He threw open the door with such violence that it hit the wall next to it. I winced, but he didn’t seem to care as he stared at me. “You came over?”

“I hate texting,” I declared.

A wash of relief flooded his face and before I could say another word he had the door open and me in his arms. “I fucked up,” he murmured, leaning down to cup my face in his hand, pressing tender kisses to my eyebrow, my lips, my jaw. “I’m really fucking sorry.” 

I sighed against his shoulder, bracing myself so he could set his crutch aside and put his arm around me. 

We stood still like that for one heartbeat, ten heartbeats. As I relaxed into the sound of his breathing, a silvery light appeared at his feet. “Gabe?” I breathed, standing up and stepping back. “What’s that?”

“What?”

“Your feet! They’re glowing!”

He looked down in shock and then started laughing. “Babe,” he said, reaching out and gently cupping my chin. “It’s the moon.”

He tilted my face towards the window in the door. There, hanging in the sky, was a huge, fat full moon peeking in between the racing clouds. “Oh my god,” I giggled. “It’s been raining for so long I forgot what the moon looked like.” I buried my face in my hands. 

Chuckling, he reached out and gently tugged my hands away from my face. “Come with me,” he murmured. “I have something I want to tell you, but my parents’ bedroom is down here and...”

“You want to sneak me into your bedroom while your parents are asleep?” I teased. 

He shook his head ruefully. “I never got a chance to do that.” Then he brightened as a mischievous smile spread across his face. “So yeah. I totally want to sneak a pretty girl into my bedroom for the first time tonight.”

As I followed him, grinning about the scandal of it all, I wanted to keep my heart light. After all, he’d apologized in the best way possible, and my training had prepared me for how much people in pain could lash out. I was grateful for that lesson. 

But my training also meant that I knew exactly how much he struggled with putting weight on his ankles. Instead of making a clinical observation, I pressed my hand to my heart in sympathy. What I saw as I watched him hobble up the stairs hurt my heart. His limp was so pronounced on his left side. When he reached the top there was no mistaking the grunt of pain as he had to pivot to reach his door. 

“Gabe,” I said. “You need to listen to me.”

“No, I have to tell you this. Let me go first,” he said as he pushed the door open. 

I stepped in, pressed it closed behind me, and shook my head. “No,” I said firmly. “You need to hear this.”

He let out an explosive sigh, then gestured for me to continue. 

“Sit,” I begged. “Please.” I shook my head. “As a nurse, I want you to heal. But as a person who—” I trailed off. What kind of person was I about to confess to being? A person who cared for him way too much? “I can’t stand to see you struggling like this when there are ways you can help yourself.”

Gabe stared at me for a long moment. When he inclined his head in a soft nod, I wondered what he had decided to tell me. My heart started racing out of some perverse defense mechanism. Even though I wanted nothing more than to stay here with him, the way he was looking at me had me ready to flee. 

Finally he exhaled and patted the bed next to him. “Right,” he said. “And this was what I was going to tell you, too.” He glanced at me. I hadn’t moved from the spot. “Please come sit by me, Everly. Standing up like that? You have to know it looks like you’re showing off right now.”

In spite of myself, I started laughing. When I went to him, it was with the sun shining inside of me. “What were you going to tell me?” I asked as I settled in next to him. 

His thigh was pressed alongside mine. He didn’t look up at me when I sat down, but he did reach over and grab my hand. He lifted my fingers, playing with each one in turn before twining them with his. “Everly, I can’t take those painkillers. I can’t.”

I snatched my hand away. “Yes you can!” I bleated, frustration making me raise my voice. “You’re only refusing to out of some kind of—”

“I can’t!” he said in a low, forceful tone that stopped me mid-sentence. I stared at him and when he finally raised his eyes to mine, I felt like he’d caught me in a tractor beam. Pulling me in to him. “Everly, I’ve been sober two years, one month, and fourteen days.” 

“Sober,” I echoed, not quite comprehending. Was he a drunk? Is that what he—

“Pills,” he said, answering the question I hadn’t dared ask. “Anything I could get my hands on, but opioids mostly. Codeine, morphine, Vicodin.” He glanced away and seemed to force himself to look at me again. Shame was written in the drawn lines on his face and my chest felt too tight to catch a full breath. I reached out and snatched up his other hand, pressing it to my lips as he said, “Our manager gave me the first one, and after that, any time I needed something to take the edge off, he was right there with another little white pill for me. I mean, even if I didn’t think I was on edge, he was still pushing.” He growled in the back of his throat and tried to snatch his hand away in frustration, but I held on to him tightly and refused to let him pull away. He looked down at our still-joined hands as if in surprise and looked up at me with a challenge in his eyes. “I tell people it was my manager who got me hooked, but no one seems to want to believe me. They tell me to take personal responsibility and I fucking have, but it wasn’t my fault.”

A little alarm bell went off in my head, but I knew now was not the time to challenge him about that idea. Not while he was baring his soul to me. “Wow,” I said.

He looked at me. 

“You’re pretty strong, you know that?”

He made a snorting sound and gestured to his legs. 

I nudged him. “No, not like that. I mean... here.” 

Without thinking I pressed my hand to his heart. He closed his hand over it. I could feel the strong, steady thump thump under my fingers and there was an answering throb in my own body. My breath caught for a moment as I looked up at him again. “You’ve been suffering this whole time and you never told me why?”

“I haven’t been suffering,” he said in a voice so low I had to lean in to hear it. “Not when I’m with you.”

As he said that, I felt his heart speed up under my hand and my breath quickened at his reaction. Tracing my fingers up, I instinctually started to feel for the pulse at his throat. 

He caught my hands, one and then the other. “Come here,” he whispered, lightly tugging. 

“Are you sure? I might... I’m gonna hurt you.”

“Not as much as it hurts me to have you so far away. Come here, baby. Let me hold you, please.”

It was the please that propelled me forward until I was straddling his lap, facing him. I was careful not to press down with my full weight, but he grinned at my attempts to hold myself in the air and with a firm tug he yanked me flush against him. “Gabe!” I gasped, half thrilled and half worried. “Be careful!”

“I’ll be careful,” he promised, then he reached up and threaded his fingers into my hair, pulling me down into a kiss that made my brain melt. “I’ll be so careful,” he murmured against my mouth, but it was just sounds now, the shape of his words deepening the kiss as I sighed into him, the light in my chest blazing as bright as the sun at noon.