“You cried over me,” he says, like it still surprises him.
“Don’t get smug,” I reply sarcastically, but I lift his hand, rubbing my lips softly against his knuckles.
He smiles faintly. “I’m not. I just didn’t think I mattered…to you…like that.”
I glance at him, then back to our hands. “Well, I didn’t really think so either. I mean, I knew I cared, but not that I cared…like this. Not until I saw blood.”
He squeezes my fingers gently and hums, low in his throat. “I’ve never had this before.”
Neither have I. It settles in the pit of my stomach like heat.
We sit in silence for a while. The room hums around us—machines, distant nurses, the occasional overhead page. Outside the window, a helicopter cuts across the sky, barely audible through the double glass.
I don’t say anything until I have to.
“I thought you hated me. After that night. When I killed that man. You wouldn’t even look at me.” I think back to it, the way I lay in bed and curled up inside myself. That first night, though, right after it happened…Kellan had told me to do it, but I still saw shock in his eyes. Something that looked like disgust. It’s part of why I unraveled.
“I didn’t hate you,” he says. “I hated that you had to do it. That we didn’t protect you from it.”
“I wasn’t exactly protectable,” I mutter.
“Doesn’t matter,” he says. “You were still ours.”
The word hits different now than it did all those weeks ago.Ours.
Before, it meant possession. Prison. Control.
Now it sounds like belonging.
“I keep choosing this,” I say quietly. “Even when I could run.”
He nods. “That’s why it means something.”
We’re quiet again. Then he says, softly, “You don’t have to do it alone.”
“I know.”
He shifts again, slower this time. “If I don’t make it?—”
“You will.”
“Let me finish.” His voice is dry, but stern. “If I don’t, I want a real funeral. None of that cold Catholic misery. I want music. I want the good whiskey. No cheap shit.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re not dying.”
“Just covering my bases.”
I drop my head, resting my forehead against his hand. “You scared the hell out of me, Kellan.”
He strokes the back of my palm with his thumb. “Good. Then maybe you’ll stay. I’ve been telling you what I want, haven’t I?”
“To be a family?”
“That’s right.” He shifts, forcing me to look him in the eyes. He stretches out his neck to kiss me, and it’s desperate, uncontrolled. His tongue flicks across my bottom lip, and hebites at it. I gasp into his mouth. “Is that to much to ask? To let us all have you, Caroline? To be touched like this by all of us every night?”
My heart stills in my chest. I don’t know how to answer that. I don’t have to think too hard about it, though, because after a few minutes, his breath steadies. His grip loosens slightly, but he doesn’t let go.
After a long time of watching him sleep, I slip out of the room into the hallway where I find Declan sitting on a chair by the vending machine and staring at a wall. He isn’t reading a book or passing the time on his phone. He’s just…staring. Busying himself with nothingness the way only Declan can. “You ready?” he asks me gently.
