Chapter 10 #2
Hospital.
No.
I didn’t want hospital.
Hospitals asked questions. Hospitals called cops. Hospitals made men into charts and families into waiting room ghosts.
A mask came over my face.
I tried to push it away.
Failed.
“Dylan Degan,” someone said.
My name sounded wrong in a stranger’s mouth.
Then another voice.
Female.
Close.
Steady, but not steady enough.
“It’s me.”
My heart tried to climb toward it.
No.
Couldn’t be.
I forced my eyes open, but the lights broke apart. Mask. Scrubs. Hair tucked back. Eyes. Those eyes.
Destiny.
That was how I knew I was dying.
Because of course death would look like her.
Of course the last mercy life gave me would be the one woman I had spent years teaching myself to survive without.
“Beautiful, is that you?”
I didn’t know if I said it.
I thought I did.
Maybe I only wanted to.
Her face hovered over mine, masked and gloved and impossible.
“You’re at Albuquerque General,” she said. “You were shot. We’re taking you to surgery.”
Destiny Rourke in scrubs.
Destiny with a nurse’s voice.
Destiny grown into the life I had told myself I was giving her by staying gone.
Pride hurt worse than the bullet.
Look at you, Beautiful.
Look what you became.
I wanted to say that.
I wanted to tell her I knew. I knew about the school, the grades, the cat with the stupid name, the matcha, the friend from Idaho, the way she had built herself into something strong enough to stand beneath hospital lights and order death to wait its turn.
Instead, I think I said her name.
Maybe not even that.
Then the world turned into doors and metal and cold.
The OR was brighter than the desert.
Whiter too.
There was no romance in it. No softness. No place for ghosts. Just masked faces, gloved hands, instruments, machines, blood, pressure, commands. They cut me into survival while I hovered somewhere above myself, half in my body and half watching from a place men weren’t meant to see.
I heard things in pieces.
Pressure.
Suction.
More blood.
He’s dropping.
Move.
Hold.
Again.
Sometimes I thought I saw Georgia at the foot of the table, wearing her blue dress from La Jolla, ring shining under surgical lights. She looked sad, not scared. Like she already knew what I had done before I did.
I’m sorry, I tried to tell her.
She only looked past me.
Destiny stood there too.
Not in scrubs now.
In Cabo. Sun on her skin. Diamonds not yet in her ears. Hair loose in the ocean wind. She was eighteen and not eighteen. Girl and woman. Wound and healer. She held the mother-of-pearl cuff in both hands like an offering.
You gave me blank pages, she said.
I did.
You forgot to ask if I wanted you written out of them.
The monitor screamed.
Everything narrowed.
“Losing pulse.”
No.
That was my voice.
Or someone else’s.
Didn’t matter.
Hands moved fast around the body that was apparently mine. Pressure on my chest. Orders shouted. Drugs pushed. Time counted. The bright room stretched, bent, broke.
I fell backward into memory.
My old man’s garage. Grease under his nails.
Beer on his breath. The flicker of a television through a cracked door.
My mother asleep on a couch at noon, the apartment smelling like stale smoke and cheap detergent we never had enough of.
Me standing over a bathtub, washing the only pair of jeans I owned with hand soap, wringing them until my wrists hurt, then wearing them damp to school because dry clothes were for kids whose mothers remembered laundry.
I had hated that boy.
Weak.
Poor.
Embarrassed.
Always hungry.
Always angry.
I had built Dylan Degan out of every piece of him I wanted to bury.
Patch.
Bike.
Brotherhood.
Money.
Fear in other people’s eyes instead of mine.
Then Destiny had looked at me in Cabo like I could be more than that.
Not clean.
Never clean.
Just more.
I saw Callum’s face across the church table.
You’re not running because a girl made you feel human.
I saw Nate grinning with a fork in his hand.
Contractor Daddy.
I saw Georgia’s father handing me a beer beside a grill.
Everybody needs people.
I saw the ring in my palm before I gave it to Georgia. Pretty. Solid. Real. A promise to a life that would not burn.
And beneath all of it, I saw Destiny at Mandy’s grave, lips trembling beneath mine, trusting me to stop.
My heart stopped instead.
For a second, there was no sound.
No pain.
No body.
Just dark.
Then a voice reached in.
Not Georgia.
God help me.
Not Georgia.
“Dylan.”
Destiny’s voice.
Not the ER voice. Not the nurse. Something softer. Closer. Wet with fear.
“Stay with me.”
The dark pulled.
Her voice pulled harder.
“You don’t get to leave.”
I wanted to tell her I already had.
I had left her at a grave.
Left her in Cabo.
Left her on a sidewalk.
Left her so many times I had started calling abandonment protection.
The dark did not care.
