Page 75 of What Should Have Been Ours

I can still feel him lingering on my skin, the warmth of his body pressed against mine. I just want to stay in moments like these forever, save them in my memories for the hard days.

Lying here against his bare chest, my head resting where I can feel the steady rise and fall of his breathing, listening to the slow rhythm of his heart, I take it all in. His fingers move through my hair slowly, sending goosebumps down my spine every time he drags his fingertips along my scalp.

I wish I could capture this feeling and lock it away forever. Somewhere, the world can never taint.

I can’t help but slip back into all the good memories we’ve made together and how they all laid the foundation for us to end up right here.

“You’re thinking too hard again,” Cam murmurs, his voice still laced with hints of exhaustion, of contentment.

I smile against his skin. “Am I that obvious?”

He chuckles, pressing a kiss to the top of my head. “To me? Always.”

I exhale, letting my body melt deeper into his. “Just…reminiscing on things…feeling a lot of things.”

His hand stills for a second before he resumes threading his fingers through my hair. “Good memories or bad ones?”

I hesitate. “Both maybe? Mostly the good ones, though.”

I can feel his nod against the pillow like he understands without me having to explain.

“Do you ever think about it all?” I ask quietly.

He exhales, his chest rising and falling beneath me. “All the time.”

I let my fingers trace along his ribs as I look up at him. “What’s your favorite memory from back then?”

He’s quiet for a second, like he has to sift through everything. The good, the bad, the unbearable…the after. Those are the hardest memories for me, not the ones with him, but the ones without him.

“I think it’ll probably always be all the nights we snuck out onto the roof,” he says. “The ones where we could be alone, away from it all. When it was just us. No nurses, no treatments, no reminders of how sick we were. Just the stars we pretended we could see and our stupid conversations about what we wanted to do when we got out of there.”

I smile. “We had some big dreams, didn’t we?”

“We did.” He looks down at me, smirking. “Or…the night on the beach, during the bonfire.”

The smile on my face hurts, and I can feel myself blushing. “Of course you’d add that one.”

He lets out a soft laugh, pressing a kiss to the top of my head. “What about you? What’s yours?”

I bite my lip, thinking. There are so many moments, so many memories of us just trying to make the best of what we had.

But one stands out the most.

“The night before your last round of chemo before leaving,” I say softly. “When you were so sick that you could barely keep your eyes open, and I stayed in your room all night, cuddled up next to you while the nurses covered for us.”

His fingers continue to stroke my hair. “I remember that,” he murmurs. “I remember waking up, and you were still there. You stayed the whole night in my bed.”

I nod against his chest. “I couldn’t leave you.”

He tilts my chin up gently, forcing me to look at him. There’s something raw behind his eyes, this unspoken gratitude that we had each other. “I wouldn’t have made it through any of it without you,” he says quietly. “I think a part of me knew that even then.”

My throat tightens. “We both fought hard,” I whisper. “There were so many days I didn’t think I’d make it.”

His hand moves to cup my cheek, his thumb stroking gently along my skin. “But you did.”

I nod, leaning into his touch. “We did.”

For a moment, neither of us speaks. There’s nothing to say, not really. We both know what we went through. We both know what it took to get here.