25. Thalassa
THALASSA
Arabella doesn’t knock—she breaks in.
Well, okay, technically she doesn’t break anything, but the way she slams my dorm room door open like we’re under siege? Not subtle.
“I swear to God,” she pants, laptop under one arm, keys still dangling from the other. “If you don’t have your phone on?—”
“I don’t. I was studying—what’s going on?”
She doesn’t answer. She just flips her laptop around and shoves it at me.
I blink. It takes me a second to process what I’m looking at. A press conference. The Copeland logo. The sleek background. A podium. Lights.
And Colin.
I feel the world sink.
He’s standing under enough heat to melt an ice sculpture, in a wrinkled hoodie and jeans, eyes ringed with exhaustion, voice hoarse. My guy looks like hell. His hands are white-knuckling the podium, and I know that look—he’s holding himself up with it.
“What—”
“Just watch,” Arabella says, breathless.
Colin speaks. He’s saying all the right things—explaining the breach, the fallout, what’s being done.
He’s calm, collected, but I can see it. The tightness in his jaw, the way his eyes keep losing focus.
He hasn’t slept. I don’t need to ask to know it’s been days.
He’s running on fumes and fury, and I want to scream at someone for letting this happen.
Then the questions start. Fast. Loud. One of them cuts deep, and he flinches.
And then—God. He just?—
He falls. Like his whole body forgets how to stand.
The camera lurches with my stomach. There’s shouting. Reporters crowd the frame. Someone says his name. And then the feed cuts.
I sit on the edge of my bed, absolutely frozen. My ears ring. My chest tightens. I forget how to breathe.
“He fainted,” Arabella says softly, reaching to close the laptop. “They say he’s stable, but?—”
“I have to go.”
“I have my keys.” She’s already dragging me toward the door.
The hospital is across the city, but we get there like it’s two blocks away and someone dared her to hit every green light. I don’t say anything for the whole drive. I can’t.
Stable doesn’t mean healthy. It just means there’s no change in his condition.
All I can see is the look on Colin’s face before he dropped out of frame. His skin was so pale. The kind of pale you only see on people who’ve been burning the candle at both ends and then just…run out of wax.
I knew he was working hard. I knew he was stressed. I just didn’t know it was this bad. And now? Now, my stomach won’t unclench.
“You’re shaking,” Arabella says, glancing at me before taking a left hard enough to make my seat belt protest.
“I know.” I clutch my hands together. They’re cold. I wish I could say I was surprised at how hard this is hitting me, but I’m not.
I care. God, I care so much it hurts. And I didn’t even realize how much until I watched him drop like that. It’s stupid, but I mumble, “I thought this was casual.”
Arabella sighs. “Sweetie, it stopped being casual the second you moved your tea mug into their dishwasher.”
“I didn’t mean to?—”
“You don’t have to mean to fall in love. Sometimes it just happens when you’re not looking.”
“I’m not in love.”
She snorts. “You sure about that?”
I don’t answer. Because I’m not sure. Because this panic that’s chewing through me? It doesn’t feel like a crush. It feels like something that could break me if it wanted to.
He has to be okay. He has to.
The hospital lobby is too white. Too quiet. Too full of smells that make me think of old people and loss. I bolt to the desk, practically crashing into it.
“Colin Copeland,” I say. “He collapsed at a press conference. Is he—can I see him?”
The nurse behind the desk barely glances up. “Are you family?”
“I—”
I falter. Because what am I? Not his girlfriend. Not his wife. Not even a defined thing. Just the pregnant girl. The chaos. The question mark.
“They’re with us,” someone says behind me.
I turn.
Dean.
Tic.
Thank God.
They’re both here, both looking like hell in different ways—Dean with his jaw clenched and his button-down rumpled, Tic in all black like he just walked out of a boardroom funeral.
But they’re calm. And somehow that helps.
“They’re with us,” Dean repeats, and the nurse nods, just like that.
Money talks. Or maybe it’s his voice. Or maybe the Copeland name still carries more weight than I understand.
