Page 223 of The Night Shift

“I needed a distraction,” I say. “Something to anchor me. Something real. You.”

Her body tightens slightly under my arm. Her pulse jumps at her throat. She holds still like a deer caught in a breathless second of recognition.

“Holly, I don’t think you realize how easy it was to pick you out of a crowd. You weren’t smiling. You weren’t trying to make an impression. You looked like you wanted to disappear. And somehow you still pulled the oxygen right back into my lungs.”

“I didn’t even speak to you that night.”

“I know,” I say, looking down at her mouth long enough to remember how it felt when she kissed me for the first time. “But I couldn’t stop staring at you. I didn’t care who saw. I didn’t care how unprofessional and pathetic I looked. You were the only person in that room who mattered. That’s how fucked up over you I was from Day One. And maybe that makes me obsessive or sick. But the truth is, Holly, that night, when everything else was collapsing, I looked at you and thought, ‘I’ll survive. I’ll get through this and anything that comes afterwards if I can just keeplookingat her.’”

My thumb stills on her waist. She swallows.

“From that night, you were the only thing I thought about. The only thing I dreamt about. You consumed me. Body and soul. Being fascinated by you…maybe it started as a way to cope, a distraction, but it’s not that anymore. It hasn’t been for a long time. It’s so much more.You’reso much more.”

She’s staring at me like she’s forgotten how to breathe. Her jaw tenses. And I honestly think she’s seconds away from breaking through the windshield to escape this car.

“I don’t…” she starts, then stops. Her throat works as she swallows whatever truth almost escaped.

“You don’t have to say anything. I just wanted you to know —”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I want to you to know how I feel —”

She shakes her head. “No.”

“No?”

“I don’t want to hear it,” she snaps, twisting away from me. Her fists are balled in her lap, nails digging crescent moons into her palms.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not going to change anything.”

“It would to me.”

“Theo, stop.”

“Why? Because you’ll believe it? Because you already know what you are to me, and it scares the living shit out of you?”

Her mouth opens. Closes.

I lower my head for a second, breathing like I've just taken a punch. Then, quieter: “Once. Just this once, let me give you a reason to need me like how I need you. To look at me with something other than hate.”

The seconds drag, brutal and suffocating.

Finally, in a voice so small I almost miss it, she mutters, “I don’t.” She’s staring at her lap, her jaw locked tight, her throat working like she’s forcing the words out. “I don’t hate you, Theo. Sometimes I wish I did. But I don’t.”

It’s like the air gets knocked out of my lungs. “Don’t lie to me to spare my feelings. I don’t have the luxury of pretending with you.”

“I’m not lying,” she insists. “If I hated you, you’d be rotting six feet in the ground. But I…I don’t know what this is either. I barely understand it myself, and each time I try to figure it out, it gets really scary inside my head. I don’t want to feel likethis.”

“Like what?” My hand curls tighter at her waist.

“Theo.”

“Like this?” I lean in and kiss her cheek — softly, like a secret. “Or like this?” I kiss the other cheek. Slower. Her skin grows warmer beneath my palm.

I lower my mouth to the corner of her lips. “Or this.”