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“Why are you in here?” I questioned in a quiet, hoarse whisper. My mouth was dry, and my eyes were crusty. It felt like I’d barely gotten any sleep at all.
“You were crying out in your sleep,” Lake said. His voice was low, gravelly, as if he drifted in and out in that chair all night. Knowing Lake, he probably did. “Drew came in here a few times, but you didn’t settle until I was in here. I held your hand for a while, but then I moved over here. I was afraid you’d be upset when you woke up.” He looked at me with tired eyes. The urge to reach for him was strong but I didn’t move a muscle.
At that moment, the distance between us suddenly felt very vast, like we’d never be able to cross it. I’d stayed for him. I meant what I said, but I wondered if it was useless, if we had already done too much damage to move past it.
I just wanted to scent him. To confirm what he and Everett already thought they knew. Yet, even as I had the thought, I knew it was true. Maybe I’d always known it in some way. We’d always been close. The three of us could have been a pack had they let me know.
My mother had always harped on and on about how choosing your mate versus having a scent match was setting myself up for failure. She chose my father, and look where that ended up – in a nasty divorce, and with my father barely speaking more than a few words to me over the years.
He was not included in my support network whatsoever. Maybe he never had been.
Did he always resent me?
At this point, he probably had a scent match somewhere, making a new family, replacing us all. I waited for that familiar ache, but it never came. Sometime in the past year, I had accepted that inevitability. It was easier to let go of things and now none of that seemed to matter.
“I don’t know what to do to fix this,” Lake said.
Not wanting him to keep freaking out, I sat up in my bed, propping myself against a headboard and tucking my knees in front of me, curling my arms around them as if it could hold me together during this conversation.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
His turquoise eyes dimmed in the morning light, and I hated that I was the one putting more shadows there, but I couldn’t take the blame. Not this time. This was on both of us.
“Everett kept a lot from you, Shaye. He was sick a lot longer than he let on. We just never knew how bad it was. He didn’t want to worry you before they had answers, and then by the time they found them, it was too fucking late.”
He sounded so cynical. His lips were turned down at the corner as he thought over how to continue and his fingers toyed with a tear in the fabric of the chair he was fidgeting in.
“Why did you start the blockers?”
“I heard him talking to Dad one night about how he was so happy that he had you. That he was thankful you found each other early in life and he got all those years with you. I heard him talking about how that’s the one thing that kept him getting up every day – the fact that you were mates. And I… I couldn’t find it in me to break that bubble between you two.”
“Even before you got the diagnosis?” I questioned. “It wasn’t an issue then. Was I not worth telling?”
That wasn’t fair to say to him, but I needed to hear his answer. I needed to know that he did it for Everett and not because he didn’t want me.
“No, Shaye,” he said, his voice slightly panicked. He couldn’t keep the distance anymore and moved until he was next to me on the bed, taking my hand in his.
I tensed at first but forced myself not to recoil from the touch. After a few beats, I welcomed the warmth he was providing.
“You’ve always been important to me, Shaye, and I’ve always loved you. I just couldn’t deny him what little time he had with just the two of you. I didn’t want you to resent me for taking the focus away from him. Before that, there just wasn’t a time our schedules lined up and we were both home to reveal it. Time was against us from the start.”
“I wouldn’t have hated you,” I said.
There was so much more I should have said but I hadn’t worked through my own emotions enough to find the right words. I’d avoided them for so long, let myself be numb to survive, and now I was even more of a mess for it.
My stomach rolled with nausea, and I tightened my hold around my knees with the one arm that I had free, the other still tucked tightly in his hand.
“What if I don’t know how to live anymore?” I finally put a voice to my worries. It was merely a whisper, but he heard me all the same, his fingers running soothingly over my palm.
I couldn’t look at him and he didn’t force me to.
“We’ll figure it out together, Shaye. You’re not alone anymore. I’m not going to let you be. I never should have let you be from the beginning.”
“You tried,” I reminded him. “I shut you out. My heart was shattered. I didn’t know how to breathe most days. If I let you in, if I admitted that I had more to live for, then I don’t think I would have made it this far. The grief would have consumed me until there was nothing left.”
“Was this way any better?” he asked. He’d never been one to sugarcoat his words. So far, he’d been gentle but this was reminiscent of the Lake I knew. “Tell me there’s some of you left in there, Shaye. I haven’t seen you smile yet. Not one that reached your eyes.”
“I could say the same about you.” I let out a humorless laugh. “Are you really any better off than I am right now?”
