Chapter 10 #3
Not in the same room.
Not with me unable to speak, unable to stop the damage, unable to be anything but the broken man they were fighting over.
Destiny answered.
“Since I was eighteen.”
The truth landed somewhere inside me and broke bones the bullet hadn’t touched.
Georgia’s voice came again, smaller.
“He said your name.”
I wanted to disappear.
For once, not to avoid Destiny.
To spare Georgia.
She knew.
Of course she knew.
Georgia had known on couches, in study rooms, in quiet pauses after kisses when my body stayed but some part of me drifted toward a girl with haunted eyes. She had known before the ring. Maybe even when she said yes. Maybe love made women hopeful enough to ignore what they already understood.
“I knew there was someone,” Georgia whispered. “I just didn’t know she was real.”
I tried to wake.
Tried to move.
Tried to rip the tube from my throat and tell her I was sorry, tell Destiny to leave, tell Georgia to go, tell all of them I had made a disaster out of every good thing because I was too scared to want honestly and too selfish to stop wanting at all.
Nothing happened.
I stayed trapped in the dark with two women bleeding because of me.
Then Georgia took my hand.
The hand Destiny had held.
The ring I bought her flashed somewhere behind my closed eyes.
“Dylan,” she whispered.
Her voice trembled.
Loved me.
Needed me.
Deserved better than me.
The machine breathed.
The monitor counted.
Somewhere in the hallway, Destiny walked away.
I felt it like a second wound.
The dark thickened again, but it was different now.
Less like death.
More like judgment.
I floated beneath it with Georgia’s hand around mine, Destiny’s confession in my blood, and the ugly truth finally standing where I could not look away.
I had tried to be noble.
I had tried to let the bird fly.
I had tried to build a clean life out of good intentions, a ring, and enough distance to make longing behave.
But dying stripped a man down.
And on the table, in the dark, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, my heart had not called for the woman wearing my ring.
It had gone looking for the girl from the fire.
Waking up felt like drowning through glass.
There was light first.
Too much of it.
White. Blurred. Splintered at the edges like my eyes had forgotten how to make shapes out of the world. Then sound came in, slow and uneven. Beeping. Hissing. A soft mechanical rhythm close to my head. Voices far away, muffled like they were speaking from another room or another life.
My body existed in pieces.
Throat raw.
Chest heavy.
Side on fire.
Arm pinned down by lines and tape.
Mouth dry enough to make breathing feel like swallowing sand.
I tried to move.
Bad idea.
Pain opened under my ribs and tore through me so fast the ceiling went black at the corners.
A hand tightened around mine.
“Dylan?”
Georgia.
I knew her voice.
Sweet. Broken. Too close.
I should have opened my eyes for her.
I should have fought my way up through the drugs and pain because the woman wearing my ring was beside me, terrified, waiting, loving me with both hands wrapped around mine.
But before I saw her face, I heard another voice.
Not in the room.
In me.
You are not allowed to die.
Destiny.
The memory hit harder than the pain.
Her voice in the dark. Her hand in my hair. Her mouth near my knuckles. Her words spilling over me while I lay trapped somewhere between life and whatever waited after it.
I never stopped loving you.
I love you.
Stay.
My heart lurched against the monitor.
The machine answered with a faster beep.
Georgia stood so quickly her chair scraped the floor.
“Dylan? Baby?”
Baby.
Georgia’s word.
Georgia’s voice.
Georgia’s hand.
Georgia’s ring.
I forced my eyes open.
The room swam.
Georgia leaned over me, blonde hair pulled back messily, face pale and swollen from crying. She looked like she had slept in the chair if she had slept at all. Her cardigan hung off one shoulder. Her eyes were red. The ring I had given her flashed on her finger where she gripped my hand.
My ring.
My promise.
The life I had chosen because I had told myself choosing clean meant becoming clean.
I tried to speak.
Nothing came out but a rough scrape.
Georgia grabbed the cup with the little sponge swabs from the tray and touched one gently to my cracked lips. “Don’t try to talk. They took the tube out a little while ago. Your throat’s going to hurt.”
Tube.
Hospital.
Shot.
Run.
Nate.
I tried to turn my head, but even that much movement sent pain crashing through me.
“Nate?” I rasped.
Georgia’s face crumpled with relief that I had asked something real. Something safe. “He’s alive. He’s in ICU too. He’s been awake twice and apparently asked a nurse if the gown came in black.”
A laugh tried to move through me.
It became a cough.
Bad mistake.
Pain lit me up from the inside. Georgia’s hand went to my shoulder, careful and panicked at the same time.
