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“Me too,” she whispered.
His fingers kept moving as they lay there, up to her shoulders, through her hair, down to the small of her back. Eventually he started moving his fingertips back and forth in a light scratching motion, making her tingle just a little.
She said, “How do you do it, Nick?”
“Do what?” he asked.
“How do you hold everything together?” she murmured drowsily. “Not with the … I’m not just talking about your legs.”
“It’s okay. We can talk about my legs.”
“You’re alwaysyou, I mean. Doesn’t matter if the world’s going your way or not. You know who you are and what you’re going to do.”
“I just make choices,” he said. “They’re not always the best ones.”
“You make choices and people love you. I make choices and things get worse.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is.” Tears filled her eyes and strained her voice. “You don’t know.”
“Hey.” He pressed his lips to her forehead. “I know you chose to meet me.”
She shook her head. “Stop it. I insulted you. You have so much to deal with every day, and I was an idiot.”
“Hayley,” he said gently, “you saw me.”
Hayley lifted her head to look at him, and he smiled at her.
“Remember what you said?” he asked. “You saw my heart in my eyes. You saw something nobody else did, something I didn’t even know was there, and you were so happy that night that you had to make me happy too. I’ve never seen anyone do that for a stranger. You didn’t even know about the walker.”
Even in the dark, she could swear she saw his eyes sparkle.
“Why can’t I ever get it right?” she whispered.
“Did you see the picture of the beach on the wall by the bedroom door?”
“Yeah.” She remembered a sandy path through brush, a glimpse of the ocean under the clouds, the colors in a gorgeous sky.
“My mom took that on vacation. The first time I was there, I was eight, and that path was impossible. The walker wheels sunk into the sand. Dad said he’d carry me, but I wanted to walk it. Insisted on it.” He chuckled. “I don’t even remember why now.”
“So you made it?”
“I did, and it was awful, and I was fine with Dad carrying me after that. Turns out they make a special wheelchair for the sand, but we didn’t know.”
“See? You’re so much stronger than me.”
“Hang on,” he said playfully. “Don’t you want to know why I put that picture there?”
She smiled. “Iguessso.”
“If I look at the path,” he said, “I think about all of the hard work I have to put myself through for something you could do as easily as breathing. But if I look past the path, there’s a glimpse of this amazing, endless ocean. If I look up, I can see the sky and it takes my breath away. I can always choose where to look. I don’t always look in the right place, but there’s always beauty and there’s always pain, and it’s always up to me.”
“Okay.” She tried not to sound disappointed. “Okay, sure. Make better choices.”
“No,” he said gently. “I put that picture there because sometimes the path’s going to be hard no matter what I do.”
“Because stupid people make things hard for you.”
