Page 75 of When We Had Forever
“Four feet’s still plenty enough to kill you, but if I’d had all that gear weighing me down, it might’ve been more. I could’ve ended up ten feet down, and then Alex might not have gotten to me in time. As it was, I probably only had another few minutes. So in hindsight, yeah, that moment saved me. Thosewordsdid. And they never would’ve been in my head in the first place if not for that moment outside the caves.”
The back of my neck prickles. This is already so much more significant than my story. “And after that? Did you manage to let go of the past, too?”
His gritty laugh warms my ear. “That? Fuck no. Here I am, three years later, still hanging on to all my bullshit. I doubt I’ll ever figurethatout. Living through an avalanche was easier. Way easier.”
He goes quiet. In the silence, the pull of his breath comes and goes like a reassuring tide.
Or a turquoise ocean, my mind supplies.
I pass a hand over my eyes. How strange that I can picture him so precisely when he has no clue who he’s talking to. It’s even stranger that I’ve spent well over a decade loving the hue of his hair, the angle of his nose, those delicate fingers. The sound of him breathing.
And the strangest thing of all? I feel like I know him. I can’t tell if it’s the voice, or the way he’s just shared without trying to make himself sound noble, or something else entirely. But listening to him talk this way feels undeniably intimate, as if he’s touching me on some deep level Michael learned to shy away from.
It emboldens me to say exactly what I’m thinking.
“There’s something I want to know,” I say. “Something I’ve wondered about ever since I saw that issue ofNational Geographic.”
“Yeah? What’s that?” His tone gains an edge, a sort of guarded hope I don’t know what to make of.
“What were you thinking about? You’d almost just died, but it looks like you want to say something. Like you’re trying to give someone a message.”
He makes a pained sound. “Jesus.” More ice clinking.
Probably not water, then.
“Nobody’s ever asked me that before,” he says. “People always want to know what it’s like to be buried alive. What it feels like to drown on dry land. Whether I saw a light, did my life flash before my eyes, blah, blah, blah, all that crap. Nobody’s ever asked what I wanted to say when I came back.”
I flush, feeling suddenly ridiculous. “Right. Sorry. That’s probably a stupid question. I’m sure you weren’t thinking about anything but survival.”
“No,” he says quietly. “I did have something to say. It’s just that out of the thousands of people who’ve seen that picture, you’re the only one who’s ever noticed.”
I wait. My breath thins to nothing.
“The truth is...” I hear an audible, scraping swallow. “I was thinking abouther. How I’d never see her face again, never touch her skin, never wake up and breathe the smell of her hair. Never hear her laugh. Never piss her off by accident again, either. No matter how badly I wanted those things, it was impossible, and it didn’t actually hit me until that avalanche did. And then I realized it was over, all of it, and all I could think of was how badly I wished I could get to her, wherever she was. Like...like I was fuckingdrowningin the need to tell her what she meant to me. I wanted to say, ‘I love you, and you changed me, and you destroyed me, too, but I forgive you for that, and whether I die today or fifty years from now, it doesn’t matter, I am who I am because of you.’”
He lets out a shuddering breath. More ice clinks.
“Does that answer your question?” he finally says.
I squeeze my eyes shut to stop a tear from sneaking out, then follow his example and partake in a hefty dose of wine.
It’s a nonsensical reaction, this urge to cry over the depth of his love for some woman I’ve never even met. But there’s something so wretchedly, tragically beautiful about his pain that I catch myself wishing someone would love me like that. So brightly that it burned them.
Because I suspect, on a cellular level I can’t escape, that ifIhad died in that car wreck instead of Michael, he wouldn’t have said about me what Grayson just did about Lily.
“Your turn,” he says.
I take a few moments to collect myself. “You sound like a soldier who’s just gone to battle and barely made it back.”
He gives a dark chuckle. “That about sums it up. But don’t change the subject. You managed to get two confessions out of me, so now I get your one. It’s only fair.”
It’s more than fair, I almost say, because by the sound of it, he’s just ripped his heart open and spilled the contents into my lap.
Telling him about Margo almost seems like cheating. “My story’s not as intense as yours. Not even close.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” he says softly. “It just has to mean something to you.”
I swallow. “It does. It absolutely does. I just...don’t know where to start.”
