Page 162 of Ghost Ribbon

I wanted to lie in his bed and breathe in his smell and feel his heartbeat under my ear and pretend, for a few more days, a few more hours, a few more minutes, that my days weren’t counted.

That I wasn’t ending.

When they were done, Alexei drove me back home and I was grateful he didn’t let them keep me there. I know my parents wanted to, but if I would be there I’d just be miserable and I didn’t want to be locked in a hospital in my final moments. I wanted to be with Alexei. And he knew this and respected it.

God, he was perfect.

When we arrived, Alexei helped me out of the car, then we went inside.

I sat on the bed.

He knelt and undid my shoelaces.

I looked down at him. I could see his shoulders were tense. He was barely eating or sleeping lately. He seemed fine from an outsider’s perspective, but I know he wasn’t - not just his physical state, but the pain I see behind his eyes is unbearable sometimes. I wish I could have reached inside him and pulled the pain out with my bare hands. I hated watching him suffer more than I had ever hated anything.

“I don’t know how to fix it,” I mumbled.

He looked up at me with those green eyes that had been in my dreams since I was a child, and I wanted to protect him.

“Fix what?”

I reached down and caressed his face.

My hand found his cheek, my fingers tracing along his jaw, across the line of his cheekbone, over the scar near his temple that I had noticed the first time I fell in front of him in a hallway and had memorized through months of proximity.

“Your pain…. I don’t know what to do to make it better.”

A tear fell on my cheek.

I see how much he suffers.

How could I miss the evidence of what this was doing to him?

He was suffering because of me and I wish I could have taken his suffering into myself until there was nothing left of it in him.

He held my palm against his cheek and turned his head slightly to kiss it. “I’m okay,” the words were a lie.

“As long as you’re here,” he continued, “I’m okay.”

“And when I won’t be here…?”

What happens to him when there is no me left to come home to?

What happens to all that pain when there is no longer a body for him to hold through it?

What happens to all that love - the immense, all-consuming thing he built around me - when I am no longer here to receive it?

Where will he put it when I’m gone?

“Don’t say that.” His voice changed. It sounded violent. “Ever again,” he continued.

I swallowed. The lump in my throat was so large I couldn’t breathe around it. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

I leaned forward and kissed his head. “I’m sorry,” I said again, against his hair. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—I’m sorry.”

He leaned up and kissed my head in return. His lips pressed against the top of my skull, against the place where my hair parted. “It will be okay.”

It will be okay.