Page 169 of Just This Once

When the doctor left, Alec and the women all looked directly at me. I felt rooted in my shoes as Hope’s brother finally moved and started walking toward me. Slowly and defeated.

I shook my head harder and harder the closer he got. His gaze never left mine.

“No,” I told him, my eyes burning.

He paused in front of me, looking dazed. “That was Dr. Kepler,” he said. “She’s being prepped for surgery right now because there was, um, fluid on her brain. They’re going to put a shunt in to drain it.”

She was still alive, then?

Relief flooded my veins so fast it left me dizzy. “So—” I stepped forward, still trembling, not sure why I couldn’t turn the fear off yet.

Alec’s face flooded with grief, and he shook his head, stopping me in my tracks. “Her liver’s done, man. She’s not making it out of this hospital alive. Not without another transplant.”

I gaped for a moment, trying to make sense of his words. “Then we’ll get her another transplant,” I said.

He shook his head. “She’s not—” His voice broke. “She’s not far enough up the list yet. And they—they told me I can’t—I can’t save her this time.”

When tears streamed down his cheeks, I lifted a hand, halting him. “No. I said I’d get tested. We were going to see if I was compatible.Tomorrow.”

Alec only winced. “You won’t be.”

“What?” I shook my head. “How do you know?”

“Because I know what she needs, and you don’t have it.”

But Hope hadn’t said anything to that extent. She hadn’t?—

Fuck. There’d been a lot she hadn’t said, like how far gone she already was.

Realizing she never thought I’d actually be able to donate anything to her—she’d always known she was going to die—I lost it.

I backed up, dry heaving and unable to catch a decent breath before my back hit a wall. Choking on the sobs, I sank down onto my ass and gripped my head in both hands as I rested my elbows on my knees.

Alec eased down beside me, pulling his own knees up to his chest and hugging them close before he rasped, “You’re him, aren’t you?”

I shook my head, finding it hard to concentrate. “What?”

“About a week after she came to town, Hope told me that she’d fallen in love with someone. Someone she claimed to have known forever but never really thought of that way until recently when something changed between them and—” He snapped his fingers. “She said it happened in an instant.”

I clutched my chest, feeling pressure close in around me from every direction. But Alec’s words filled me with a kind of weight I’d never experienced before.

“I thought she was talking about some stranger back in Ohio. I thought that’s why she’d come to Texas, to run from her feelings. But—” Turning to look at me, he said, “She was talking about you. Wasn’t she?You’rethe orgasm king.”

“Alec,” I tried to explain, but he lifted a hand to stop me.

“She asked you to keep her condition from me.”

When I nodded, he furrowed his brow. “So you just—you did it? You kept it from me for her? You were more loyal toherthan you were to me?”

Fuck. I hadn’t thought of it that way. I thought I’d been protecting him too by keeping it under wraps. But I knew what he said was true, even as I tried to deny it to both of us. “No,” I rasped, shaking my head and too afraid to admit the truth.

But Alec waved a hand. “It’s okay,” he told me calmly. “It’s really okay, Ohrley. She’s always needed someone who would put her first. Someone who’d be more loyal to her than they were to anyone else. She’s never gotten that before.”

When I squinted at him, not understanding, he reached over to grab the sleeve of my shirt. “I’m sorry.” Looking at me with Hope’s startling blue eyes, he shook his head. “I didn’t understand. I thought it was just about sex, and you were sleeping with her behind my back because—because I don’t know why. Because you’re you. I thought you were treating her like you usually treat women. I didn’t realize you had actually fallen in love with her right back.”

Panic clutched my throat from the overwhelming emotion flooding my system. My only course of action to escape it was deny, deny, deny.

So I shook my head and whispered, “No.” But I was breathing too hard for it to be in any way believable. Tears wet my cheeks. I was unraveling at the seams. The world felt like it was imploding around me.

---