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I’d never heard of full-on hallucinations being a part of dying—it was always the tunnel leading into the light and your life flashing before your eyes, but I definitely didn’t have any life that involved a tiger like three inches from my face.
I really didn’t have any experience of the extremely rough, wet, and hot tongue of said tiger slathering all over the side of my face.
Which could only mean—
“T—Tony?”
A deep rumbled grunting hum answered me, and I got another half-face tongue-bath.
“Stp—pit.”
Another.
I didn’t have the strength to lift my hands to stop him, and I let my eyes close.
Another deep roar, cursing, and agitated barking made me open my eyes again.
Raj—because of fucking course it was Rajesh Parikh, who the fuck else was it going to be?—turned his gigantic, fluffy orange-white-and-black head to look in the direction of the commotion.
I wondered who was doing the roaring, since my tiger-friend wasn’t it.
I did have a pretty good idea who the barking was, though, and I’d never felt so goddamn happy in my fucking life.
I didn’t stay conscious long enough to see him.
24
I wokeup and really wished I hadn’t for a good solid thirty seconds. Everything fucking hurt. My ribcage felt like—well, like some two-hundred-fifty-pound fucking bruiser had been using it as a goddamn soccer ball. My hands were scraped to fucking hell from the gravel. And my face—well, let’s just say that I’m not as pretty as I used to be.
Point is, my return to consciousness was deeply unpleasant, and I very much wanted to go back to the nice blackness that didn’t hurt so fucking much.
Until I heard Taavi’s voice.
“Val?”
He sounded worried, desperate, and upset. And I just couldn’t let that stand.
So I forced the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut to open, blinking blearily in the harsh light from—well, in the light, anyway. The overheads were off, and it was raining outside, so the light in the room was actually astonishingly dim. It was just that I hadn’t had my eyes open in a while, and it made my head feel like it had an icepick driven in it somewhere around my temple.
I grunted. I’d meant to say hi or hello or some sort of greeting that resembled speech, but a grunt was all I managed to get out.
It was enough to light up Taavi’s angular face, and that alone made the pain of waking up totally worth it.
He smiled at me, although his eyes were shiny and wet, and he rubbed at the corner of one of them with his un-braced hand. “Hi,” he whispered.
I made another sound that I hoped at least sounded like it was trying to be friendly.
A warm hand settled gently on my thigh, a spot that wasn’t quite as battered as the rest of me. I honestly wouldn’t have given a fuck if it had been—I loved that Taavi was touching me, especially since I’d gotten pretty damn close to not ever being able to feel him touch me ever again.
I swallowed a couple times, then finally managed to form words. “Hi back.”
This time he let the tears track down his cheeks without wiping them away. “You absoluteborrico. What the fuck were you thinking?”
I didn’t know what aborricowas, but I was fairly sure it wasn’t a compliment. He also wasn’t wrong, assuming he was calling me a dumbass. What I did was actually really fucking stupid, especially in hindsight.
“Sorry,” I rasped.
“I don’t want you to be sorry, Val. I want to know why you did it!”
