Chapter 13 #3
I watched his hand shift on the wheel. The faint pull at his mouth when the truck hit a rough patch of road.
The way he breathed through discomfort instead of pretending it did not exist. I had seen too many men turn pain into personality.
Dylan used to be one of them. Tonight, he looked like a man trying not to lie even to himself.
“Are you hurting?” I asked.
His eyes stayed on the road. “Some.”
“Scale?”
“Not a nurse tonight, Beautiful.”
The nickname slid through the cab.
Soft.
Careful.
I looked out the window before he could see my face.
“I’m always a nurse.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
The answer held weight.
Too much of it.
He knew what it had cost me to be both woman and nurse in his room. To check his wounds while my own stayed open. To do the right thing with hands that wanted the wrong man. Or maybe not wrong. Maybe just badly timed. Badly handled. Badly loved.
“Four,” he said after a moment.
I looked at him.
“Pain’s a four,” he said. “Maybe five if you ask again with that face.”
“What face?”
“The one that says you’ll call Callum and have him drag me home by the back of my neck.”
“Tempting.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re recovering.”
“I’m recovering,” he agreed.
That mattered too.
No heroic denial.
No growled I’m fine while actively bleeding.
Growth, apparently, could be measured in pain-scale honesty.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
His expression changed.
Not nervous exactly.
Worse.
Hopeful.
“You said normal.”
“I did.”
“So I found normal.”
That was how we ended up at a fall carnival set up in a dusty lot outside the city, tucked between a church, a row of cottonwoods, and a street full of parked cars.
Strings of lights hung between temporary poles.
A Ferris wheel turned slowly against a bruised purple sky.
Kids ran past carrying glow sticks and paper boats of fries.
Somewhere, someone was frying dough, roasting green chile, and burning popcorn all at once, and the combination should have been terrible but somehow smelled like every fair I had never had time to go to.
I stared through the windshield.
Dylan shifted beside me. “Too much?”
I shook my head.
“No.”
“You sure?”
There were people everywhere. Families. Teenagers. Old couples. Toddlers on leashes. Music crackling from cheap speakers. The whole place glowed with a kind of ordinary happiness that felt almost obscene after hospitals, blood, and goodbye scenes.
But it was not too much.
It was exactly enough.
“You brought me to a carnival,” I said.
“You said no tortured biker poetry.”
“So your backup plan was funnel cake?”
“Funnel cake is structurally honest.”
I turned to look at him.
He shrugged. “It knows what it is.”
The laugh came easier this time.
Dylan watched it happen, then looked away before the moment got too big.
Good.
He was learning.
We got out of the truck slowly because Dylan refused help and I refused to hover, which meant I watched him stand with every muscle in my body locked and pretended not to notice the way his hand pressed once against his side before dropping.
He caught me catching him.
“Don’t,” he said.
“I didn’t.”
“You did with your eyes.”
“My eyes are medical professionals.”
“Tell them to clock out.”
“Impossible. They’re union.”
His mouth twitched.
The air smelled like dust, sugar, chile smoke, and cold coming down from the mountains.
Lights flickered overhead, turning his dark hair copper at the edges.
For a second, standing beside him in a gravel lot with music and laughter around us, I had the strangest sensation that the world had folded wrong.
Like we had stepped out of the story we had been trapped in and into someone else’s easier life.
Dylan stopped before we reached the ticket booth.
I looked at him.
He held out his hand.
Palm up.
Not grabbing.
Not assuming.
Asking.
The gesture hit me harder than it should have.
Maybe because I remembered every other touch. The desperate ones. The forbidden ones. The ones stolen from grief, fear, and hospital shadows.
This was different.
This was open air.
This was a choice.
I placed my hand in his.
His fingers closed slowly around mine.
Warm.
Careful.
A little rough.
Still Dylan.
The electricity was still there. Of course it was. That live-wire feeling under my skin, the old pull, the dangerous hum of him. But it did not feel like a trap this time. It felt like a current we were finally allowed to notice without pretending it was lightning meant to destroy us.
He looked down at our joined hands.
Then at me.
“Okay?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Okay.”
We bought tickets from a teenage girl wearing vampire teeth and a bored expression. Dylan paid cash. I tried to pay for mine. He looked offended.
“It’s a date,” he said.
“I’m employed.”
“I’m aware.”
“I can pay for myself.”
“Also aware.”
“And yet?”
“And yet I asked you out.”
“That logic is archaic.”
“I got shot recently. Let me have chivalry.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Weaponizing medical history already?”
“Absolutely.”
The ticket girl popped her gum. “You two want the wristbands or not?”
