One Day Soon (One Day Soon, #1)(56)

Then, as if he couldn’t help himself, he wrapped his arms around me, pulling me into his chest. I tucked my head underneath his chin and sobbed into his shirt. He ran his hands up and down my back and I found myself finally able to relax.

Bug left at some point, but neither of us moved. We cried. We held on. We felt the broken pieces start to mend.

“Can we go somewhere? Just us?” I asked.

“Anything you want,” he said softly.

I cupped the side of his face. “Don’t ask me to leave again. Promise.”

His face contorted and he shook his head. “I can’t—”

“I need you to promise me, Yoss. I don’t push you about your past, don’t push me about mine. That life, that world, it’s gone for me. I can’t go back. You of all people should understand that. So promise me Yoss that you won’t fight with me about this. I need to know you want me here with you. Always. I need to know you love me. It’s the only thing that will make all of this easier.”

I wasn’t playing fair. A part of me knew that.

Yoss leaned down and kissed me, taking my doubts and my fear of rejection and erasing it all.

“Promise,” he murmured against my mouth.

It wasn’t the first lie he ever told me.

And it wouldn’t be the last.





Present Day

“Do you have any other movies on that thing besides Fiddler on the Roof?” Yoss asked moments after I arrived in his room. I had waited to see him until the end of the day. I hadn’t been putting it off. I wanted to see him. I needed to. But I wasn’t quite sure of the reception I’d receive.

Yoss had kissed me.

It left things unsettled. A little bit awkward.

It was now almost six o’clock and the sun was setting. The sky was awash in fierce shades of red and gold.

I hadn’t been sure what to expect when Yoss saw me again. Asking what movies I had was pretty far from my list of possibilities.

I looked down at my laptop bag slung across my chest. I had brought it with me to take notes in his case file.

“Uh, yeah, sure I do,” I said as I sat down beside his bed. I pulled out my computer and put it on the table, turning it on.

We should talk about the kiss. About the things we had said yesterday. We should talk about his health. What he was going to do once he left the hospital.

I’m not avoiding, I told myself. I was simply allowing us the opportunity to talk about things beyond life and death, choices made and piles of regret.

We’d talk about movies.

And that was okay.

It seemed I wasn’t the only one who needed a break from the heavy stuff.

Yoss started to laugh minutes later.

“What?” I asked in confusion.

Yoss coughed and inclined his head in the direction of the screen. “Is that really a bunch of panda bears in Kiss makeup?”

I started laughing too. Hard. And then I made an unfortunate noise with my nose. It was completely mortifying.

“Did you just snort?” Yoss asked, smirking.

“I did not snort. And if I had, way to point it out,” I muttered.

“I remember how you used to snort when you’d laugh and your face would turn a bright shade of red. Sort of like what it’s doing now.” Yoss leaned closer to me, examining my flaming cheeks.

I waved him away with my hand, making him laugh again.

Yoss seemed in good spirits. I noticed his color was better. He was still jaundiced, which was a result of the hep B, but his eyes were brighter. He had shaved. It was strange and nice to see his face underneath all that hair. The curve of his chin. The slope of his jaw. The determined set of his mouth.

And even though he was still grossly underweight, he was looking more like the Yoss I remembered. A little older. A little harder. But still Yoss.

“Where did you find that?” he asked, pointing to my desktop background.

“It’s amazing the things you find on the Internet when you should be doing actual work.” I grinned. His mood was infectious. It always had been.

I was more than a little surprised by his attitude. He had been seesawing between bitterness and depression with little room for any other emotion. It had been eight days since I had walked into this room and found him lying in the bed, badly beaten, barely hanging on.

Eight days since my past had crashed head first into my present.

Eight days since I had realized that second chances did happen.

I was still trying to decide what to do with this chance now that I had been given it.

I was walking on shaky ground, struggling to figure out how much of what Yoss and I used to be still existed.

I had to know if I was setting myself up for a whole new level of heartache.

Losing him once had almost destroyed me.

Losing him again would surely annihilate me.

“So you what kind of movie do you want to watch?” I asked, showing him the list of downloads on my laptop.

Yoss leaned forward, his arm brushing mine. Having him so close was a special kind of torture. It was a relief. It was agony.

Because the sixteen-year-old girl I used to be wanted to hold his hand in that intimate, innocent way that I had always done before.

The thirty-one-year-old woman I was now wanted to do so much more than hold his hand. Because my body remembered what it felt like to have his weight on top of me. Sometimes, in the darkest hours between night and day, I would close my eyes and I could almost feel him…inside.