49. Your Here -Libby
Forty Nine
Your Here -Libby
Iwoke with a dull, pounding headache pressing against the inside of my skull, and an awful, disoriented heaviness. My body had dragged itself back to consciousness, but the rest of me hadn’t agreed to follow, leaving me stranded somewhere between sleep and waking, unable to place myself.
For a second, I didn’t know where I was.
Too still.
Too quiet.
Then, without warning, the night came back—not as memory, but as sensation: the smell of it, the cold of it, the specific weight of what I’d done pressing down all at once.
The dock. The horde pouring across the lot. The screaming tangling together into a single, ragged sound that still echoed inside my skull.
Finn standing on the shore.
Finn turning back.
Finn going under. Gray hands, snapping teeth, the weight of them—and then nothing. Just the place where he’d been.
Gone.
Something collapsed in my chest. A broken, animal sound tore from me, one I didn’t recognize as my own voice until it was already over.
I squeezed my eyes shut so hard that colors burst behind my eyelids.
It didn’t help. The memory played anyway: his eyes finding mine through the chaos, one hand raised—not waving, not reaching, just held up, like he was asking me to wait.
The boat pulling away. The water opening up between us.
My voice tearing itself apart on his name until there was nothing left of it—and still the water closed over him, indifferent, complete.
My throat tightened, and the words were a strangled whisper in my own head: I never told him I loved him.
The truth of that settled over me and pressed in.
I groaned and shifted against the mattress, pressing my face deeper into the pillow—
And froze.
There. Around my waist.
An arm.
Heavy. Warm. The weight of a living thing.
My heart lurched—one hard, violent thud.
Panic surged, instant and electric, flooding my limbs with adrenaline that burned away the grief and the fog, and the headache in one blinding flash. My body reacted before my brain caught up.
I twisted hard, breath catching in my throat, my hands already coming up—
And came face to face with him.
Silver eyes.
Those silver eyes. Pale and storm-colored, mapped in stolen glances, cataloged in a part of my brain I hadn’t known existed before him—like the exact shade the ocean turns just before everything goes wrong. Eyes I had grieved. Eyes I had said goodbye to.
They looked back at me now.
Clear and real and right there, inches from my face, framed by dark lashes and the bruised, exhausted skin of a man who had been through something terrible and come out the other side of it breathing.
He smiled.
“Hey…” he said, and his voice came out rough with sleep and something deeper.
My brain refused to process it.
“No—” I whispered.
I blinked. Hard. Squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again, bracing for the cruelty of waking up twice.
Still there. Still looking at me.
Warm skin. Solid muscle. The steady drum of a pulse beneath my fingertips.
“Finn?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s me. I’m here.”
Something between a yelp and a sob escaped me.
His hand found my face, warm and rough. His thumb moved once across my cheek, then he simply held me steady until the world stopped tilting.
Then he kissed me, a movement that seemed to cost him something.
It wasn’t like before, not the frantic claiming in the chaos.
This was slow, almost hesitant; the press of his mouth soft and unsteady.
He tasted of salt and exhaustion, but it was a kiss that promised time—as if, even beaten and broken, the only thing that mattered was proving he’d made it back.
His lips moved against mine with a quiet certainty that completely undid something inside me. It was as if he’d kept himself alive just for this.
His fingers curled into my hair, and something in me gave way completely—some last, careful thing I’d been holding onto without knowing it.
His arm tightened around my waist, dissolving the remaining distance between us.
Against my chest, I felt the slow, steady rise of his breathing—alive, alive, alive—and beneath it, the quiet drumbeat of his heart, unhurried, as though it had all the time in the world.
I stopped holding myself upright.
I pulled back just far enough to see him.
My hands were already on his face—I didn’t remember putting them there—palms cupping his jaw, fingers finding a gash above his temple I hadn’t noticed before. Rough stubble. A bruise darkening along his chin. The particular, irreplaceable warmth of a pulse.
I couldn’t stop looking at him. I kept tracing the same lines, the same angles, the same small damages—not cataloging, not verifying, just unable to stop, the way you can’t stop pressing a bruise. He was here. I couldn’t look away, terrified that the moment I did, he’d be gone again.
“You’re—” My voice shook so hard that tears started to pour out of me. “You’re here—you’re actually—”
“I’m here,” he said, and his forehead came to rest against mine, his nose brushing my nose, his breath warm against my lips. His hand stayed cradled against my face, thumb stroking slowly back and forth across my cheekbone. “Right here. Not going anywhere.”
“How—” The word tangled in a sob I couldn’t suppress. “I saw you—I saw them—you went down and I couldn’t—the boat kept moving and I screamed for them to go back and nobody could and you just—”
“I know,” he said softly. “I know.”
Those two words, and my throat closed up before I could stop it.
Not quietly. Not gracefully. The kind of crying where your throat locks up between each wave and your chest keeps heaving even when there’s nothing left—the sounds coming out of me ugly and animal, my body doing something I had no part in deciding.
“You died!” I cried, my fist connecting with his chest. “You were gone—I watched them take you, and I couldn’t do anything—I just stood there on that boat and watched, and,”
“I know,” he said again, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me close.
