He knows.
I stand rooted to the spot as he closes the remaining distance between us.
“Hey,” he murmurs. The corners of his lips twitch into the barest ghost of a smile.
“Hi,” I whisper, unsure what else to say. I feel completely gobsmacked, like someone just told me that two plus two really does equal five.
My eyes dip to the obnoxiously-sized (and obviously expensive) flowers held close to his chest.
“For your mom,” he says in response to my unasked question, not even bothering to dance around the subject. “How is she?”
I try to answer him—to apologize for lying for so long—but my confusion wins out over logic, and what actually comes out is a very ungrateful sounding, “What are you doing here?Howdid you…” My throat closes around the rest of my words as that panic I felt yesterday when I saw him at my house once again claws at my insides.
Now, instead of hearing that persistenthe’s herein my head, all I hear is an unending string ofhe knows.
“Ronnie,” Damian answers point-blank. “She texted me and told me what happened.”
An unexpected and absolutely ludicrous jealousy twists my stomach in knots. “I… How did she get your number?”
Damian shrugs. “Guadalajara? From the eight times she made you check in with her, I presume. She must have still had it saved in her phone.”
My lips twitch. “As I recall, it was three max.”
He snorts. “Per day, maybe.”
That fleeting pang of insecurity fades, and I release a shaky breath. Ronnie would never go after Damian—or anyone I was sleeping with or remotely interested in, for that matter—and I have to believe, after everything we’ve been through, Damian wouldn’t go after her. Unless I’ve read this entire thing between us wrong, and in that case, I?—
My brain screeches to a halt mid-thought as my eyes catch on Damian’s right hand. His knuckles are mottled with blackish-purple bruises, like he hit it against something hard. Like a wall.
Or someone’s jaw.
“What happened to your hand?” I gasp, reaching out and carefully prying his hand away from the bouquet so I can get a better look at it. He relents to my touch without a fight, though Inotice him wince in my peripheral vision when I brush a thumb over his swollen skin.
“Oh, this?” he asks with a dismissivepfft. “It’s nothing, just the result of areallyintense game of rock-paper-scissors. Spoiler alert: paper won.” When I give him a flat look, he responds with that annoyingly charming grin of his.
“Sounds like a totally real thing that happened,” I deadpan.
Damian nods. “Absolutely. You should’ve seen it.”
My only response is a scoff, and then we fall into a silence so thick and all-encompassing it seems to engulf the entire waiting room. In it, I hear all the unspoken words between us.
I stare down at Damian’s hand to avoid his gaze, my thumbs still mindlessly tracing soothing circles across his bruised skin. I don’t even realize he’s leaned in toward me until I feel the warm brush of his breath on my face.
“How are you holding up?”
My thumb stills. “I…don’t know how to answer that,” I admit. “Or what to say to you about…” That swell of familiar panic expands in my chest, and instinctively, I drop his hand. I’m about to take a step back, to put some space between us, when he stops me, reaching out with his injured hand and fervently grasping my fingers, even though the movement must be excruciating for him.
“Hey.” His voice is a contradiction—hard but soft. A warning wrapped in the warm embrace of a consolation. “You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.”
I risk a glance up at him through my lashes, and the look he gives me makes my chest tighten.
I’ve never had anyone look at me like that—with such affection and understanding, as if, having felt my pain himself, he would do anything in the world to take it away so I don’t have to.
Fresh tears creep in at the edges of my vision as he leans in a little more, just enough to say in a voice only loud enough for me to hear, “But if youdoneed or want to talk, or you just want to cry on someone’s shoulder or scream into their shirt, or if you want to do nothing at all but sit here in silence and eat your weight in waiting room M&Ms, I’m here. I’ll be whatever you need—that ear, that shoulder, that shirt, or the guy who gets you as many dollar bills as you need to empty that vending machine over there.” He jerks his chin toward the vending machine in question, and I choke out a wet laugh before meeting his gaze again. When I do, he says the very words I need to hear. Words that make me feel like my heart might explode. “I’mhere,” he promises. “And I’m not going anywhere.”
My bottom lip wobbles.
You can’t say things like that to me,I nearly let slip. Because when he does, it makes me want to do something really stupid like fall in love with him.
