Chapter 28 - Zane

I wake up to a sharp pain, though I can’t tell where it’s coming from. My whole body feels heavy. It’s like it’s been filled with concrete. The air smells sterile, cut with the faint scent of smoke lingering in my nose. My head throbs, but it’s the ache in my stomach that pulls me into full awareness.

The unfamiliar room comes into focus. I barely recognize it until I register the blurry view out of the window—the upper floor of the clinic.

Of course. I’m in Maisie’s bedroom, staring at the walls of books, the soft orange paint, and the white window through which sunlight peers. The clinic downstairs has probably long since run out of space. I’m hooked up to an IV bag, I realize, and I’m not on her bed but on a portable hospital bed next to a beeping monitor of my vitals.

I’m alive.

And judging by the way it feels, barely.

I move to sit up, but every muscle screams in protest. My chest tightens, and I force my eyes open, fighting the fog. Slowly, I blink, adjusting to the dim light.

It takes me a second to realize I’m not alone. Maisie’s here.

She’s slumped in a chair by my side, head resting on her folded arms against the bed. Her hand is gripping mine tightly, even in sleep, and her face is tear-streaked, pale but calm. There’s exhaustion written into every line of her body. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days.

I nearly choke on my guilt. The force of it is terrifying. I try to squeeze her hand, though my fingers barely respond.

Still, the pressure is enough to stir her.

Her eyes flicker open, and the moment she sees me, her breath catches. She sits up quickly, wide-eyed, like she doesn’t quite believe what she’s seeing.

For a second, neither of us speaks. I’m too weak to find words, and she looks like she’s on the verge of tears again.

“Zane?” Her voice is soft, almost a whisper, laced with the fragile beginnings of hope. “Are you...?”

I swallow, my throat dry.

“Hey,” I manage, my voice raspy, the sound barely audible.

Maisie’s lips tremble. Then she bursts into tears. She tries to hide it, wiping at her face quickly, but I can’t help but grin even as emotion tightens my chest.

“I thought I lost you,” she breathes, her voice cracking. “I thought...”

Her hand tightens around mine, and I want to pull her closer, hold her, but I can barely move. Still, I manage to lift my other hand, weak as it is, and reach for her face. She leans into my touch, her tears wetting my fingers.

“Maisie...” My voice breaks. I don’t know how to say what I’m feeling. I’ve spent so long locking it away, pushing her away. But seeing her like this, so raw, so vulnerable. It undoes me.

“I’m here,” I rasp, my voice hoarse but stronger. “I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.”

She lets out a shaky laugh through her tears, shaking her head. “You better not. I swear if you ever scare me like that again...”

Her words falter. As if we’ve both plunged into cold water, the jovial atmosphere dies. The number of times I’ve probably terrified her… I can’t even think about it.

I have to tell her. I have to stop hiding.

“Maisie,” I start, my voice low, “I need to tell you something. A few things, actually. And I want you to hear me. And you don’t have to believe me yet, but I want you to know it’s all true.”

Her softening expression has a touch of wariness. I can’t blame her; I’d be wary, too. If I’d been treated like she has—if I’d been through as much as her—I’d find it nigh impossible to trust.

So I open my mouth, and for the first time in my life, I begin to speak as honestly as I can.

“When I was twenty-three,” I start, “I had a girlfriend. Her name was Tessa. And looking back, I don’t think I ever fully got over what happened next.”

And Maisie grips my hand, and I tell her everything.

I tell her about how it began, the crazy nights, the way Tessa—twenty-nine years old, suave, doting, sly, cool —had seemed like my dream girl for the first few months. How fast we moved in together, blaming our circumstances but reveling in the chaos of it deep down. How, despite Tessa’s packlessness, she was so vibrant when things began, a firecracker; how at the time, her casual instability felt like all that I deserved.

Speaking about it is far easier than I’d anticipated somehow. I don’t know why. Once I start, I just can’t stop.

I talk about how things got worse slowly at first. The red flags just looked like flags, and her run-ins with local pack authorities wherever we ended up drifting just seemed like funny stories for the future, and it didn’t matter how many times she ended up stranded in the middle of the night so drunk she didn’t remember her own name, she told me, because I’d always rescue her. And I did.

When she eventually stopped going out at all, the fights got worse. I talk until I’m hoarse about the sound of the smashing of glass, how particularly I grew to understand that sound, about cleaning tequila off the wall of our tiny apartment for hours on a Wednesday morning. About Tessa’s sloppy, ineffectual fists, how when she swung for me, she always missed, but it still hurt somehow, and I’m still not sure why. I tell her about how, on the anniversary of the day my parents died, in a drunken rage, she told me they’d be glad to be dead if they could see how I’d turned out.

Maisie’s grip on my hand never falters, not even once. At some point, I feel a pinprick of wetness on my wrist and look up to see she is crying once again.

“All I’ve done for a week is cry,” she says, half-laughing, face still folded with grief. She presses her lips hard against the back of my hand and holds them there for a long moment, then says, “I’m sorry, keep going.”

