SLOANE
Three hours ago, I was on a dance floor with Jensen’s hand on my lower back and my cheek against his shoulder.
He didn’t care that I stepped on his feet at least four times, and I laughed so hard my abs hurt.
I felt like myself. Just a woman having a great time with a man she can’t stop wanting to be near.
By the time we got back to the rental house, I had a headache. Not a big deal. I’d had a long day. The bar was loud. I took two Advil, drank a glass of water, brushed my teeth and went to bed thinking about how nice Jensen’s arm felt around my waist during that last slow song.
Now I’m on the bathroom floor with my face pressed against the tile, the world shaking so hard I could argue for an earthquake. My teeth are chattering, and I’m drenched in sweat, which doesn’t make any sense when the shivers won’t stop.
I press the back of my hand to my forehead. I’m burning up. Shit.
Fevers are no joke when you’re immunocompromised. They aren’t a wait-and-see proposition. Your body doesn’t have the white blood cells to fight whatever is attacking it, and by the time you figure out what’s wrong, you could already be septic.
My oncologist drilled the protocol into me after I spiked a fever that landed me in the ER during my first round of chemo. Then, at the start of every new round of treatment, Jeremy made me repeat it back to him like a kid memorizing multiplication tables.
Given where I am in my cancer journey, the fact that my skin is on fire probably doesn’t mean anything.
It could be a virus, or even dehydration.
My body throwing a tantrum because I pushed it too hard on a trip that involved backpacking through mountains, a long-ass day of driving, followed by emotional devastation, and then closing down a bar like I’m a normal, healthy twenty-eight-year-old woman.
God, how I want it to be nothing.
But I can’t stand without the room tilting sideways. The headache has morphed from a dull throb behind my eyes into a vise grip around my entire skull. Hands shaking, I manage to retrieve the thermometer from the first-aid kit sitting on the vanity.
103.8. Not nothing.
For a few moments, I lay on the bathroom floor and let myself sink into the rage that simmers underneath the physical misery.
It’s exhaustingly unfair to be yanked back into the limitations of my body after a few days of forgetting it’s a problem.
For the first time in over a year, I felt like a person, not a patient.
It’s not a high bar, but I appreciated every moment of it.
And because of it, part of me wants to wait and see. Down a couple more ibuprofen and another glass of water, hoping the fever breaks on its own. That’s what a normal person would do. Tonight, more than anything, I want to be normal.
But I’m not. A fever is tap dancing across the mine field of my immune system.
I pull myself up and grip the edge of the bathroom counter until my vision stops swimming.
Then I shuffle into the bedroom and force myself to pull on pants and shove my feet in the Birks.
The thought of walking down the hall to Jensen’s room with bare legs right now feels like exposing too much when I already have to let him see me in this sickly state.
I move like someone three times my age, one hand trailing along the wall because without it I’d be on the floor again.
I knock twice and push the door open.
The room is dark, a sliver of moonlight cutting across the floor from where the blinds don’t quite meet.
I can make out Jensen’s shape under the covers.
He’s face down with one arm hanging off the side of the mattress.
Even with my fever-addled brain—or maybe because of it—I register how deeply my body connects this man with comfort. Such a slippery slope.
“Jensen.”
He stirs and pushes up on one elbow. I hear his breath catch before he huffs out a gravelly laugh. Last night, I crawled into his bed and fell asleep tucked against him like I’d been doing it for years. He thinks I’m here for that.
I hate that I’m not.
“Sloane.” His voice is thick with sleep. “Get over here.”
“I need to go to the hospital.”
Silence. Then the click of the bedside lamp, and light floods the room. My heart clenches at the way his expression goes blank, then shifts to something worse as he takes me in.
I must look like hell. I’m gripping the doorframe because letting go would mean sinking to the floor. My oversized T-shirt—his T-shirt—is soaked, and I’m shaking so hard I can hear my teeth rattling.
He’s out of bed before I fully process the look on his face, crossing the room in three strides. His hands grip my arms, steadying me, his palms rough against my burning skin.
“Jesus. You’re on fire.” He presses the back of his hand to my forehead, jaw tight. “When did it start?”
“I don’t know. I woke up shaking.” I hate that my voice sounds thin and reedy. “My temp is almost 104. With my history, that’s—”
“An emergency.” He finishes my sentence with a calm that doesn’t match what’s happening in his eyes. “We need to get you to Reno. It’s a bigger hospital, better equipped for…”
“Complicated patients,” I finish with a pathetic laugh, then swallow roughly. “Reno, it is.”
It takes him mere seconds to pull on jeans and a T-shirt, shove his feet into boots, and grab the flannel off the back of a chair. He doesn’t fumble or panic. He moves like this isn’t his first middle-of-the-night dash to the ER, a fact that sits in my belly like a stone.
His mother was sick. He took care of her. She died anyway.
And now his cancer-patient situationship is standing in the doorway burning up with a fever, and he’s grabbing his wallet and phone from the dresser with steady hands even though his eyes are telling an entirely different story.
“Should we wake Cody?” I ask.
“No. I’ll text him later.” He takes a blanket off the end of the bed, wrapping it around my shoulders. “Can you walk?”