I bit my lip.
Dylan handed over the cash.
The girl slapped paper wristbands on us with the weary efficiency of someone who had witnessed too many first dates and had no faith in any of them.
I admired her.
We ate first because Dylan claimed a successful normal date required food before emotional damage.
He bought us green chile cheeseburgers wrapped in foil, fries too hot to eat without pain, and lemonade so sweet it made my teeth question my life choices.
We sat at a picnic table under a string of lights while a local band played a cover of something old and romantic badly enough to make it new.
Dylan ate slower than I remembered.
Careful bites.
Pain hidden, but not denied.
I pretended not to catalog it.
He pretended not to know I was cataloging it.
Romance, apparently.
At some point, mustard dripped onto his thumb.
Without thinking, I handed him a napkin.
Without thinking, he took it from me and smiled.
Such a stupid moment.
Such a tiny, ordinary thing.
It made my chest ache.
“What?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“Destiny.”
I looked down at my fries. “We never got this.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“No,” he said. “We didn’t.”
“No awkward first date food. No small talk. No pretending not to stare. No finding out whether you eat pickles.”
“I eat pickles.”
“Good to know.”
“I also stare.”
“I noticed.”
His smile faded into something softer.
“I’m trying not to.”
“I know.”
The band’s singer missed a note with confidence.
Somewhere nearby, a child shrieked with joy or rage. Hard to tell at fairs.
Dylan leaned back carefully, one hand resting near his side. “I thought about taking you somewhere nicer.”
“Define nicer.”
“Restaurant. Candles. Tablecloth. Something with wine I couldn’t pronounce.”
“That sounds terrifying.”
“Exactly.”
I smiled.
He looked at me like he wanted to memorize it.
This time, I let him.
After we ate, he insisted on games.
This was a mistake.
Not for me.
For his ego.
Dylan Degan, survivor of gunfire, recovering outlaw, future construction business owner, man who had faced down pain, blood loss, and Edge’s silent wrath, was absolutely terrible at carnival games.
Terrible.
He missed the milk bottles three times.
The teenager running the booth looked personally embarrassed for him.
Dylan stared at the remaining bottles like they had betrayed a peace treaty.
“In my defense,” he said, “I usually aim at people trying to kill me.”
I folded my arms. “Romantic.”
“That came out wrong.”
“Did it?”
“Mostly.”
I laughed so hard the booth worker smiled.
Dylan bought more tickets.
“Dylan.”
“What?”
“You are not about to get into a dominance battle with weighted milk bottles.”
“They’re not weighted.”
“They are absolutely weighted.”
“That’s quitter talk.”
“That’s nurse talk. Your abdomen is going to hate you tomorrow.”
“My abdomen already hates me.”
“Your surgeon would hate this.”
“My surgeon isn’t here.”
“No, but I am.”
His eyes shifted to me.
The air warmed again.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “You are.”
The laughter softened between us.
He stopped throwing.
Not because he had won.
Because I had asked without asking.
That mattered more than a stuffed animal.
Unfortunately, he then discovered ring toss.
Which went worse.
By the time he finally won, he had spent enough money to purchase the entire booth and the bored college kid operating it. His prize options were a neon snake, a plush taco, or a ridiculous stuffed coyote wearing a tiny cowboy hat.
I pointed immediately. “That one.”
Dylan looked at the coyote.
Then at me.
“Of course.”
“It has dignity.”
“It has a hat.”
“Exactly.”
He handed it to me with solemn ceremony. “For you.”
I accepted it against my chest. “Thank you. I’ll treasure him always.”
“Don’t name him Nate.”
“I was going to name him Dylan.”
“Cruel.”
“He does look like he’d make bad emotional decisions.”
Dylan laughed.
A real laugh.
Not huge. Not careless. But real enough that it reached his eyes and changed his whole face.
I had forgotten how young he could look when pain was not standing directly in front of him.
Or maybe I had never gotten to know him young.
Not really.
The thought sobered me.
Dylan noticed.
He always did.
“What?” he asked.
I adjusted the stuffed coyote in my arms. “I’m thinking.”
“Dangerous.”
“I’m realizing we missed a lot.”
His expression softened.
“Yeah.”
“Years.”
“I know.”
“I hate that.”
“Me too.”
We stood between game booths while lights blinked around us and other people lived entire painless evenings in every direction.
Dylan took a breath.
“I can’t give them back.”
“No.”
“I would if I could.”
“I know.”
His hand brushed mine.
Not taking it yet.
Just there.
A question again.
I answered by sliding my fingers through his.
His grip closed around mine like relief had a shape.