Chapter 60 Bowen
Bowen
“It's Kit,” Tucker says. Two words, but I can hear a dozen emotions in them.
“Where is he?” I ask, already sliding out of bed and stumbling into the jeans I left discarded on the floor of my bedroom.
“St. John's.” The already nauseating fear I've lived with for days is nothing compared to the pit that opens at his words. Every fear, every anxiety. Every middle of the night, worst-case scenario. It all pours in until I have to place my forehead on the cool wall to stop myself from puking.
“Is he…”
“Alive?” Tucker supplies, a forced laugh that's all bitterness born from the same exact fear that lives in me. “Yeah. He's lucky.”
Lucky.
The word replays in my mind on a loop as I drive to the hospital.
Park my truck. Stagger on legs that are close to giving up with every other step.
I've gotten scraps of sleep all week and have been running on pure guilt and the sickening sort of dread that lives with a gut feeling and enough life experience to know that it very much can happen to you.
The Universe can take and take and take until you're nothing but a chewed-up version of who you used to be.
All I can hear as the nurse points me in the right direction is, “Your fault. Your fault. Your fault.”
He looked like I punched my fist into his chest and tore out his heart before he went running from my house. The things I said…
My. Fault.
Tucker meets me in the hallway. He's saying things about Kit being in a medical detox all last week when we couldn't find him. He had wanted to get better.
He was trying.
“My fault,” I grit out. Tucker is shaking his head and places a hand on my shoulder.
“Not your fault, man. He chose to relapse.”
But it is. I upset him. I told him to get the fuck out.
That's when their mom opens the hospital door, eyes red and swollen from crying. And I see Kit, lying in the bed.
He looks so small. So pale. Deathly pale.
My kitten.
The memory releases me with the same clammy hands and racing heart as a nightmare does. I blink, bleary-eyed at the figure next to me. For one tense, agonizing moment, the moonlight on his pale skin looks haunting.
I reach for him, pulling his sleeping form away from the slash of silver light and into my chest. Kit makes a soft noise, placing his hand over mine on his tender stomach.
The same guilt that drove my feet away from him that night in the hospital has my hands moving against his stomach.
The memory of him, small and broken down, has my lips quivering through every kiss against his warm skin.
Guilt for ever letting him go a day without understanding what he means to me. Guilt for not being strong enough. For walking away in the first place. For still being so fucking scared, it steals the air from my lungs.
“Boe?” he asks, hushed in the quiet of the night. My breaths are panting out of me like I've just run a mile.
Kit lets me roll him over, let's me hover over him. Looking at his eyes, no purple bags hanging under them. No shadows of the fight he used to battle from sunup to sundown. No chapped, bitten lips or gaunt cheeks.
My hand finds its way to the pulse point on his neck, and Kit sucks in a breath, looking between my eyes. He must be able to see enough, because his own hand moves to my face. “Boe,” he whispers right before I seal my lips over his.
I'm possessed by the need to claim. To hold onto every second I get to feel this.
Feel him. We're sweat and nails and whispered pleas.
We're past and present. Two broken men who are trying to banish guilt and fear and outrun the ghosts of who we used to be.
Trying to deal with a future that feels too scary to consider, because I know what life is like without him.
I know how hollow it is. I know what it's like to wake up every morning not knowing where he is, what he's doing or if he's okay. I know the anxiety of looking at a blank phone screen, expecting it to light up with a call any minute, telling you he's gone.
Kit moans under me, gripping my hip as I move inside him. I move in slow, shallow thrusts. Not willing to part my chest from his. I lace my fingers with his other hand, and he wraps his legs around me. We're as tangled together as we could possibly be, and it's not enough.
I want him to tell me he's mine, and mean it. I want him to tell me he's not leaving. Never leaving.
I don't know how I would survive it.
I know he's gone before I even open my eyes. I can sense the cool sheets before I even rub my hand against them.
It smells like sex in here. Sex and Kit, wrapped up in me. I'd be smug as fuck about it if my bed wasn't empty beside me.
The bathroom door is open, light off. I force myself to take a piss, wash my hands, and look at myself in the mirror. Faint red trails cover my shoulders and down my back. Visible proof that he was here.
His bedroom door is cracked, and it creaks on its hinges when I press my knuckles into it. No Kit there either. No banging around in the kitchen, or him curled up on the couch.
That's when I hear a laugh that's familiar but feels out of place here now.
The morning sun is bright against my tired eyes, but I see them through the window clearly.
Pat Meyer is holding a tool up for Kit, who is scrunching his nose and shaking his head.
Pat laughs, pats Kit on the shoulder and goes back under the hood of Kit's van.
I didn't think he would be here so soon. I thought we had more time.
Kit looks back over his shoulder at the cabin, and I quickly pivot out of view.
Fuck.