Page 137 of Fate, Interrupted

The doctor is telling someone that the bullet nicked the liver.

Right.

I take a careful inventory of my current condition. There is a persistent and unwelcome burning in my left side. I’m foggy and groggy, and the top of my head is pounding. An IV is taped to my hand.

Shit. I should have told them to put it in my arm. I hate them in my hand.

It occurs to me that my preference of IV placement wasn’t an issue last night, because the last thing I remember is walking to the truck after the best burger of my life, the misty air, the warmth of Silas’s hand in mine.

Then the boom.

Is he here?

I don’t turn my head right away. I need one more second before I accept I’ve recently been shot. I’m entitled to that.

I turn my head.

Silas is three feet from the bed, in a chair that was clearly not designed for someone his size, forearms braced on his knees, eyes already on me.

Watching.

The chair he’s crammed into is two sizes too small. He’s been waiting for me to open my eyes. My chest gives a ridiculous little squeeze that has nothing to do with my liver situation.

Down the hall, a monitor beeps with the steady indifference of hospital equipment, and outside the window the sun is peeking above the horizon.

He says my name.

Just the one word, in the voice I have been holding onto, except lower now and rougher at the edges in a way that tells me everything about the night he’s spent in that chair.

“Hi,” I say.

My voice comes out smaller than intended—the anesthesia’s fault, I suppose, and a very dry throat.

He exhales once. Like he’s been holding his breath since the parking lot.

“Hi,” he says.

I try to take a breath that doesn’t involve my liver and mostly succeed. “So,” I say. “We didn’t make it to Paxton.”

He looks at me for a moment. “No,” he says. “We didn’t.”

“Close but no cigar.”

“Closer than I’d have liked,” he says. And I know they are the words of a man who has been sitting with a very precise linear measurement for most of the night.

“How close,” I say.

He leans forward slightly in the stupid chair. “The doctor said a quarter inch to the right, and we’d be having a different conversation.”

I absorb that.

A quarter inch. In most contexts, it means nothing. In this one, it means everything.

“Well,” I say finally. “Good thing I have excellent reflexes.”

He doesn’t say anything.

He looks at me like I’m the only thing in the room worth looking at, and he’s done pretending otherwise.