I already missed rubbing my palm over those jaws. They were shadowed and scratchy looking, like the stress from tonight had made the hairs go awry and stand on end.
“He’s fine.” Caroline assured him. “That’s just a symptom of the rib fracture.”
“So they’re broken,” Drew said, his voice calm and deadly.
Well, that wasn’t a good sound.
“Not completely broken. Just cracked. That’s a good thing. It will make the healing a little faster and will cause less complications.”
“What about his head?” Drew asked, still watching me. His eyes were hungry, but they were also focused. He wasn’t looking at me so much as measuring me, like he was trying to decide if I really was okay.
“No concussion,” Caroline replied.
“Told ya,” I grunted.
The sound of my surly voice snapped his eyes to my face. Everything else fell away when he looked at me like that—with his heart in his eyes.
It hurt, but it was the kind of pain I’d become addicted to.
Never ever had the words I love you so much it hurts been truer.
The push-and-pull effect I always felt with him took center stage and confusion tugged at my heart strings.
Caroline cleared her throat and stepped up toward Drew. “You should probably stay with him tonight. Watch him, you know, in case of complications.”
Right in the center, in the deepest part of the blue, Drew’s eyes flared. The tug-of-war turned in his favor, and I knew I’d lost this round. At least for tonight.
Caroline had just given him an excuse to stay close a little bit longer.
She’d given me one, too.
Hell. Even though I knew I didn’t need a babysitter, tonight I wasn’t going to argue. I was content to lose. It really wasn’t a loss anyway; it was a reprieve.
“I’ll watch him,” Drew vowed, his voice slightly husky. When his eyes left me and went to her, the muscles in the back of my neck relaxed a little. “I’ll call you if anything seems to get worse.”
“Call anytime.” Caroline agreed, giving me a parting glance. I could almost see the smile in her eyes. She thought she’d been clever setting us up for some time alone. She was, because neither Drew nor I would call her out on it. If we did, we wouldn’t be able to pretend.
I was so incredibly tired of pretending.
On her way out, she shut the door behind her. It closed with an audible click.
The two of us stared at each other, neither moving.
Finally, his chest seemed to deflate with pent-up sentiment. “You broke up with me. I don’t break up with you. Everyone in this house knows we’re more than friends. Your beat-up face makes me want to pound a bottle of vodka—”
“Isn’t that a happy little list.” I was sarcastic because showing my true emotions in that moment made me feel far too vulnerable.
Drew shuffled all the stuff he was holding into one hand and held up the other, stopping me. “Can we just forget it all tonight?” His voice was weary. He sounded exactly the way I felt. “Can it just be like it was before, at least until morning?”
“How was it, Forrester?” I whispered.
A glutton for punishment. That was me. I knew exactly what it was like between us. It was being a part of something so much bigger than yourself. It was that feeling of rightness a person got when something settled in their gut. This wasn’t going to make anything any easier.
It would only make it harder.
“It was complete.”
I lifted my eyes back to his.
Those three words almost matched another three he said to me just hours before. I wasn’t sure which were better. I love you or it was complete.
They both knocked me off center. They both grounded me.
His feet were silent on the carpet when he stepped forward. As he spoke, he set down the items in his hands, one by one.
“Just me and you. Just this room. Just the dark and the sound of your breathing. Us. Together.”
I swallowed. My God, I want that.
“It doesn’t change anything.” I warned him.
“You wanna have it out?” Drew challenged without heat. “We will. And I’ll win. Losing you is not an option.”
I tipped my head toward the ceiling and closed my eyes. My face hurt. My chest hurt. My head hurt… Losing you is not an option.
Suddenly, he was beside me, filling up his side of the bed. The heat he radiated and the familiar scent of leather and the Fastback was like the first taste of home a person got after too long spent away. My chin angled down when I looked at him, my eyes thirstily gulping up every feature.
“Here,” he said quietly and lifted a wrapped ice pack between us. Gently, he pressed it against my swollen eye, and I expelled a sigh of relief.
“That feels good,” I murmured, allowing the cold pressure to combat some of the burning tightness.
“I need this tonight.” The naked candor in his voice had every cell in my body enraptured. “I need you.”
He used the only thing in this entire universe that could sway me.
Him.