Chapter 37 Bohdan
Bohdan
It’s like college in the best ways. Like any time before, really.
There’s no way we’re floating on the ocean somewhere between Livorno and Rome.
We’re somewhere else.
At least, I am.
Maybe I’m dreaming. It has to be a dream—because I’m in this stupid disco with my best friends, Sloan looking up at me, face soft underneath flashing lights that on any other day would send me to my knees, but I hardly see them tonight.
The only bright thing here is her. And despite everything I’ve done to her—everything I’m still capable of doing because I’ve got the truth she wants so desperately in my hands—there’s nothing about her that hurts me.
She’s the flash of blinding light, the smattering of colour across the walls and the floor and the entire world. The vibration of a too-loud bass in my chest, making my heart beat and keeping me alive.
That has to be psychosomatic—the power of whatever’s left of my brain coming in handy for once, so I can stare at her, see those freckles thrown into contrast and painted with vibrant, white light, and nothing about it can hurt me.
She holds up another pair of grey rubber loops that match the ones nestled in her ears. She smiles—it stretches wider across her face than anything I’ve seen in years when she reaches up to place them in mine, fingers whispering over my skin.
They trace my jawline, her thumb running over my bottom lip, pulling down slightly before she places her hand on my chest, right above my heart.
A blanket settles over everything. All that noise I couldn’t really hear anyway.
She rests her hand there, fingers tapping in time with the beat of my heart—one, two, one, two, one, two—before she slides it down, interlacing her fingers with mine.
Back where they belong. The same hands that still hold my heart the way I used to hold hers, and I know I should let go, that I never should have gone along with it.
But I don’t think my head’s ever felt clearer, and I follow the woman I’ve loved since she was an eighteen-year-old girl, and I let her drag me towards our best friends at the bar.
We do too many shots. We dance. We laugh too much and too loudly and for too long. I push her up against the wall in a random hallway just off the bar and kiss her with too many wandering hands and too much tongue and too many teeth coming down on her bottom lip.
And when they kick us out, our friends booing loudly and Talon proclaiming we ruined disco night with a smile bigger than any goal or championship ever produced—we go back to the suite, and I trace letters on her skin with my mouth that she’ll never be able to read to tell her how sorry I am and how much I still love her and always will.
The sun rises at some point, rays stretching across the gentle, rolling waves of the ocean, and the milky sky tries to tell me I stayed up too long and drank too much and I should know better, because I’m only going to cause myself pain.
But it’s Sloan under me and on me and beside me in my bed, and my head doesn’t hurt at all.