a laugh. She climbed onto the hospital bed, wrapping her arms around me and a manic sort of noise left my throat.
Very funny. This isn’t real.
My head was a swirling mist, trying to pull me back down into the dark away from her. But I was going to cling to this perfect daydream for as long as I could.
I pushed my hand into her hair and felt her teardrops on my shoulder like hot wax, trickling over my flesh in a burning trail.
“Don’t cry, little one,” I murmured, drawing her closer as I stole a moment in this fantasy.
I drew her chin up, finding her mouth and stealing a kiss that tasted all too like reality. Her fingers knotted in my hair and I kissed her harder, biting her lip and enjoying the sweet illusion my mind had conjured. The dark was pulling me down again so I was gonna forge a memory I couldn’t forget even when I was lost to the nothingness.
“You said you love me, little one,” I spoke against her full lips, sea salt and sugar rolling over my tongue. “Can you imagine what a mess we’d have been together if that was true?” I laughed, delirium crawling through my mind.
“Ace,” she breathed against my mouth. “I’m so sorry I didn’t look for you. We thought you were dead.”
“But I am dead,” I said, a dark smile twisting up my lips before it flittered away again. “Shawn said I didn’t get a grave, is that true? I always thought gravestones were pointless anyway. Countless memories, loves and hates then you’re just reduced to a few words on a rock. What would my words be, little one? Here lies a failure?”
She released a cracked sob, her fingers trailing along my cheek. All too real, all too perfect. I hope she stays forever.
“You’ve got a lot of drugs in your system,” she choked out. “You’re not thinking clearly. The doctors had to operate. But you’re okay, Ace. You’re right here in Sunset Cove with me. You’re home.”
Home…
Home was where three boys and one girl sat in the sand with me. This wasn’t home, it was a place I couldn’t stay.
I stared into her blue eyes which were always so much brighter than mine. The sky didn’t compare to these eyes.
“And where are we going next? On a boat to dive at the Mariner’s shipwreck?” I mused, memories sliding through my mind of doing just that. I’d spent too much of my adulthood being a dull fuck. I missed going on adventures with my family, I missed swimming as deep into the ocean as I could before I was forced to come up for air.
“Is that where you want to go?” she asked, curling up against me.
“As long as you’re there,” I muttered, carving my fingers down each rivet of her spine.
My mind started to catch up a little more to everything and a deep chill set into my bones as I remembered Shawn. I tried to shut him out but he drove in deeper, the ghosts of every piece of me he’d killed now living beneath my flesh to haunt me.
“Shawn Mackenzie’s a demon,” I whispered and Rogue clutched me tighter. “I never believed in monsters until I faced him in the dark. And now’s he’s here...” I walked my fingers up to my chest, tapping them hard against the bone. “Here to stay.”
“Don’t say that,” she gasped, staring up at me from where she lay against my chest.
I stroked my thumb along her cheek and up to her temple. “But you know anyway, don’t you? Because now he’s left his mark on me, I can see him in you too.”
She swallowed hard, then nodded in admission, turning her head into my palm to lay a kiss there. Where her lips touched, the cold was burned away and for a moment I didn’t feel Shawn’s hold on me at all. But the second her mouth parted from my flesh, the cold dug in deeper and I could hear his laughter echoing in the back of my mind.
“That’s what he does,” I said. “He’s a master at burrowing beneath skin and bone, finding unhealed wounds and peeling them further apart to make room for him. But you survived him, little one.”
“You did too,” she said fiercely, her eyes watering again and I cocked my head as I gazed at her, not wanting to talk about Shawn anymore.
“You’re my biggest regret,” I said in a low voice, darkness curling through