For a while we just look at each other, then a relieved expression flits across his, unfortunately, far too attractive face. ‘So that’s how it is.’
‘How is what?’ I ask without thinking.
‘The way you worry about me… how scared you are, how important my well-being is to you…’
Oh God, what is that sparkle in his eyes supposed to mean? Is he actually flirting with me?
A strange tingling runs through my stomach, yet—or maybe precisely because of that—I study him seriously. ‘You’re just trying to distract.’ Again, and by now I’m almost sure I know why he’s doing it: there’s something he doesn’t want to confront because it hurts too much.
That phone call that clearly got to him, the extreme rescue operation and his refusal to talk about it are proof that I’m right.
Now he leans toward me and braces his hands on the ground. The muscles under his shirt tense. ‘You know, this thing between us, it could be so beautiful.’
No, it couldn’t. ‘You would have climbed down the cliff without a safety harness.’
He comes closer, his green eyes holding me far too captive. ‘Like the other day, when we danced in the rain,’ he says wistfully.
‘That was a mistake.’ I move back, yet his scent still creeps into my nose and I feel how my body wants something different from my head. It wants to touch Jaden, feel his skin, sense his heartbeat.
‘No,’ he replies. ‘It was anything but a mistake.’
I don’t know what to say, only that I should put some distance between us. But in the ambulance it’s too cramped for me to get away from him.
‘You liked it.’ His gaze sticks to me. ‘You liked letting go of everything for a moment and just being.’
Images of the two of us appear before my mind’s eye. Him, gently rocking me back and forth, raindrops running down his face. The image is so vivid that I almost feel his arms around my torso again, his breath on my skin, his closeness that makes me so…
Knowingly, he nods. ‘You liked not having to worry, not thinking about yesterday or tomorrow.’
Yes.
‘You liked that there was only the now.’
Yes.
Not for a second does he release me from his gaze. Suddenly the air between us feels thin. I swallow hard.
‘And ever since, you can hardly think about anything but that dance and what it did to you.’
Oh God, yes.
How does he know that?
He smiles, suddenly looking so enraptured, as if he himself were back there again. In front of the clinic. In the rain. With me. Just about to kiss me.
‘Admit it,’ he asks me, and I can feel the longing in his words. Feel how important it is to him that I tell him how much I enjoyed that moment of freedom, of not thinking, with him.
For a while I look at him, then I lower my lids. ‘Yes,’ I whisper into the silence between us, and I don’t even know myself why I’m doing it. Because that’s not what this is about at all right now. ‘But that doesn’t change the fact that today you could have lost your life.’
He looks at me, no longer defensive, but as if he were searching for words to explain something to me for which there is definitely no reasonable explanation.
‘In the end all we have is the present moment. This one breath we’re taking right now, this one beat of our heart,’ he then says softly into the silence between us, and I feel the weight of his words. The truth in the letters, his pain in every sound.
What he says hits me where it already hurts anyway. Because a part of me knows that Jaden is at least partly right. We can dream of whatever we want, conjure up a future we look forward to, keep alive wishes that mean the world to us.
But we don’t know whether we will ever have all that.
Lilly’s dark circles are darker today than usual, her cheeks look sunken. Not even the colorful scarf on her head can do anything about the pallor that the nausea paints across her face.