Whatever it is, we barrel down the halls. Tic says, “He fainted from exhaustion and dehydration. They have him hooked up to a bunch of monitors. It looks gnarly, but he’ll be alright.”
Hearing the words makes my knees go weak, but I stay on my feet. I won’t believe it until I see him with my own eyes. We get to his room faster than I expect and far too slowly for my liking.
Colin’s room is warm and too quiet, except for the soft beeping of the heart monitor and the low hum of a machine I don’t recognize. He’s awake, thank God, and sitting up, though he looks like he’s been steamrolled by a truck full of regret and caffeine.
When he sees me, his face lights up. “Hey, sweets.”
“Don’t you Hey, sweets me,” I snap, moving to the side of the bed and smacking his arm lightly. “You scared the hell out of me. Don’t you ever do that again!”
“Ow,” he says, but he grins. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“That was never in question.”
Arabella slides into a chair by the window. “He looks like shit.”
“My hearing works, thanks,” Colin mutters.
Dean comes to stand on the other side of the bed. Tic doesn’t sit—he just leans against the wall like a silent sentry.
“You gave us a scare,” Dean says, voice low.
“Yeah, well.” Colin shrugs, then winces. “Turns out fifty straight hours of system triage without sleep is not, medically speaking, great.”
“Imagine that,” I deadpan. “Science confirms the human body needs rest. I’m sure that’ll be the headline.”
Colin smiles at me, and something inside me softens just a little too much. “I’m fine. Really.”
Dean shoots him a look. “You fainted on camera.”
“Dramatically,” Tic adds. “Could’ve waited until after the conference.”
Colin rolls his eyes. “Thanks for the support, fellas.”
“We’re just glad you’re okay,” I say quietly.
I mean it. God, I mean it.
A nurse comes in and gives him juice. Like, actual apple juice in a little paper cup with a plastic lid and a bendy straw. And for some reason, that’s the thing that makes it all real.
This man—this absolute menace of a tech genius, who regularly rebuilds networks from scratch and once set up a baby growth alert system just so I wouldn’t get surprised by anything—is sipping hospital juice like a middle schooler after a blood draw.
It’s almost funny. If I weren’t still shaking.
I sit in the chair beside his bed and curl one knee up to my chest, trying to ground myself. It’s getting harder to sit like that—my stomach feels tight these days.
Tic stands just inside the door, arms crossed, scanning the hallway like he’s expecting paparazzi to burst in at any moment.
Dean is sitting now too, in the chair across from me, one leg crossed over the other, chin resting in his hand as he watches Colin with a kind of exhausted fondness.
Arabella’s on her phone, probably texting half the universe with updates.
And I’m here. And everything is weirdly…okay. Because he’s okay.
“I mean, not to brag,” Colin says, taking another sip of juice, “but this is the most dramatic exit I’ve ever made. Ten out of ten.”
I glare. “You’re lucky I don’t smack you again.”
“Tempting offer,” he says, eyebrows up.
“Behave,” Dean warns, but he’s smiling too.
There’s a lightness in the room now, something bubbling up around the edges. But underneath it is something heavier too. Something I can’t stop thinking about.
When I saw him fall, something broke open in me. And now that I’m here—now that he’s talking and breathing and mostly upright—I don’t know how to put it all back in the box.
These men…they were supposed to be temporary. An experiment. Something reckless and exhilarating, something I would maybe regret but definitely learn from. But it doesn’t feel like that anymore.
Not when Dean looks at me like I’m the first good thing to happen to him in a year. Not when Tic shifts his weight and softens the line of his shoulders the second I walk into a room. Not when Colin grins through pain and cracks jokes with a straw between his lips.
I’m falling. That’s what it feels like. A slow, messy fall I never planned for. And I can’t tell them. Not yet. Because what if this is just adrenaline? What if the fear of losing him is playing tricks on me?
What if I say the thing, and it ruins everything?
So I sit, and I listen, and I pretend that I’m just glad he’s okay, and not that my entire internal wiring has shifted because of these ridiculous, frustrating, completely irreplaceable men.