“Of course I can walk.”
He studies me for a beat, and I can see him deciding whether I’m full of shit.
Then he puts his arm around my waist and guides me toward the stairs like I couldn’t find my way without him.
My legs are doing a truly pathetic job of holding me up, so pride feels like a luxury not worth the price in this moment.
We step outside, and my body doesn’t know how to reconcile the mountain cold air with the inferno under my skin. I shiver so violently that my teeth audibly clack together. Jensen’s arm tightens around me.
He opens the rental car’s passenger door, and I grab the handle to pull myself in, but I’ve got the strength of a tadpole, and my coordination is shot, so I just stand there gripping the door like a drunk person trying to look sober.
“I’ve got you,” he says, and then lifts me into the seat like I weigh nothing. It’s not dramatic like the sweeping movie gestures I’m a sucker for, but tears sting the back of my eyes, and my heart swells before the pain spiking through my head reminds me this is not a romantic interlude.
But when his fingers brush my collarbone as he buckles the seatbelt, the contact sends a shudder through me that has nothing to do with the fever.
“Stay awake,” he says. “Talk to me.”
“About what?” I ask like it’s a joke.
“Anything,” he answers, dead serious. Right. This is serious business.
He shuts the door, rounds the front of the SUV, and gets behind the wheel. The engine turns over, and he backs out of the driveway. “Let’s talk about earlier. How are you that bad at dancing?”
A ghost of a smile crosses my face. “Rude.”
A smile he blessedly returns as our headlights cut through the dark. “Accurate.”
The road from South Lake Tahoe to Reno winds through the mountains, mostly empty at this hour. The forest is thick on both sides, and the yellow center line blurs if I stare at it too long. Jensen fiddles with the vents, and I press my head against the cool glass of the window.
I should call Jeremy and let him activate whatever emergency medical network he undoubtedly set up for this scenario. He probably put an entire medical team on speed dial as soon as I hit town, with a spreadsheet to track it.
But I don’t want anyone but the man driving ten miles over the speed limit and checking on me every thirty seconds.
“Jensen.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s probably just a virus or dehydration or whatever. It doesn’t mean—”
“Sloane.” He sounds calm, but his knuckles are white on the steering wheel. “You don’t have to manage my feelings right now.”
The words slide beneath all my carefully constructed defenses, settling into the place I’ve been trying not to feel anything at all.
He’s right. I’m reassuring him so he won’t worry, or look at me like I’m breakable.
Through every stage of this cancer journey, I’ve been deploying my sunshine like a shield for everyone I love, and I’m so goddamn tired of it.
“I’m scared.”
The words feel like they cost me a year of my life. His hand finds mine across the center console, his grip almost too tight. Like he’s holding on for both of us.
“Me too,” he says.
The mountains fall away as we drop into the valley, and the lights of Reno appear in the distance. My head is splitting, and my body alternates between feeling on fire and like I just did a polar plunge. I lose track of the minutes as I try to hold onto consciousness.
Jensen’s thumb moves in slow circles on my hand, grounding me. When I start shivering so hard the blanket slips off my shoulders, he cranks up the heat and I see sweat dripping down his temples.
“Almost there,” he says, squeezing my trembling fingers.
We take a final turn, and the hospital appears, a beacon against the middle-of-the-night darkness.
The building feels familiar even though I’ve never been here.
All medical buildings look the same after a while.
He pulls up to the emergency entrance and puts the SUV in park.
“I’ll grab a wheelchair,” he says, already climbing out.
“I can walk,” I answer, the part of me that needs to prove I’m not the sick girl refusing to surrender.
I open the door, but my knees buckle as soon as my feet hit the asphalt. I grab the doorframe and manage to stay upright for about one second.
Jensen scoops me up before I sink to the ground and carries me toward the sliding glass doors of the ER.
I want to protest. To make it clear that I’ve been carrying myself through worse than a little fever for more than a year.
Most of my life really. But he’s holding me like there’s no chance of letting go.
My gaze tracks to his pulse hammering wildly in his neck, and I understand he needs this as much as I do. So I press my face against his shoulder and breathe in his warm cedar scent.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that hospital lighting makes everyone look half-dead even when they’re fine. I’m nowhere near fine. Jensen walks straight to the intake desk, and I can hear him talking, but the words are fuzzy, the world around me starting to slide in and out of focus.
A wheelchair appears, and Jensen lowers me into it. A nurse asks me questions I have trouble answering because my brain has decided that now would be the perfect time to go offline.
“Hey.” Jensen crouches in front of me, his face level with mine. “Stay with me, Sunshine.”
I force myself to focus, but that’s a mistake. Because when I really look at him, past the calm voice and steady hands, all I can see is the unguarded terror beneath. His whole face is tight with it, and I’ve never hated anything so much.
I didn’t want him to ever see me like this.
It’s the reason I ran after those two nights in Nashville.
Why I smiled through my trail exhaustion and took care of his blistered feet without mentioning how badly my own body hurt.
I wanted him to know me as strong. Capable. Alive in all the ways that mattered.
But the look on his face tells me this moment is rewriting something between us. And my last thought before everything goes dark is that I don’t know if we can ever go back.