“Hello to you, too,” I eventually mumbled against her lips, our grins exploding as we stared into each other’s eyes.

“Sorry.” Danni’s forehead fell to rest against mine while her fingers played with the hair at the nape of my neck. “I couldn’t stop myself. You’re all I’ve thought about for weeks, and I’ve been so desperate to see you again. I thought you should know straight away how I feel about you.”

“How do you feel about me?” I whispered.

“Was my kiss not hard enough?”

“Indulge me.”

Her eyes searched mine. “I think you’re really kind of okay.”

I found the hem of her hoodie, slipping my free hand under it, my fingers gliding across her smooth, bare skin. I watched the way her lips parted, and she inhaled slowly.

“Just okay?”

“The best I ever had,” she reminded me, her brows rising high as her face came alive.

I laughed softly, closing my eyes and pressing my lips against hers again. For all I loved to see her and hear her voice, touching and feeling her against me was my favourite thing. A woman who bled the same way I did, breathed the same, whose heart beat the same—yet she somehow felt like magic when I touched her. She was the calming high I never wished to come down from. That’s when I knew—right there, on that hilltop—I was irreversibly in love with Daniella Marston.

Not just a little bit. This wasn’t even the start. I was head over heels, out of my depth, up shit creek without a paddle, in love with her.

I pressed harder into her body, leaning on my one crutch for support, only for it to slip on the mud and make me stumble to the side. She caught me quickly, holding me tight by the biceps as I regained my footing, glanced down at the ground and cursed my injuries for breaking us apart.

“Easy, tiger,” she said through a smile.

I glanced up at her through hooded eyes and tensed my jaw. “This shit is really starting to get old,” I grumbled, sounding like a pouty lion trying to suppress his roar.

She wrinkled her nose and tilted her head. “Is it making you grumpy?”

“Only when it makes me break away from my girl.”

Danni’s blinked twice. “I’m your girl?”

“I want you to be.” I nodded, digging my crutch harder into the ground and leaning on it to straighten myself upright. “But that’s up to you,” I whispered. “I know this is weird, new, and scary. This time last year, I barely knew you, and here I am now with our friends and my sister watching, unable to think of anyone I would rather be around than you, Danni.”

Her grin grew impossibly wide.

“Why the hell didn’t I really know you then?” I challenged, creasing my brows as my huge grin tore free.

“Maybe I was only meant to come along when I did.”

“You were. You absolutely were. When I broke up with Nat, I vowed to myself that I’d go and figure out who I was. I vowed to be better on my own. Get over Alice. Get over Nat. Be Marcus. All alone… no ties. I thought, I don’t know… maybe I could go out, see the world, meet new people, go on all these adventures that everyone around me seems to crave. The ones away from home, in other countries, other cities.” I paused and sucked in a breath. “But it turns out that everything I ever needed to know about myself was in you all along. I’ve discovered more about myself from a hospital bed, talking to you three times a day, unable to go anywhere or do anything, than I ever discovered about myself while travelling, or sleeping with other women, or…” I stopped talking, huffed out a laugh and rolled my eyes. “You once told me you didn’t need saving. What I didn’t realise at the time was that I did. And you did that, Danni. When no one else was around, you curled your arms around my back and refused to leave. You tried to squeeze my cracks back together. You stood by me in front of that ocean and taught me to look at the world differently. You silence every negative. You make my positives shine. And I cannot imagine ever meeting someone who makes me feel as alive as you do, no matter which ends of the Earth I go to.”

Danni, the most confident and beautiful woman I’d ever known, suddenly looked shy and unsure, like I was speaking about someone else instead of her, and she was just a spectator, swooning from the sidelines.

“Whenever I hear my phone ring, I know in that split second before I see who is calling who I want it to be. And it’s you. It’s always you.”

“I do that, too,” she breathed.

“And, Danni?”

“Yes,” she croaked.

“I think it’s time to tell you that I love you.”

She hitched in a breath, and I smiled as I heard it catch in her throat.

“You don’t have to respond to that,” I assured her, my grin growing impossibly bigger. There was no fear of her running. No fear of seeing any real uncertainty in her eyes. Everything felt right. Everything clicked. “But if the accident taught me one thing, it’s that if we’re not living when we’re living, then we’re just passing time, waiting to die. We’re all at the same bus station, babe. We’re all going to the same place in the end. We can either make a party of it while we’re here—love hard and make it epic—or we can wait until it’s too late to do and say what we really want. And I want you.”

Her eyes danced around, a sheen of moisture coating them before she made her face turn hard as she tried to control her emotions, but failed again. That’s right. I was getting good at reading Danni. Even through the phone, I could usually tell what she was thinking before she told me herself.

Right there and then, with our friends suddenly raising their voices and heckling behind us, I knew Danni was scared… because I could tell she loved me, too.

“I want you,” she eventually told me, her arms squeezing tighter around my neck.

“But it scares you…”

“Not in a bad way. You’re the first person I’ve ever felt this way about. You’re the first person I want to talk to in a morning and the last voice I want to hear on a night. But how will it work, Marcus? I don’t want to be the person who forces you to hang around and wait for me. My lifestyle, my job, the time apart, the men I’ll be surrounded by, and the attention I get… There is so much that’s going to be hard for you if we chose to make a go of it. This girl will leave you waiting for months and months and months while she selfishly travels the world, chasing a dream that may or may not come true. That makes me no better than Alice.”

“First of all,” I started. “It’s already coming true.”

Danni rolled her eyes playfully, her hands slipping from around my neck to fall down and rest against my chest. “Technicality,” she muttered.

“Second of all. Yes, you may walk away from me more than you stay, but with you, I’d always know you were coming back. That’s the difference, Dan. You would come back because it’s who you are. You’d leave me, but you’d never run away. You’re the most loyal person I’ve ever met.”

She tried to interrupt me, but I raised my hand and pressed a single finger to her lips, pushing down hard as I stared at her mouth and perfect white teeth.

“And thirdly, I get to say what I can handle. Not you. I get to decide who is right for me and if I can cope with your lifestyle, and I say, hell, yes, I can. I want the girl who can be on the other side of the world and make me smile harder than anyone else just by hearing her voice on the end of the phone. I pick Danni, who makes me feel alive, who challenges me, who makes me forget about needing to be funny because I’m so busy laughing at her lame arse jokes.”

“Hey!” she cried weakly.

“And her god-awful singing.”

“I’ll have you know that I sing with passion.”

“You live with passion.”

“What other choice is there?”

I pulled her closer—impossibly close—the ache of pain building up in my legs, but I was too fucking happy to care.

“Feel the fear and love me anyway,” I whispered to her. “I dare you.”

She brushed her lips over mine, the tip of her nose rubbing against my cheek before she pressed her mouth to my ear and whispered back, “I already do.”

“Thank fuck for that.” I exhaled, pulling her back to me and crashing my lips against hers one final time, making sure she couldn’t follow it up with any more doubts or uncertainties.

From that moment on, I was all in.

Who cared if I drowned this time?

Not me.