Page 22 of Falling for My Sister's Heartkeeper
After that, I drift back to sleep, and when I wake up again, he's still there, which is strange because Maximo doesn't do this, Maximo keeps oceans of couch between us, and yet here he's on the edge of my bed in the ugly hours, changing the cloth, checking the little thermometer, holding water to my mouth like the job matters more than sleep.
Because here's the unfair thing about my Maximo, the textbook billionaire hero who's supposed to be allergic to anything with feeling attached. Apparently he also does this. Sits in the ugly hours playing nurse to a broke girl with a borrowed heart, like there's nowhere else he'd rather be. And that heart, the one I borrowed, the one that's supposed to be resting through this fever and behaving itself on its pills, picks the worst possible night to go reaching for him anyway. A smart girl's heart would know better. Mine just knows him, and it has since before I did. "You didn't have to stay," I mumble.
"Be quiet."
"You could've had the housekeeper—"
"Bequiet,Jassy."
So I shut up. I turn my face into his hand because it's cool and it's his and the fever has burned off every wall I usually keep up, all my careful nothing-to-see-here, and in the warm swimming dark I say the truest thing I own, easy as breathing, the way you can only say a thing when you're too sick to protect it.
"I love you, Maximo," I tell him. "Did you know that? I love you so much it's embarrassing."
And then I'm gone, under, asleep before I can watch it do anything to his face.
MAXIMO DIDN'T SLEEP.
He sat where he was, her cheek gone slack against his palm, her breath evening out into something safe, the fever loosening its grip degree by degree while the windows went from black to gray to a morning he hadn't asked for.
He had heard the words before. From family, meaning it dutifully. From women, meaning something they'd revise by morning.
He had never once heard them said like that. Thrown away, unguarded, expecting nothing back. Said the way she did everything, all in, holding nothing in reserve because it'd never once occurred to her to keep score.
And she had said his name like that too.Maximo.Not the guarded way the rest of the world said it, but easy and sure and already hers, the way she'd said it since the day he handed it over. Except tonight, with her guard burned all the way down, he finally heard what had always been underneath it. She had said his name like it belonged to her. Like he did.
I love you so much it's embarrassing. He was still holding a cool cloth he'd stopped needing, still counting a pulse that had evened out an hour ago. He was, he understood, going to sit here until she woke, and then he was going to pretend, with everything he had, that he hadn't heard a word.
Because she loved him.
And she had no idea that the heart saying so had been carved out of the one person on earth he could never stop grieving. She thought she was giving him something new.
She was giving him back the dead.
Maximo looked down at the sleeping girl, and for the first time in two years he couldn't tell whether the thing cracking open in his chest was grief or the other thing, the forbidden thing, and that, more than the fever, was what kept him awake until morning.
Chapter Eighteen
THERE'S NO SCRIPT THIStime. That's the whole difference, and it turns out to be the entire difference.
It's been a week since the fever. A week of him being in every room I'm in and none of the ones I'm actually standing in, polite as a hotel, careful as a bomb tech, pretending with his entire body that a girl didn't tell him she loved him with her guard on the floor.
Which is its own kind of tell, if you think about it. You don't wall off a room nobody's trying to get into. A smart girl would read all that careful distance as the no it's dressed up to be and let it lie. But since the smartest thing about me has always been a heart that already made up its mind, here we are.
I'm done pretending back.
He's at the window with a glass he isn't drinking. I cross the room. He hears me coming, I know he does, I watch his shoulders set for the incoming rule, and before he can reach for one, before either of us can hide behind a lesson or a script or a page number, I take his face in both hands and I kiss him.
For a moment he's stone. Every wall the man owns, holding.
Then he isn't.
The glass goes down on the sill, forgotten, and both his hands come up into my hair, and he kisses me back like the lessons were rationing and this is the famine breaking. There's no careful press to it now. No counting. No arm's length, no pagenumber, nothing held anywhere in reserve. He kisses me like he's furious about it, like it's a thing being taken from him instead of freely given. And then, somewhere in the middle of it, the fury goes out of him all at once, and what comes in behind it is worse, something that shakes. His hands gentle in my hair. He slows down. He kisses me slow, and then slower, like he's decided to learn it by heart because he already knows he's going to make himself pay for every second of it later. He makes a low sound against my mouth that I'll hear for the rest of my life, and for the whole length of that kiss the walls are simply gone, and it's only him, all the way here, all the way mine.
My heart's going off like it's trying to break out of my chest and take him with it, way too fast, way past anything my doctors would ever sign off on, and for once I don't tell it to slow down. Let it race. Let it be bad for me. I kiss him back with everything I have and I don't do the math on the cost of a single thing. I've never in my life been so sure of anything.
And that's exactly when he stops.
He pulls back. He sets me away from him, both hands, final, and his face has gone somewhere I can't follow, shut and gray and appalled, not at me, I'd swear it on the heart keeping me alive, but at himself.
