Chapter 46
Chapter Forty-Six
Closure
“Ethan.”
The sound of my name being called claws at the back of my brain with significance, but my eyelids are too heavy to open on command. My body is too heavy, frozen in a kind of sleep paralysis, just without all the fear that I’m being possessed by a demon. Instead, the feeling is comfortable. Warm.
“Ethan,” the voice calls again, and god, I know that voice. I’m simply too tired to put it to a face. My thoughts are sluggish with exhaustion.
I feel a hand in my hair, long fingers brushing through the strands in soft circles.
It’s soothing and gentle—having the exact opposite effect of drawing me awake.
I want to sleep forever with the tenderness behind that caress.
Something about it resonates through my soul, the touch desperately welcomed.
In a recessed corner of my semi-conscious brain, there is a spark of recognition—a growing urgency to understand why this moment is important. Why this action has meaning. So, with a herculean effort, I force my eyes open, barely more than a sliver, and look up into the blinding light of day.
Pale sapphire eyes meet mine, and the sweetest smile on the only lips I want to kiss for the rest of my life hits me with full force. “Hi, baby.”
I snap up so quickly that I startle both of us.
Luke’s eyes widen with shock as he watches me pop up from the chair, only to lose balance, my leg having fallen asleep sometime over the night.
I have to grip the edge of the bed to keep from falling to the floor, but the pins and needles shooting through me are worth it because Luke is awake. He’s okay.
There’s no time for thought—no time to question my movements as I rush forward, taking Luke’s face in my hands, reveling in the sensation of touching him. He smiles at me, tears in his eyes, and then our lips are connected in a frenzy.
It’s like witnessing the Big Bang starting over, but in slow motion, the cosmos, galaxies, stars, and planets coming to new life in this single, colossal moment.
It’s the feeling of reaching that part in every romance novel where the hero finally gets their happy ending after pages worth of struggle, and the meaning behind every sappy lyric of every love song ever written coming together to form the most megalithic surge of joy a human could possibly experience.
There simply aren’t words to describe it.
And the way Luke grips my hair in his right hand, holding me as close to him as possible, I know he feels it as acutely as I do. He’s crying now, the salty taste of his tears on my tongue, and I revel in that, too. Because he’s alive and awake and here. He’s okay. He’s okay!
We stay with our foreheads together for a long moment before he takes a deep, shuddering breath, and I pull away to see his face more clearly.
That beautiful, perfect face. I was so afraid I’d never see his sparkling azure eyes again that I never want to look away from them.
And being the sole focus of his attention sends the most welcome shiver down my spine.
“Is this like a weird hobby for you?” Luke suddenly asks with a raspy chuckle. His voice is a little raw from the ventilator, but it’s still sweet music to my ears.
“What?” I frown, brushing a tear from his cheek with my thumb.
“Rescuing people?”
I bark a laugh, the echo of words spoken so long ago that it feels like a lifetime gone by. A moment that’s come full circle. My answering smile takes over my whole face.
“Only for you, my little crisis fiend. Always for you.”
“You and your fancy words.” Luke gives me a little pout with just a touch of his signature sass. I’ll catalog all these little quirks I nearly lost forever for as long as I live.
“God, I love you,” I say, the words barely scratching the surface of the sentiment.
Luke’s eyes widen slightly at the admission, almost like he forgot how I spilled my heart all over him while he was bleeding out on the kitchen floor.
Maybe he has. How could anyone be expected to remember something like that in the middle of something so terrifying?
But then he smiles like this is more of a confirmation that it really happened and wasn’t part of a fever dream.
“About damn time you said it back,” he sighs, dropping his head against the pillows. It’s the first time I notice how tired he looks.
“Said it back?” I frown.
“I’ve been waiting for you to say it for weeks.”
“Weeks? You never said it first!”
“I absolutely did!” Luke scoffs, a brow arched at me indignantly. “I said it the night you asked me to go to New York. When we started planning that trip.”
I blink at him with confusion, trying to wrack my brain for the memory of that night, desperate to recall what was said.
Luke was miserable until I suggested the impromptu vacation, so there’s no way he would have said it before that.