“No.” I’m confused. “Why are you crying? What did I say?”

Maisie looks at me as if I’ve grown a second head.

“Zane,” she says gently, eyes welling. “I’m crying because you didn’t deserve that. And I love you. I’m sorry that happened to you.”

Her words root themselves in me like a tic. I can’t shake them suddenly.

“I didn’t ever want to make you cry again,” I find myself saying, the memory dredged from somewhere inside me.

Maisie laughs again. She takes my face in her hands and kisses me.

“You can make me cry for the rest of our lives,” she promises. “So long as you’re there to do it.”

After that, I coax her up onto the bed. At first, she refuses, saying my injury makes it too risky. But eventually, she relents and crawls up beside me. As she lies against my chest, I count her breaths, tapping my finger on her upper arm in tandem with her slow, gentle heartbeat.

“Thank you for telling me that,” she murmurs. “I mean it. Thank you. I know it wasn’t easy.”

“It was easier than I thought it would be,” I say honestly. “Probably because it was you.”

She hums. “That was why you rejected me that first time? Because I was drunk?”

I nod, chin resting atop her head. “It’s no excuse for how I treated you. But at the time, I just… couldn’t. I looked at you and just saw her. I’ve not… had a serious, long relationship since her. Not until now. I think I spent so long just surviving that I never took the time to figure out how to get past it.”

Maisie sighs. She runs a hand gently up to the top of my chest and rests it there, drawing tiny circles and shapes on my clavicle with her fingertip.

“It makes sense,” she admits. “You should have told me, but I understand why you didn’t. And I don’t blame you. Even if a part of me thinks I should.”

“You’re allowed to blame me,” I promise. “If it’ll make you feel better. Consider me blamed.”

She huffs a laugh, then laughs some more. The vibration of it sinks into my chest.

“That,” she giggles, “is why I can’t.”

We lie together for hours, talking about nothing, watching her ceiling. There are tiny glow-in-the-dark stars taped up there. I decide we’ll have to bring them wherever we move. When, eventually, we move in together.

Or not-so-eventually, ideally. But I’ll go at her pace, I decide. Whatever she wants.

Maisie tells me about the aftermath of the fight and how everyone’s doing. Miraculously, there wasn’t a single fatality on our side, though there were a few other critical injuries like mine. Now, thankfully, everyone is recovering well, and the townsfolk of Rosecreek are being evacuated back in starting today now that it’s certain the Haverwood pack is finished.

Rebuilding efforts will begin soon. A fifth of the town was damaged by the fires the Haverwoods started, and while most of the damage is salvageable, and buildings can be repaired and restored, it’s going to take a lot of work, and everyone’s going to have to chip in.

But everyone lived. That’s the most important thing. I am shocked by the force of my relief upon hearing it.

The pack survived. The team survived. Everyone made it out somehow.

“I’m glad,” I say, the sour taste of the understatement making itself known in my mouth.

Maisie picks up on it in my voice. She pinches my arm gently. “I know you are.”

I clear my throat. “I have something else to tell you. One more important thing I need you to hear.”

“What is it?”

I take a deep breath. “The conversation you overheard. That day outside the clinic.”

Maisie stiffens against me. She doesn’t move away, but I feel the tension as it runs through her, tight as a taut wire.

“You don’t have to say anything,” I reiterate. “And you don’t have to believe me. But I want you to know—what happened was, I’m having this conversation with my friend, not even a close friend, really, and he asks me about this singer. I don’t even remember her name now. But he asked about what it would be like to date her since she’s so famous—and I swear to you on my life, Maisie, I said, ‘She’s huge, it wouldn’t work’ because I couldn’t date someone with that much fame. Or any fame, really. I’d get jealous and… and needy. And it wouldn’t work. One time, I dated a jazz singer for a month, and I started to get jealous of the men at her shows. And she wasn’t even famous. So I couldn’t do it. That’s what I meant. She’s huge —you know what I mean? Nothing to do with the way she looks. Absolutely nothing. But I’m so sorry for what you heard and how much it must have hurt. I’m so sorry. I promise I didn’t mean it in that way.”

Maisie doesn’t feel like she’s breathing. I wish I could hear what’s going through her head right now.

From the moment she told me about her overhearing that conversation, I’ve been mortified. Of course it would have sounded that way. I felt like slapping myself the second she told me.

I realize there’s one thing I forgot: “Oh, and in case you ever find yourself wondering ever again, I’ve found you super attractive from the moment we met. It’s never been in question for me. You’ve been driving me crazy for months—I wanted to tear each of those dresses off you every night.”

Silence falls. I wonder if I’ve done too much, said too much. But all of it was true. I don’t want us to even think about lying to each other ever again.

Eventually, Maisie speaks, her voice tiny.

“You really mean that?”

“No more lies,” I promise. “Not between us. Everything is real from now on. That’s how we’re doing this.”

Her arms around my middle tighten, and she buries her face in my chest. “No more lies,” she repeats, muffled.

I squeeze her tight. “Promise.”