“Don’t,” she whispered. “Please don’t. You’re going to tear something.”
I breathed through it.
Or tried.
My body felt like a building half-collapsed and held upright by temporary supports no one trusted.
Georgia stroked her thumb across my hand.
I looked at our hands.
Hers smooth, warm, ringed.
Mine bruised, scarred, taped, attached to tubes.
Then memory slid beneath Georgia’s touch like a knife under cloth.
Another hand holding mine.
Smaller.
Strong.
Shaking.
Destiny’s lips on my knuckles.
I closed my eyes.
Georgia’s thumb stopped.
That was how I knew.
She saw something.
Maybe not the memory itself, but the shadow of it crossing my face.
She always saw more than I wanted her to.
“Dylan,” she said softly.
I opened my eyes again.
Her face was not angry.
I wished it had been.
Anger would have given me something to push against. Something to answer. Something sharp enough to make me feel less like a man lying in a hospital bed with one woman’s ring on the hand holding his and another woman’s voice still inside his blood.
Georgia sat back down slowly, but she did not let go of me.
That mattered.
She was still holding on.
“You scared me,” she said.
“I know.”
“No.” Her voice broke. “You don’t. I got a call saying there had been a shooting. That you were being taken into surgery. I drove here not knowing if I was going to be your fiancée or your widow before I ever got to be your wife.”
The words hit harder than the wound.
Widow.
Wife.
Georgia’s future had almost been destroyed because of a life I had promised her I was trying to leave behind, even while part of me kept circling another woman like a planet locked around the wrong sun.
“I’m sorry,” I rasped.
Her eyes filled again. “I know you are.”
That was the worst part.
Georgia believed in the pieces of me that were sorry.
She believed they could be enough.
She leaned forward, pressing my hand between both of hers. “I’m not giving up because you had a bad dream.”
My chest tightened.
I said nothing.
Her chin lifted, and there she was—the Georgia most people never saw because she was sunshine until she wasn’t. Soft did not mean weak. Warm did not mean easy to move.
“I’m not stupid,” she said.
“Never thought you were.”
“I know there’s history with her.”
My pulse jumped.
The monitor betrayed me instantly.
Georgia looked at it, then back at me.
Her mouth trembled.
But she kept going.
“I know there’s something between you and Destiny. I knew before this. I knew when you disappeared in the middle of kissing me. I knew when you started taking jobs near Malibu. I knew when you pretended not to listen every time someone said her name.”
I swallowed.
My throat burned.
“I should have told you.”
“Yes,” she said.
No softness there.
Just truth.
“You should have.”
I closed my eyes.
“But I also should have asked harder,” Georgia continued. “I should have made you tell me the truth before I said yes. I wanted to believe love could grow over whatever was left behind.”
I opened my eyes.
She looked down at the ring.
“I still want to believe that.”
The words went through me slowly.
A mercy and a sentence.
“Georgia.”
“No.” Her grip tightened. “Not yet. Don’t say my name like you’re about to confess yourself out of my life while you’re lying there half-dead and drugged and guilty.
I have waited. I have loved you. I have taken the parts of you that were quiet and difficult and half-locked.
I knew you weren’t simple when I put this ring on. ”
I stared at her.
“You deserve better than half-locked.”
“Maybe,” she said, tears sliding down her cheeks. “But I get to decide what I’m willing to fight for.”
That should have made me feel relieved.
It didn’t.
It made guilt open under my ribs wider than the bullet wound.
Because Georgia was fighting for a man who still heard another woman asking him to stay.
She reached up and brushed the hair back from my forehead.
Her touch was gentle.
Possessive in the quietest way.
Not because she was trying to own me.
Because she had been promised the right to love me there.
“I’m your fiancée,” she whispered. “I’m not leaving this room because another woman cried over you.”
My chest hurt.
Not the surgical pain.
The other kind.
The kind no doctor could chart.
“She saved my life,” I said.
“I know.”
“She was there in the OR.”
“I know that too.”
“She—”
Georgia’s face tightened, but she did not look away.
“She what?”
I could not say it.
She told me she loved me.
She kissed my hand.
She begged me not to die.
She was the voice I followed back.
Those were not words a man said to his fiancée while wearing her ring around his future.
So I chose cowardice again and dressed it as kindness.
“She did her job,” I said.
Georgia flinched.
Because she knew.
Because I knew.
Because that was the cruelest almost-truth in the room.
“Yes,” Georgia said quietly. “She did.”
The silence afterward was full of machines.
I looked at the ring on her finger.