But in no part of that conversation afterward were those three little words ever uttered.
I would have clung to that like the only life raft left in the ocean, given how in love with him I already was at the time. Unless…
“That was a dream,” I say softly as it clicks. “You said that to me in a fucking dream. I was asleep!”
“You weren’t asleep yet. You answered me.”
“What did I say?” I balk.
Luke bites his lower lip, giving me a coy look that tells me he knows he’s being a little shit, and he knew I absolutely did not hear it properly. “Well, I suppose it was more of a grunt.”
“Because I was fucking asleep, asshole!” I laugh. “That doesn’t count. That doesn’t even remotely count.”
“Okay, well, in the recorded history of the universe and chronological time, it is written in the stars that I told you I loved you first. So, there.”
“God fucking damn it, I hate you so much.”
“No, you don’t.” Luke smirks, reaching up and touching my face. I hold my hand over his, squeezing his fingers tightly, kissing the inside of his wrist.
“No.” I smile, tears coming to my eyes. “No, I really fucking don’t.”
We spend the next few hours clearing the air of everything that happened and what we missed while we were apart. Luke tells me what the doctors clued him in on when he’d first woken up while I was too out of it to notice, and I catch him up to speed on the rest.
He’s overjoyed to hear that I am officially out with all of my friends and that it wasn’t a cosmic disaster, and he laughs when I tell him Tiff was onto us from day one.
Based on their years of history, he’d have been more shocked to learn she hadn’t figured it out before I came clean.
However, Luke is stunned to hear about Chrissy’s redemption arc, even more so on the heels of Frank’s unexpected albeit messed-up apology.
Bigots apologizing for their bigotry in 2023? Inconceivable.
When I tell him that Pete’s been denied bail after being arraigned on multiple felony and misdemeanor charges, including two charges of attempted murder in the second degree, one for him, the other for his mother, Luke goes quiet.
He looks away from me, almost like he’s ashamed. I don’t understand why at first.
But then he says, “I shouldn’t have let it get to that point,” staring down at his bandaged arm being propped up under a mountain of pillows.
He has full use of his hand, but there’s a numbness in his pinky and ring finger that may never go away—it’s unclear yet.
The doctors say it could take time to come back, but in the grand scheme of things, if that’s the only permanent damage he walks away with from all this, he’s damn lucky.
He’s going to need a ton of physical therapy.
I can almost see the gears turning in his head as he questions what he could have done differently to change this outcome—a feeling I’m intimately familiar with. When he turns back to me, he gives me a startlingly vulnerable look, tears welling in his eyes.
“You were right, and I was too proud to listen.” He sniffs. “I should have taken it to the cops the first time. I should have ended things for him right then and there. But I was convinced it wouldn’t help. That it would only make things worse. It always made things worse.”
Luke tells me exactly what happened that day after he’d left my house, filling in the missing pieces of the story.
He says he’d driven around town for a few hours before ultimately going back to Pete’s because there was simply nowhere else for him to go.
He’d locked himself in his bedroom as soon as he went inside, ignoring his mother’s frantic pleas for forgiveness through the door, and then later, Pete’s drunken demands that he come out and face him like a man.
He was planning on packing up his things and driving back to New York, but as soon as Pete got wind of that, he’d sabotaged everything, wrecking the truck in his childish fury.
He was so pissed that Luke wasn’t engaging with him that he took it to the next step.
Still, Luke kept himself locked away, trying to make another plan to escape.
“You should have called me,” I say softly. “Even if you hated me, I could have at least gotten you out of there.”
“I never hated you,” he says with a sigh.
“I wasn’t even mad at you. Just angry in general for the way my life was going.
I couldn’t think straight. I was too ashamed to face you after everything I said.
The way I screamed at you… I was afraid I’d fucked up everything between us with my issues, and I couldn’t deal with it.
So, I kept deleting your messages and ignoring your phone calls, convincing myself it was better this way.
When you eventually stopped messaging me, the silence somehow hurt worse.
I didn’t know what to say to you. How to make up for it.
I kept telling myself you deserved better.