Page 32 of What We Become

I know what she means.

“Yeah. Even after last night. It scared the shit out of me, Sage. Every old reason I had for keeping my distance came back. For a while, I believed loving you had put you in that wall.”

“Stephen put me in the wall.”

“I know.”

Not but. Not if. Not because of me.

Stephen did this.

“I didn’t know it last night,” I admit. “But I do now. Distance didn’t keep you safe before. It won’t keep you safe now. It only keeps us apart.”

“What happens when you get scared again?”

“I tell you.”

Her brows lift.

“I tell you I’m scared,” I say. “Then I let you decide what you want to do with that information. I don’t make the decision for both of us.”

“Look at you, learning boundaries.”

“Don’t sound so surprised.”

“I’m incredibly surprised.”

I finish towel drying her hair and kneel in front of her to pat dry her legs.

“I really thought I was dead last night.” She says it so quietly I almost miss it under the drip of the shower.

I keep drying her legs, slow passes of the towel over skin mapped with burns, and let her take the silence she needs.

“You know what I thought about?” she says. “In there. At the end.”

“What?”

“You. All of you.” Her voice is wreckage, but there’s something underneath it holding the shape. “I thought about the house. The pit. I thought about kids, Eli. I decided I want five. Minimum. One with each of you, and I was sitting in a wall full of foam doing family planning like a lunatic.”

The towel stops moving.

“Five,” I repeat.

“In this economy,” she says, and laughs, and the laugh turns into a cough that bends her forward. I’m up before it peaks, hand flat between her shoulder blades, feeling the rattle work through her. It passes. She sags back against the seat, breath sawing in and out.

“Oxygen,” I say.

“Don’t you dare.”

“Sage.”

“I’m fine, it’s just a cough, we were having a moment⁠—”

“We’re still having the moment. The moment travels.” I wrap the towel tighter around her shoulders and lift her. She doesn’t argue, which tells me more than the cough did. Her arm loops my neck, and her face presses into the hollow of my throat, and I carry her back into the room with her wet hair soaking through my shirt.

I settle her on the bed and fit the oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. She wrinkles her face at it like it personally offended her, but she lets me.

“Happy?” she mutters.