CHAPTER 2 FOR BETTERWORSE #2
Devlin noted the tense look on Dane’s face. He looked at Cole. “Gabe wants to see you,” he said softly.
Cole sniffed and cleared his throat, then rose slowly as if trying to stand beneath a great weight. He silently entered the hospital room.
“What’s going on?” Devlin asked Dane. “What did you mean the deputy might not be the friend Cole thinks he is?”
“Right now, it’s more of a hunch,” Dane said. “Something just feels off with him. But Clint is checking into something. We’ll know more when he gets back to us.”
“What if he doesn’t get back to us before Gabe leaves? Do we let him go with the deputy? Is that wise?”
“I don’t think so,” Dane said. “But ultimately, it’s up to Gabe.”
“Does he know how you feel about the deputy?”
“Not yet.”
“Does Cole know?”
Dane shook his head. “He’s a mess. I’m not sure he can handle much more.”
Devlin sighed. “I need to grab some smocks for Gabe to wear. The clothes he was wearing when they brought him in were soiled with his blood and grime from the alley.”
“All right,” Dane whispered.
Devlin hesitated, rooted in place. “Are we going to win this one?” He despised the fear and doubt in his words, in his voice, and the implication that they might not get their loved ones back.
“Yes,” Dane replied with conviction, despite the tears in his eyes. “We can’t stop believing that. If we do… he wins.”
“At least, lie down until Devlin returns,” Cole whispered as he hesitantly touched Gabe’s arm, directing him toward the bed.
Gabe started to resist, then relented instead and lay down on the bed.
His eyes drooped with the fatigue of surgery, but he didn’t close them.
Cole’s throat strained as hot tears formed.
He should be resting… healing… regaining his strength.
Guilt consumed Cole; Gabe wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for him.
“Don’t…” Gabe mumbled, his tired eyes—a vibrant baby blue even in his weariness—rested on Cole.
Moving closer, Cole stared down at him, a wall of tears blurring Gabe’s handsome face. “It’s my fault,” he said thickly. “All of it… everything that’s happening…” His throat worked. “You.”
Gabe took his hand and squeezed. “No, it isn’t.”
“After all this…” Cole’s chin trembled, and he clung to Gabe’s hand for dear life. “… if we make it out… how can you still…”
“What?”
Cole blinked, and warm tears rolled down his face. “How can you still… want me… knowing what I am?”
Gabe gripped his hand almost painfully, a hardness creeping into his face. “What you are is my husband— the man I fucking love. None of this bullshit is going to change that. Understand?”
“Yeah,” Cole whispered with a tremor, the fear still evident in his voice.
Gabe drew him down into a kiss, then cupped his face. “For better or worse, baby,” he murmured against Cole’s mouth. “I fucking meant it.”
Cole’s hand trembled as he reached up to press his palm against Gabe’s cheek, a desperate pressure like he could anchor Gabe to the earth if he just clung tight enough. “For better or worse,” he repeated, voice thinner than it had ever sounded. “Even if it gets really, really fucking worse.”
Gabe let out a half-laugh, half-sob—then pulled Cole into an ache-inducing embrace, every muscle straining to keep them bonded as one tangled, fused thing.
Cole pressed his face into Gabe’s neck, inhaling the scent of hospital antiseptic, sweat, and the metallic tang under Gabe’s skin.
The smell transported him back to the old farmhouse, to distant memories of blood, bleach, and guilt.
He squeezed his eyes tighter. “If anything happens to you…”
“It won’t,” Gabe cut in. “Nothing is going to happen to me. You know how fucking stubborn I am.”
Gabe’s words were both a lifeline and a shackle.
Cole clung to him, but the scent rising from Gabe’s skin—clean sweat and the faint blood smell from his wound—pulled him back through the years.
He was thirteen again, hands slick with blood that wasn’t his, vomiting into a cracked sink while his father’s voice echoed overhead: “There’s real responsibility in what we do.
” For a moment, the world seemed to fold in on itself, and Cole saw the hospital room as if from a vast, impossible distance—himself crumpled in Gabe’s arms, a pale ghost inhabited only by old memories.
He yearned to crawl out of his skin and leave it behind, a molted shell that could no longer infect the people he loved.
He pressed his nose into Gabe’s neck, but the comfort he sought curdled into something else entirely—a memory, sharp and vivid as broken glass.
He was kneeling on the scarred linoleum in his childhood bathroom, scrubbing his hands until they were raw and pink, and the scent wouldn’t come off no matter how deep he gouged his nails into his skin.
His father’s voice was a distant, godlike rumble behind the locked door: “Get it off you, boy, get it out, every drop.” He almost pulled away from Gabe then, not because he wanted to, but because he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving that stink on his husband, of letting the old, poisoned part of himself seep into the last thing in his life that made him feel clean.