It opened under me like water.
Then the pain came back.
Air.
Noise.
The monitor found a rhythm.
Weak.
Wrong.
Mine.
I drifted after that.
Time stopped behaving.
Sometimes I was in surgery. Sometimes I was on the run.
Sometimes I was at Coastal Thai with Nate, pretending noodles were a reason to be close to Malibu.
Sometimes I was in Georgia’s parents’ kitchen while her mother wrapped leftovers in foil.
Sometimes I was in Cabo under a palm tree, and Destiny was looking at me like I had a choice.
I never had a choice.
That was the truth I had spent years burying.
I chose Georgia.
I did.
I chose the ring, the clean life, the promise, the family that welcomed me without fear. I chose the future that made sense. I chose the woman who would not drag me into war with my own conscience.
But choosing Georgia had not unchosen Destiny.
It had only made me a worse man.
The darkness thinned again.
Different sounds now.
Softer.
Not OR.
Machines. Beeps. A ventilator hissing like a patient monster. The air smelled cold and sterile. My body was far away, sunk beneath drugs and pain, but something warm held my hand.
Not held.
Clung.
A thumb brushed my knuckles.
A voice whispered near me.
“You’re really bad at staying away from me.”
Destiny.
Dream.
Had to be.
I couldn’t open my eyes. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t tell her that if she was a hallucination, she had bad timing and worse mercy.
She kept talking.
Her voice moved around me like water in the dark, sometimes clear, sometimes muffled, sometimes breaking apart before I could catch the words.
“I always noticed you.”
The memory of her forehead near my hand drifted through me, though I didn’t know if it was happening or if my mind had made it up because dying men were selfish enough to invent tenderness.
“You were supposed to show up tall and annoying and alive.”
I wanted to smile.
Couldn’t.
“You arrogant, beautiful, stupid man.”
That one reached deep.
Yeah.
Fair.
Her fingers moved through my hair.
Or I dreamed they did.
My whole soul leaned toward the touch.
“I tried to move on,” she whispered. “I really did.”
No.
Don’t.
Don’t tell me that now.
Don’t tell me anything I couldn’t answer.
She talked about nursing school. Matcha. Cupcake. Concerts. Nice boys. Daniel. The man with the clean hands who had almost fit into the life I had imagined for her. I wanted to hate him again, but the drugs had taken most of my strength, and jealousy required blood I didn’t have to spare.
Then her voice changed.
Lower.
Closer.
“He saw the ugly pieces and ran,” she said. “You called even the ugly part of me pretty.”
Something inside me cracked.
I had run too.
Just in the opposite direction.
“You left, Dylan.”
There it was.
The accusation I deserved.
“You left me with blank pages and a bracelet and a nickname no one else could say without making me want to cry.”
I tried to move my fingers.
I didn’t know if they moved.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
My mouth wouldn’t work.
The machine breathed for me, indifferent to confession.
“I got the clean air,” she whispered. “I got the life. The school. The friends. The future. I got everything you thought you were giving me by staying away.”
Good, I thought.
Good.
That was the point.
“But I didn’t need you gone forever.”
The dark around me shuddered.
Her forehead rested near my hand. I felt the warmth. Or imagined it. Her tears maybe. Her breath. The impossible proof that she was not a dying dream but a woman sitting beside my bed after I had put a ring on someone else.
“I never stopped loving you,” she whispered.
If I had been alive enough, that would have killed me.
I floated there, trapped under sedation and grief, while the woman I had loved from a graveyard to a gunshot told me the truth I had spent years trying not to earn.
“I love you.”
Present tense.
Cruel tense.
Holy tense.
No.
No, Beautiful.
Don’t do that.
Don’t love me now.
Don’t love me with Georgia’s ring in the world and my blood still wet in your memory. Don’t make me the man who wakes up and ruins everyone. Don’t make me choose after I already chose wrong.
But some rotten, selfish, honest part of me curled around her words like they were the only warmth left in the universe.
Stay, she told me.
Not for me.
Then for Georgia.
Nate.
Callum.
The life I had built.
She was trying to give me back to everyone else because Destiny had always had more decency than the world gave her credit for.
Then her lips touched my knuckles.
I knew that.
Not a dream.
Not death.
That I knew.
A soft press of warmth to scarred skin. A kiss that asked for nothing and took everything anyway.
“You are not allowed to die,” she whispered.
I followed her voice.
Not because I deserved it.
Because I was weak.
Because I was selfish.
Because I loved her.
Then another sound entered the room.
A door.
A breath.
A silence that was not empty.
Destiny’s hand left mine.
Cold rushed in.
A different voice.
Soft.
Broken.
“How long have you loved him?”
Georgia.
The dark twisted.
No.
No, no, no.
Not both.