Chapter Fifty-Three
Max ~ Present ~
My back is against the wall next to the door now, my head leaning there, too, with my eyes shut softly and my breaths coming more even after listening to him talk for a while.
“Nico was the only one who could know. It was the only way to make sure the family was safe from retaliation. They had to think I was gone. It was the only way to—” His voice breaks, and I hear a soft thud against the door.
And with a heavy exhale, he continues, “to make sure they wouldn’t come after you again, Max. God—Max—”
Silence. I don’t dare move an inch.
I don’t know how much time has passed since he started talking. My eyelids are heavy, but I force them open. My body is numb. I can’t feel my fingers, but I start to register the things around me.
The bedroom is completely unchanged from what I can tell in the dim moonlight streaming in from the window. The bed is made with the same white quilt and big white pillows. The gold curtains I once mocked hang at the far end, framing balcony windows.
I can see the top of one of the pillows from here—it’s topped with a small, green chocolate mint.
“Nico said the whole penthouse was renovated,” I mumble it to the chair, mocking me from two feet to my left, where I sat months ago in Cal’s lap reading while he took business calls. In fuzzy socks. “It looks the same in here.”
“I haven’t been able to step foot in that room, let alone change a single—” His tone is frustrated at the topic change, his words fast and riding atop a small laugh, but the exasperated breath that stops them is not joking in the slightest. “Please.” He’s barely audible now, emotion snapping through the words, floating through the crack under the door, “please, Max—please open the door.”
My right hand reaches up without permission and lands on the door handle.
This can’t be real.
This isn’t real.
I’m having a mental breakdown and when I open this door, Nico is going to be on the other side ready to commit me to a mental hospital.
I’ve officially lost my mind.
My fingers twist the lock, and my hand falls from the handle.
The door doesn’t open. No sound comes from the other side of it, either, making me question the very real potential that this is a hallucination.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I stand straight up, holding the handle of the door and stepping back, fumbling as I pull it open slightly, dropping my hand back to my side and taking another step to the side. But I keep my eyes pressed together, scared of either outcome.
Nico with a straitjacket or—
“Max?” The voice is soft, just like I remember, and right in front of me.
I hear the door creak slightly and a very faint click of it being closed. I stop breathing and feel the air shift around me.
This isn’t real.
Behind my eyelids, the real orange flames of the building that exploded in front of my face burn. Real.
The white of the explosion, real.
Around my waist, the very real, very tight grip of Nico’s arms as he held me from running towards the blaze left real bruises.
My very real scream echoes in my head, right before the ear-splitting, very real shriek of their mom when Nico told her later that night.
That was real. This… this is not real.
“Are you real?” I let the words pass my lips, but they’re barely a whisper.
I don’t breathe and I pull my lips back together, feeling my chin wobble as the tears start again.
“Open your eyes, Max.”
The voice sounds real.
It sounds so real and so close I could almost reach out and…
I pull oxygen into my lungs slowly, digging the heels of my hands into my eyes.
But then I open them. And I’m looking out into the unchanged bedroom again. But now, a very small, dim light near the bed is throwing shadows across the vast space. My eyes adjust.
“Max.” The voice is right in front of me now.
“Cal?”
His name is foreign on my tongue, unspoken for so many days—too many days.
The dark, curly hair, the hard edges of his face, the perfect golden-green eyes. They come into focus one by one.
And I don’t dare blink.
Cal.
He steps closer to me.
My eyes search his face, for a sign, for verification, for something that tells me this is real life.
There’s a new scar stretching from his left temple down to below his ear, light pink and raised.
I lift my hand and run one finger down the six-inch scar.
His eyes close and he draws his lips together in a line.
I run my finger back up the scar, and across his eyebrows that are pulled into a frown. No, not a frown—a grimace.
Pain and sadness.
And my finger traces the lines formed between his eyebrows, before I pull my hand back slowly, aching to touch him more, to shake him, maybe to hit him.
But the shock, the confusion… the reality, it pulls me back.
I think my knees give a little. I wobble, and his hand catches mine between us before it can drop and his eyes open.
“I’m so sorry.”
“And now?”
I don’t move my hand out of his gentle grasp or respond to his apology.
“Now?” A brief look of confusion mars his features.
I hold his gaze, trying to decipher my own reasons behind this question.
“You said,” I take a deep breath, swallowing. “You said everyone had to believe you were dead. So, what about now? Are you dead… or alive?”
“Alive. Or I will be. Very soon.”
He seems to understand my question before I do. His other hand finds both of mine, and he grasps them between both of his own.
He holds my eyes as he lowers himself to the ground.
He dips his head, pulling my hands up to his forehead, leaning gently against my stomach.
I look down at him, my hands clasped in his, his head against them in a prayer, his knees on the soft rug of the bedroom we laughed in, loved in.
My Cal.
“Please,” a whisper and a small guttural sob. “Please, forgive me.”
Never will you find a Renzetti on their knees for anyone. I will sooner die than put myself on my knees for you or anyone else.
The last words I heard out of his mouth that night echo in my mind.
He took a step towards the men who took me, dropping his gun to twist around his finger, and forcing the barrel of the gun pointed at him against his own forehead in a dare.
And then he told me to run.
And I did.
And he died.
But he didn’t.
Because he is right here.
He’s real.
I take stock of every place our bodies are touching.
His hands.
His forehead, warm.
His hair lightly brushing the tips of my fingers.
The press of his hands wrapped around mine into my stomach.
“You said you would sooner die than get on your knees for anyone,” I repeat his words back to him, still unable to process this reality as one that is truly real.
“I’m already dead.” His eyes lift to mine. “And you are not just anyone. I’ll get on my knees and beg for your forgiveness every day if you let me, Max.”
“Time, Cal, I need…” I’m gently pulling against his hands, and he reluctantly lets mine free, nodding at the floor.
But my hands are in his hair before I can stop them, pulling his head against the spot right below my chest.
His arms wrap around me and his entire body sags against mine.
I rock back, dizzy, but he holds me up, holds me steady.
The room spins, my fingers still wrapped in his hair, the warmth of him real against my fingertips.
I feel the tears drop from my cheeks onto my hands and mix with the dark curls my fingers have already found their previous home in.
After a minute, my body slides down and his hands rise to cup my face. My hands are caught between us and the golden-green of his eyes shines bright, glimmering with unfallen emotion.
I’ve spent the last ten weeks reaching for my own dreams because of this man.
I’ve spent every day forcing myself out of bed to make him proud of me, to fight the grief. The grief that, tonight, was lifted, replaced with some sickening combination of confusion and anger and relief.
But everything before right now was dark; the darkest it’s ever been.
I pulled myself out of the dark for school, for his memory, but I lived in shades of that dark in between and for so many years before he came back into my life last year and taught me how to bring all the color back.
Now nothing is grey.
Nothing is dark.
He is here.
“You’re real,” I whisper, our breath mixing between us.
“I’m so sorry, Max.” One of his hands is wrapped around the hair at the nape of my neck, while the other slowly traces my jaw. “I love you. I’m so sorry. I love you.”
“Cal.”
For the first time in so long, his name brings a smile to my lips that mixes with tears and, even faster, my lips are on his, needy and wanting and everything that I have been missing for seventy-one stupid fucking days.
He’s alive.
And he’s mine.