* * *
“Bastian?”
I picked my head up off the desk, awake in an instant when I heard Jackson’s voice. I didn’t remember falling asleep. My face remembered, since it now had a pen indentation at the edge of my cheek.
Oh. Yes. I had “put my head down to rest my eyes”. We all know howthatends.
Jackson’s eyes were open and clear as a summer sky in Wyoming, before the storms blow in and churn the world into a tempest. He’d awakened for real this time, actual consciousness with awareness behind it. A quick glance at his vitals showed all systems normal, green across the board, a human male in pretty decent condition despite his close call.
I stood up, rubbing at the pen line on my cheek, and hurried to the bed. “Jackson? How are you feeling?”
“Feel like I was shot at and missed, and shit at and hit,” he said in a rough voice. He glanced at the table next to the bed hopefully.
I grabbed a plastic tumbler of water from nearby, one with a straw, and helped him to sip. “I can’t attest to the second one, but I can tell you, when you were shot at? They didn’t miss.”
He wheezed a chuckle and winced as the action jostled sore bits of flesh. Most of his wounds had healed, but they’d done so with him totally still. His body hadn’t moved for weeks, and it lodged complaints about the whole “motion” thing.
“I remember that.” He struggled to sit up. I pressed the button to raise the head of his bed slowly, so as to allow his body and blood flow time to adjust. “We were protecting the installation. There was more resistance than we expected. I got hit, but my team hadn’t finished pulling back.”
“Yes. You decided to snort Martian soil. Not what I would put up my nose, for future reference.” Gently, I helped him take another sip of water, then set the cup back down.
Once he swallowed it, he looked around the darkened room. “Where are we? We on Earth? How’d I get back here?”
“We’re at Mars Base Bravo.”
Jackson’s head snapped back to face me. “We’re onMars?But… Butyou’rehere. You’rehere.”
I listened as the emphasis wandered with his realization. “Yes. I’m on Mars. You were dying, Jackson. They called me to-Oof!”
Pure emotion gave Jackson a surprising strength. He grabbed my arm and pulled me against him, bent at an awkward angle, with the rail of the bed biting into my midsection, and me not caring at all. I felt his torso shake with a sob.
“Bastian. Oh, God, Bastian. Babe. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry,” he said, words muffled by my shoulder.
I wrapped my arms around him, careful not to tangle in his wires and IV line but still desperate to hold him. “It’s all right,” I said, with no idea what else to say.
“It’s not,” he said, and crushed me tighter against him. “It is not all right. I treated you like shit. I should never have doubted you. You’re not like that, babe. You’re not a cheater. Fuck, you’re not Owen, and you were right. I kept making you pay for what that shitheel did. You deserved better, and I didn’t give it to you. I’m so, so fucking sorry.”
He was so warm. Warm, and real, andalive, demanding to hold me. His heartbeat thudded near my ear, a strong and regular rhythm I’d feared I would never feel against my face again. The last piece of tension inside me unwound since now, it had proof. Jackson had lived.
Jackson still loved me.
His grip slackened enough for me to pull back. Refusing to leave contact with me, he cupped my cheek in one hand, then let it slide down my arm so he could hold my hand. I hooked a chair with one foot and pulled it over so I could sit there, hand in hand, with my husband.
My husband, who looked like a the most contrite son of a dog I had ever seen. “I don’t know if you can ever forgive me,” he said. “I fucked everything up good. Laramie- I told you Laramie made comments about you. Little slurs I wrote off. You know. I’d tell myself, ‘That’s just Laramie. My brother. Worried about me. Too protective, but it’s because he cares.’”
I nodded. “I found that pretty frustrating, to be honest.”
“I don’t know how you put up with it.” Jackson’s gaze dropped with shame. “I should have stood up for you. My family, they raised us to think it was us against the world. Sadlers versus the universe. Of course they were doing it to protect me! It would take time, that was all. They needed to get to know you. And you, you put up with it for my sake. Didn’t you.”
Another nod. “I tried to be patient.”
“You gave me more chances than I ever deserved.” He heaved a sigh that carried with it a weight of guilt. “I let Laramie keep right on saying those things. Then they started trickling into my head. Like Hamlet’s uncle, dripping poison into his brother’s ear.”
“Did- Did you just reference Shakespeare? Is that not some kind ofnerdery?”
“You shut your piehole,” he said with a smirk. It feltso goodto tease him and hear him tease me back. “I can hold my own on trivia nights.”
“I stand corrected. Pray, continue.”