Page 283 of Breathe Like Hell

I had no idea what to say.

It almost freaked me out, in a way, because what if my mom had never gone to the post office that day? Or Micah hadn’t been magically standing behind her? Or I hadn’t been screaming my head off while everyone did nothing but watch? There were a million ways this might’ve never happened.

But it did happen.

Micah was the one to mark me as an infant, and then the one to save my life as an adult, transforming me into the angel I was now.

“What are the odds of that?” I questioned, almost incredulously.

The words left my mouth before I realized they didn’t quite fit the situation. Odds belonged to coincidence. This didn’t feel like coincidence.

Micah just stared at me, his eyes arctic and infinite.

I felt him in my bones.

Neither of us spoke in that moment, but we were thinking the same thing.

It wasn’t about the hypothetical odds of two unlikely things happening to me. The answer wasn’t some mathematical probability I could solve. It was something that had been weaving itself through my life long before I’d ever actually known Micah.

I was trying to measure our lives like separate lines that had happened to cross.

But they were never separate.

They’d been threaded together all along.

“Should I tell Mason?” I dared to whisper.

“I’ll tell him.”

The gravity of this continued to magnify, my whole understanding of the world and my own life shifting while I sat on Micah’s roof.

Micah created me. He kept Mason safe.

For the two decades of his absence, Mason had been kept alive by Micah’s inadvertent touch, by me.

Micah had been loving Mason through me for my entire life, though none of us knew it. We’d been walking toward each other from the very beginning. A forest, beckoning. A tide, reaching. Shark teeth on the beach and the flick of a white tail disappearing into shadow. Every single part of my life had been touched by this.

“I love you,” I said, quiet tears slipping down my face. “I can’t believe you’ve been with me for so long.”

“I wish I actually was with you earlier. More than just like this,” Micah responded, his face solemn. His eyebrows were furrowed and his lips set in a line.

“Oh. It’s okay,” I whispered.

“It’s not okay. Every day I think about it, and I know I’ll think about it even more now. I should’ve found you earlier, saved you from the hell you went through.”

“Well, you’d have a few more moral issues to overcome if that was the case.” I gave a short, dry laugh, wiping my tears a bit. “Fourteen is not legal.”

“I wouldn’t have fucked you, Dakota. I just wish I could’ve helped you. It’s really hard to know that I’ve been here all this time—that I marked you as an infant—and I still didn’t protect you at all during your childhood.”

“You know there’s no possible way you could’ve known that, right?”

“My brain is irrational when it comes to you. Completely irrational.” He grabbed me around the waist, pulling me back onto his lap, nuzzling his face against the side of my throat, his lips grazing my pulse.

I smiled. “Well, you have me now. And I actually blocked Anthony’s number this past summer, so there’s that.”

“You did?”

“He sent me a guilt-tripping text about not going to his wedding, and that was my final straw. I became a really terrible person after you died, you know. Pretty much anything could piss me off or send me over the edge. It was like my tolerance for any sort of hardship had decreased to zero.”