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“Yeah, well… you’ve already said you don’t want to hear about it,” Nick reminded her. “So just assume it’s all the whining I’m doing in my head.”

There was a silence where she seemed to absorb his meaning.

Her perfectly lipsticked mouth ticked a little to one side.

“And you think getting your memories back will help with that?” she asked.

Nick shrugged. “It can’t make it any worse.”

The look on her face remained skeptical.

“Perhaps,” she conceded.

Her eyes said something different.

That time, however, she must have decided to keep her misgivings to herself.

CHAPTER13

EVEN IF IT KILLED HIM

Emotion slid through him.Cloying, thick, heartbreaking, overwhelming.

Utterly unable to be reasoned with.

A feeling of import lived there.

Or just of devastation, maybe.

The overwhelming sensation struck Nick as one of intense urgency. Whatever was there, it was insanely important to him. It was the most important thing, the most unable to be lost. The taste of pain, of pleasure, of want… of fuckingneed… it erased everything else.

He couldn’t bear to be parted with it again.

He couldn’t bear it.

He couldn’t bear to let it go.

Grief spiraled there, not just in the thing that lived on the other side, but an intense grief that he’d forgotten it. He’d forgotten something so important to himself, it felt like the worst kind of sin, the worst kind of betrayal. How had he let himself forget? How had he given away something so precious, so uniquely his?

How had he tossed aside something no one else could ever know?

It felt like murder.

It felt like he’d murdered someone. Maybe more than one someone.

He couldn’t reach the actual memories, though.

He couldn’t see them, or even get close enough to imagine them.

Nothing about what he felt had the tangible weight of understanding or remembrance, or even of make-believe fantasies of what he’d wished his life could be.

It was still too far away.

He was still too blinded by those gaps, unable to see what lived beyond them.

He could feel the intensity of it, the need to hold onto it, the need to understand, the grief at its loss. But whatever it was he grasped at, it turned to smoke as soon as his fingers closed, as soon as he stretched his arm out far enough to reach it. He strained harder, trying to get there, to pull it back to him, to leave with it clutched in his fingers.

He couldn’t.