Page 75 of Intersect

“Darcy?” he asks.

I turn back, glancing at him over my shoulder with a raised brow. “Yes, Darcy. Who else would I be trying to help?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I slide away so I can turn toward him, staggered. “Darcy Whitley. Your patient. Seven years old? Brain tumor?”

He looks at me blankly before his eyes open with recognition. “Oh, right. How the hell do you know about that? I only saw her once, and it had to be a year ago.”

My eyes fill for at least the tenth time since I got home. “Are you saying she’s not your patient? She’s fine?”

He shrugs. “Yeah, I assume so. She just had a little glioma, if I recall correctly. It was no big deal. I referred her to neurosurgery. I’d have heard if there was anything else going on.”

It worked. I take a quick breath as the relief hits, but once it’s gone my throat tightens a little, happy and sad all at once. This, I realize, is what it’s going to be like to time travel. I may do good things, but it means losing people too, losing shared experiences. Darcy no longer knows me, and I’m the only one who will ever remember sitting beside Nick at her birthday party.

“It was a big deal. You won’t remember, because I changed her timeline,” I whisper, hugging my knees. “Today when you went to the hospital, Darcy was a dying patient without much time left because the first doctor they saw blew off her headaches. So I warned her mother tonight. During that visit you barely remember, you saved her life.”

He frowns. I get it, the way it’s impossible to grasp that something has happened when you don’t remember it, but he also has faith in this—and in me. “No,” he says. “You saved her.”

Either way, I’d do it all over again, even if it means the memory of Nick with Meg is stuck in my head forever. It’s stupid that seeing him with her is still bothering me, but the problem is that even if it took place in 2017, it feels like it was minutes ago.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, wrapping his hands around my ankles. “Are you just tired or is it something else?”

My head droops. I could choose to keep pretending things are fine, but not telling him things just doesn’t seem to work out for us. “I saw you,” I say quietly. “I ran from Cleveland Park to campus, thinking if I could just watch you walking into the gym I’d feel better. And then Meg got out of your car.” I press my face to my knees. I don’t want to cry in front of him over this and it’s completely unfair to make him feel guilty over it. I just don’t know what else I can do. “You’d just spent the night with her, obviously. It was sunrise. And I know it was a year ago or more but it feels like it just happened.”

“Jesus,” he says. “I don’t know what you saw, but no matter what it looked like, I was never in love with her. Never even close.”

It helps, a little. “I know. It just felt real. It feels like it just happened.”

He slides toward me and his hands cradle my face. “In my whole life it’s only been you. You’re the only person I’ve ever been in love with, and tonight when I contemplated the idea of life without you, I finally got what Grosbaum must have gone through, because I’d have waited forever just hoping you were coming back.”

He kisses me. A real kiss, one without any blame or terror. His lips are gentle on mine, as if I’m so fragile I might shatter right here in his hands.

I’m the one who needs more, and demands it. I climb over him, placing a knee on either side of his hips so there is no distance between us. With a guttural noise, his hands twist in my hair, and the kiss grows hard and desperate. I slide my hands over the broad shoulders, the perfect chest I missed so much, and then lower.

“Quinn,” he groans, his mouth still against mine, “we really shouldn’t. You should rest.”

I rise, move him against me, watching his weak attempts at restraint falter.

I start to sink on top of him but hold myself aloft instead. “Are you sure we shouldn’t?” I taunt.

“No,” he grunts, arching upward. His head falls against the back of the tub as he bottoms out inside me. “Fuck. That’s so good.”

He watches as I move, his eyes heavy, his mouth ajar, his hands slipping over my chest. With each thrust he drives the memories of Meg a little further from my head.

“Faster,” he pleads quietly, grabbing my hips.

“I can’t in this position. My knees…” I begin, and find myself lifted and carried to the bed, with him still inside me. He lies me on my back and pulls my knees over his shoulders, hitting an angle that never fails to drive every other thought from my head. “Oh God,” I moan.

He watches my face, desperate to come, waiting for the telltale arch of my spine. I see the strain in him, in his shoulders, in the tendons of his neck. He slips his fingers between us and I go off like a rocket. He follows, my name a pained whisper falling from his lips.

After a moment he carefully removes himself and flips to the side of me.

He opens one eye. “I told you that would happen.”

I grin. “Are you saying you regret it?”

He pulls me against him, dragging a blanket over us and tucking my head into the crook of his shoulder. “As long as we’re in the same place, I’m never going to regret anything again.”