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The sight destroys whatever remains of my heart.

His next breath catches. Ryan clears his throat, but it doesn’t restore the strength to his voice. His hands begin shaking around mine, and the sight terrifies me more than his tears. Ryan’s hands have remained steady through fights, loss, surgery, and every moment when the rest of him was coming apart.

Ryan Decker does not shake.

Now they tremble because he is asking me for the one thing he swore he would never beg me to give him again.

“Fight for me.”

His voice breaks completely.

The words are barely louder than the car idling behind him, stripped of every command and trace of El Cuchillo. Ryan looks terrified, and I know exactly why. He isn’t asking me to fight for an idea of us or the love we have already admitted survives everything. He is asking me to fight for him. The foster kid who learned nobody stayed unless he made himself useful. The boy who became his own family, protection, and home because trusting anyone else meant handing them the weapon that would eventually be used against him. The man who stood in Lance’s study and asked me to say he mattered, only to watch my eyes fall to the floor.

He is giving me that weapon again.

For fifteen months, Ryan has insisted he needs nothing from me. He has protected himself with distance, silence, women, anger, and a city far enough away that I couldn’t reach him. Even this weekend began as something he controlled, with rules designed to make certain he could leave before I had another chance to choose fear over him.

Now he stands in front of me with tears on his face and shaking hands around mine, asking the woman who abandoned him when he needed her most to become the person who comes back for him.

“Not only us,” he says, forcing the words through a throat that keeps closing around them. “Me, Charm. Fight for me. Make me believe I can trust you to protect my place beside you when I’m not standing there demanding it. Please. Hazlo por mí, por favor.”

The final plea nearly disappears. Ryan has roared at me, begged me in Spanish, and broken apart while refusing to let me see it. I have never heard him sound as frightened as he does asking me to love him bravely enough that he can stop surviving it.

Tears move down his face while he holds my hands between us. He looks furious with every one of them, but he doesn’t release me to wipe them away.

“Don’t fight my boundaries. Don’t fight every answer that hurts or make me your enemy when I can’t give you what you want fast enough. Fight whatever inside you keeps turning love into something I have to survive.” His grip tightens. “Do the work and come find me because I want a life with you, Charm. I want mornings, arguments, books, hockey, your clothes taking over my closet, and your fucking coffee beside mine. I want every loud, difficult, beautiful year we were supposed to have.”

His forehead lowers against mine. The fight holding back his tears finally loses, and his next words leave him with the fear of a man placing his entire future into hands that once dropped it.

“Mi bebé, mi hada, mi chica, mi amor… te quiero conmigo para siempre.”

A sob tears through me. “I’ll fight for you.”

Ryan’s eyes close.

“I won’t ask you to believe another promise tonight,” I tell him. “I’ll show you.”

His mouth crashes into mine.

The kiss contains every version of Ryan I have ever known. The man who taught me to read until literature could hurt me. The boy who remembered a drunken conversation about carnival lights. The lover who begged me in a language I couldn’t understand. The furious stranger who cut me from his life because loving me stopped being safe. His hands frame my face while mine fist in the front of his shirt, directly over the word he carried beneath it for fifteen months.

Ryan kisses me without restraint. Love, anger, terror, and hope move through his mouth until I cannot separate one from another. I taste tears against his lips and feel his body shudder when I pull him closer.

The kiss feels like a beginning trapped inside a goodbye.

Ryan finally tears his mouth from mine. His forehead presses against me while we struggle for air, and his thumbs move once across my cheeks.

“I’ve gotta go.”

Every part of me screams no.

I make myself nod.

Ryan kisses my forehead, then steps away before either of us loses the strength to let him. He opens the back door of the Corolla and lowers himself into the seat.

His eyes find mine through the open doorway.

“I love you,” I say.