew up being told he was wrong for everything he was. Who taught himself to need nothing and want nothing and feel nothing because feeling things gotyou hurt. Thinking about how that kid became this man. This man who doesn't know how to say anything soft. Who presses his lips to your hair in the dark when he thinks you're almost asleep. Who held on when every version of himself was screaming to run.
About how I came to Harlow with nothing left. Walls up. Rules in place. Never again. Never that close to anyone ever again. About how completely, catastrophically, entirely I have dismantled every single one of those rules.
About how I would do it all again.
Every bad decision. Every moment of it.
If it meant ending up here.
In this small bed.
With him.
I think I would have liked him back then too.
Chapter 42
Jamie
I wake up before my alarm.
That's not unusual. What is unusual is that I don't immediately reach for my phone. Don't run the day in my head. Don't run through what needs doing before six AM. I just lie there.
Because Rhys Callahan is asleep on my chest.
His hair is everywhere, even in my mouth. His own mouth slightly open. He's taken most of the duvet and most of the bed and has one arm thrown across my stomach like he owns it, and I don't move for a long time.
I've been awake for forty-three minutes.
I know because I checked.
I haven't moved once.
Not because I'm tired.
Not because I'm comfortable.
Because the second I move, this ends.
I don't want it to end.
