I didn’t realize I was crying until he swiped a tear from under my eye and kissed his fingertip like it was precious.
“I need you more than you’ll ever know,” I whispered.
His head touched mine, a graze of his lips as I felt him thrust deep, taking me with him down a road that would change us forever. “Good.”
I let go.
Of not just my fear.
But of my first love.
Chapter Thirty-Five
JULIAN
I slept so hard that I woke up disoriented, until I felt Keaton’s hot mouth on me, and then I just thanked God I was alive.
I gripped the sheets while she woke me up in the best physical way possible and nearly wept when she swirled her tongue.
“Shit.” My hips bucked while my balls seized, ready to combust. I wanted to be inside her, I wanted her every way I could have her, but I couldn’t find it in myself to even move. “Keaton, I’m going to—”
“Kinda busy . . .” Her head popped up.
And then I was done for.
Completely screwed and so damn happy I wanted to throw a parade for her and her mouth.
Keaton’s head poked out from under the duvet. “Oh, hey, you’re awake.”
“I’m building a shrine to your mouth,” I admitted in a sleep-filled voice.
She beamed. “Only if I can build one to your abs.” She walked her fingers up my chest. I grabbed them and kissed the back of her hand then tucked her next to me.
Where she belonged.
“So . . .” I toyed with her fingers. “I figured we should work on the book for a bit, see how far we can get, and then order in.”
“You don’t have to order in. I mean we don’t.” Keaton looked up at me tentatively. “I decided last night, even though it makes me sick, to just keep living my life. They don’t know my pain, my struggles. They don’t know what I feel. If it gets really bad I’ll address it, if not . . .” Her voice trailed off. I could tell it wasn’t a flippant thing.
“I’m okay with lying low,” I said seriously. “And you haven’t been feeling good anyway.”
“True.” Her fingertips trailed my jaw. “How about we just wait and see?”
“I’m okay with that.” My hand slid down to her ass and cupped her. “But I think I may need a few more minutes to wake up.”
She rolled her eyes.
And then I gripped her by the ass and turned her to her stomach, moving my body over her. “Just a few minutes.”
“Of suffocation?” she teased.
I bit her ear and tugged. “Pleasure.”
“Yes . . .” It was breathless, needy, it was all for me.
In the last days, there was a lot of silence. It’s not what you see on TV, where everything looks clean, like you’re playing this waiting game until something works and kills the cancer. It’s constant pain, constant wondering, questioning. It’s not pretty. Death is the end of something that shouldn’t die in the first place, so it’s hard to watch, it’s hard to understand, it’s just hard all around. Noah always tried to smile for me. Even when he couldn’t speak I knew how he felt because he had a little notepad he wrote on.
I stared down at the note he’d just written and rolled my eyes. “Get naked? Really?”
He just shrugged and scribbled a horrible picture of what looked like naked stick figures, one had a giant penis, and the other had breasts that fell past her waist.
“Drawing isn’t your strong suit.”
He scribbled something else down and showed it to me. The penis had grown, fantastic.
He made a choking noise that sounded like laughter, but when I looked up, he was actually choking, starting to turn blue.
I hit the call button, freaked out, only to get shoved out of the way when the nurse came running in.
“He just started choking!” I said, my cheeks stained with tears. “He wasn’t even eating!”
“Anaphylaxis,” the nurse stated as she grabbed something from a crash cart and inserted it into his IV. They said words I didn’t understand and ran around his bed poking him, keeping him alive, and all I kept thinking was, It’s okay to let go.
Because this wasn’t living.
It wasn’t.
We later found out that he had an allergic reaction to a new medication, and because his body was so tired of fighting, it reacted as if it was attacking his system.
Just one more drug he could no longer take.
That was the beginning of the end, that night.
We both lay awake staring at each other. He wasn’t writing anything down, but he didn’t need to. Instead, he was playing with my hair, rubbing my arm, making sure I knew that he was awake, that he was there.
And because I needed him to know it was okay, because I loved him, I asked him the hard question. “Noah, are you fighting because of me or because of you?”