One hand pressed my head against his chest, the other locked across my back, holding me together because I couldn’t do it myself.
“Hey—hey. I’ve got you. I’m right here. Just breathe.
That’s it. Just breathe with me. I’m not going anywhere. ”
“I thought—” my voice broke. “I thought I lost you before I could even tell you—before I got the chance to—”
He pulled back, just enough.
His hands found my face, both of them this time, tilting my chin up until I had no choice but to look at him. His eyes held mine.
“Tell me what?” he asked.
I hesitated.
The words caught for a heartbeat. Some old, frightened part of me recoiled from the edge.
Then his thumb moved across my cheek. I looked at him—really looked—and felt that fear release its grip.
“I love you,” I said.
His eyes stayed on mine. I felt my chin trembling and didn’t try to stop it.
“I’ve been lying here thinking about how you’d never—” My throat closed around the rest. I swallowed. “How you’d never get to hear it. And I just kept—I couldn’t stop thinking about that. Just that. Just you, not knowing.”
His thumb pressed gently against my lips.
“Hey,” he said, his voice carrying a steadiness that anchored me even as everything else inside me came apart. “You’re saying it now, love.”
I let out a shaky, fractured breath that fogged against his thumb, my chest still heaving, my heart still hammering, my eyes still blurred with tears that kept coming no matter how many times he wiped them away.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “I am.”
He watched me for a long moment, his thumbs still moving. Something in his face changed, and then he leaned in until his forehead found mine again, until I could feel his breath warm against my lips, until there was nothing left between us but the small, charged distance.
“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with this,” he admitted, his voice rough and honest. “I’ve spent my whole life not getting attached to anyone.
Kept things simple. Kept things temporary.
Convinced myself that meant I had it figured out—that everyone else just made it complicated for no reason, and I’d found the cheat code. ”
“Clearly, that worked out great.”
“Yeah,” he said, the corner of his mouth turning up just barely. “Stellar results across the board.”
His thumb traced along my jaw, tilting my face up slightly.
“But somewhere along the way,” he went on, the humor fading from his voice, leaving something quieter in its place, “I got attached anyway.”
“When I stood on that shore,” he said, his voice dropping further, “and looked up to see you on that boat—to see your face, to witness what watching me go down did to you—”
He exhaled slowly, his breath unsteady, pressing his forehead harder against mine.
“It destroyed me, Libby. Not the dead. Not the hands. None of it. Your face. That’s what almost killed me. That’s what I couldn’t survive—not the thought of dying, but the thought of leaving you.”
My hands tightened against his face, fingertips pressing into the stubble along his jaw. I held him close, feeling my breath grow shallow and uneven, my eyes burn, and something in my chest pull taut like a wire about to snap—yet I didn’t look away.
“Good,” I said softly, my voice barely holding together. “Because it destroyed me too.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I figured. I saw it on your face then. I saw it just now when you woke up.”
“Don’t,” I whispered, my eyes closing. “Don’t make me think about it. I can’t go back there. Not right now.”
“Okay,” he said immediately. “Okay.”
His hand slid back into my hair, pulling me closer.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said against my forehead, his lips brushing my skin between words.
I opened my eyes and searched his face—every line, every shadow, every flicker of light in those silver eyes.
“You can’t promise that,” I whispered. “Not now. Not in this world.”
“No,” he admitted. His honesty—the refusal to lie, to offer a comfort he couldn’t guarantee—was stark. “I can’t. I can’t promise you the world won’t try to take me again. I can’t promise things won’t go sideways. I can’t promise I’ll always make it back.”
His hand tightened in my hair, just slightly, just enough.
“But I can promise I’m going to fight like hell to stay,” he said.
“Every time. Every single time. I will fight anything—dead, living, the ocean, whatever stands between me and getting back to you—and I will not stop fighting until I physically cannot move. That’s what I can promise.
And I need you to know that it’s more than I’ve ever promised anyone in my entire life. ”
My eyes burned, my throat closed, and new tears spilled over, a joy so sharp and sudden it almost hurt as much as the loss had.
“Don’t scare me like that again,” I whispered into his neck, my lips moving against his pulse point, each word a warm brush of air against his skin.
He pressed a kiss into my hair, his lips lingering, his breath stirring the strands.
“No promises,” he said quietly, and I could hear the faint ghost of a smile in his voice. “But I’ll try.”
I pulled back just enough to meet his gaze again, my hand rising to cup the side of his face. My palm covered the bruise along his cheekbone, and my thumb traced the edge of the cut above his brow with careful, aching gentleness.
“You better,” I said, my voice still trembling but now underpinned by something steadier—something solid, something that would endure. “Because I just told you I love you, and I’m not taking it back. And I’m not saying it again to a grave. You hear me?”
He smiled.
His hand covered mine where it rested against his cheek, his fingers curling around mine, pressing my palm closer. It was as if he craved the contact, as if he’d spent twenty miles in the dark dreaming of this exact moment.
“I hear you,” he said softly.
His silver eyes held mine, steady and full of something he’d spent a lifetime refusing to carry.
“And Libby?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you too.”