Chapter 68 68
Kaelen's POV:
I put the coffee down and went.
She was sitting up in bed when I came in, propped against the headboard with a pillow behind her back. She'd changed at some point, or maybe Marcus had brought her something, because she was wearing an oversized flannel shirt that definitely wasn't hers and sweatpants that were too long, the cuffs bunched around her ankles.
Her hair was a mess, tangled and flat on one side from sleeping, and there was still a mark on her neck from the needle, this dark purplish dot surrounded by a faded yellow ring.
She looked small. Smaller than I'd ever seen her, sitting there in someone else's clothes with her fire gone and her hands folded in her lap and her eyes not quite meeting mine.
"Hey," I said from the doorway. Brilliant opener, Kaelen.
"Hey."
"Marcus said you—"
"Yeah. He explained it. Come in."
I came in. Closed the door behind me, then immediately wondered if that was weird. Should I have left it open? Was closing the door too intimate? We were literally just doing a healing thing, it wasn't—
"You can sit," she said, nodding at the edge of the bed. "I'm not going to bite you."
"I know that."
"You're standing in the doorway like you're about to run."
Because I kind of was. Not from her. From the way my chest was already doing that stupid clenching thing just being in the same room with her, breathing the same air, close enough to see the dark circles under her eyes and the way she was holding herself very still, like any sudden movement might break something.
I sat on the edge of the bed. Far end. Maximum possible distance while still technically being on the same piece of furniture.
She noticed. Of course she noticed.
"You're going to have to come closer than that," she said. "Unless your healing works from six feet away."
"It doesn't."
"Then..."
I moved closer. Not all the way. Just enough that our knees were maybe a foot apart. The mattress dipped under my weight and she shifted to keep her balance, and for a second our legs almost touched through the blanket and we both froze.
This was ridiculous. We'd been closer than this a hundred times. We'd kissed, we'd slept in each other's arms, we'd done... other things. And now I couldn't sit on a bed near her without feeling like my skin was too tight.
"So how does this work?" she asked. Her voice was steady but her hands were fidgeting in her lap, picking at the cuff of the flannel shirt. Nervous. She was nervous.
"I just... touch you. And focus the healing energy outward instead of inward. It's instinctive, mostly, I don't have to think about it too hard. The warmth just kind of goes where it needs to go."
"Okay."
"But it needs to be sustained. Marcus said maybe an hour. For the energy to actually circulate and help your body fight the drug."
"An hour," she repeated. Flat.
"Yeah."
"Of you touching me."
"Yeah."
Silence. She was looking at her hands. I was looking at her hands too, at the way her fingers twisted together, and I remembered what those hands felt like in mine, how she'd grip my fingers when she was scared during training, how she'd trace patterns on my palm when we'd lie in the grass after practice and talk about nothing.
"Okay," she said again. And held out her hands.
I took them.
The healing kicked in immediately, that warmth rising from somewhere deep in my chest and flowing down my arms, through my fingers, into hers. It wasn't something I had to force. With Annabeth it had never been something I had to force. The energy just... went to her. Like water finding a path downhill.
She inhaled sharply when she felt it. "That's... warm."
"Too much?"
"No. No, it's..." She didn't finish. Her fingers tightened around mine, just slightly, and I felt the healing spread into her palms, her wrists, up her forearms. Working its way through her system, seeking out the damage the drug had done. I could feel it too, not the drug itself but the places where it had been, these cold dead spots in her energy where the fire should've been. Like empty rooms in a house that used to be full.
We sat like that for a while. I don't know how long. Five minutes, ten, her hands in mine, the golden warmth flowing between us while outside a bird was going absolutely insane in a tree near the window, the same three notes over and over. A cardinal, maybe. Lucian would've known. He'd gone through a birding phase last spring, bought a whole field guide from a thrift store and ID'd every bird in Emberdale until Marlen threatened to flush the book down the toilet.
I was thinking about Lucian and his birds to avoid thinking about how close Annabeth's face was. How I could see the exact shade of brown her eyes were in this light, darker at the edges, almost black, with these tiny gold flecks near the pupils that might've been dragon and might've been just her. How her lower lip had a tiny crack in the corner, dry from the recycled air in the safe house. How if I leaned forward about eight inches I could—
"It feels different," she said quietly, interrupting whatever my brain had been about to do. "Than the last time you touched me. When you absorbed my fire."
"Different how?"
"Calmer. That time it was... urgent. Frantic. This is more like..." She closed her eyes. "I don't know. Like sitting in the sun."
I wasn't going to survive this. I was going to die right here on this bed, holding her hands while she said things like that with her eyes closed and her face soft and her guard down for the first time in weeks.