Tic’s the one who breaks the quiet next. He shifts away from the wall and says, “The doctor says you’ll be released tonight if you eat something that’s not in a juice box and stay conscious for more than four hours.”
Colin gives a lazy salute. “Copy that.”
“Think you can eat something?” Dean asks.
“If there are fries involved,” Colin says, “I’ll consider a full recovery.”
Arabella puts her phone away and stands. “I’ll go bribe a nurse.”
“No deep-fried anything from the cafeteria,” Tic warns.
“Too late,” she says. “Already planning my fried food siege.” She slips out the door with a wink in my direction.
I love her so much it hurts. Evidently, that’s the theme for the day.
Dean leans toward me a little. “You doing okay?”
I nod. Too fast. “Yeah. Just…scared me, is all.”
He studies me, and it’s not the kind of studying that people do when they’re suspicious or impatient. It’s patient. Careful. I hate how seen I feel when he does that. “It scared us too.”
I look down at Colin’s hand, where it rests on the blanket. I touch it lightly, just for a second.
I don’t know where this is going. I just know I want to be here to see it.
Colin dozes off twenty minutes later. Mid-sentence, actually.
After Arabella delivers two large containers of gloriously fried everything and he wolfs it down, he’s telling some story about an intern who coded a reservation bot that started automatically booking tables at rival restaurants—“to steal the competition’s bandwidth,” he explains proudly—when his head just kind of…
tilts. His eyes flutter shut, and he starts breathing in that even, open-mouthed way that says yeah, his body’s finally given up on being awake.
Dean adjusts the blanket. Tic kills the lights. Arabella shuts the blinds.
We sit in the soft glow of the heart monitor for a long while, not saying anything. I lean my head against the wall and let myself be still. It’s the first time today that my adrenaline doesn’t feel like it’s trying to crawl out of my skin.
The world narrowed when I saw Colin fall. It collapsed to a tiny square of screen and a single thought: Please don’t let this be the moment everything changes. And then I got here—and it did change.
Not because he’s hurt, or because it was dramatic, or because Arabella and I broke half the speed limits in the state to get here.
But because I walked into this room, and everything in me settled. Like my body recognized something my mind’s been fighting. That this…whatever this is…is home.
I don’t say that out loud, obviously. I don’t even know how I’d phrase it if I wanted to. I just sit there, watching the rise and fall of Colin’s chest, the way Dean’s thumb circles idly against his coffee cup, the way Tic keeps scanning the hallway like he’s daring someone to try something.
This is my family.
And they don’t even know it yet.
“You staying tonight?” Dean asks eventually, voice low.
I shrug. “Depends on if they kick me out.”
“They won’t,” Tic says, still watching the door. “We’ll make sure of it.”
Dean smiles at that—small, real. “You can crash at the house. If you want. After.”
I nod. “I might.”
There’s a comfort in this quiet. In being allowed to stay. No one’s asked me for anything. No one’s pressured me to define what we are or what I want or whether I’m keeping the babies.
They’ve just made space. And the longer I sit in it, the more it scares me. Because I think I want that space to always be there. But what if it’s not? What if I ruin it?
What if I say the wrong thing or need too much or don’t want enough?
Dean glances at me again, brow furrowing like he can sense the spiral building. “You okay?”
“Just tired.”
He nods, but I know he doesn’t buy it. Still—he doesn’t push.
“I was really scared,” I say eventually.
“I know.”
“Didn’t think it would hit me like that,” I add. “Like…this hard.”
“You care about him.”
I shrug. “Okay, fine. Yeah. I care.”
Tic smirks. “More than a little?”
I shove a fry in my mouth. “Shut up.”
He softly chuckles, and we finish the fries. Dean and Tic have moved the chairs closer to the bed, and they’re talking in low voices about nothing in particular—weather, stock reports, the café down the block with the good almond croissants.
I sit near the edge of the bed, just watching Colin sleep. I could do this for the rest of my life and be happy.
I’m not sure they’ll let me.