Page 100 of Kiss Me Honey Hone

Balance? This bloke was totally off balance. Unhinged.

“Youarejust like her. Thinking you’re invincible. That the world revolves around your pretty little face.” Peter held up his hand, the balm glistening on his fingers. “Well, let’s see how pretty you are when you’re gasping for air.”

He then lunged.

Aaron grabbed a glass beaker from the bench and hurled it in his direction. The glass shattered on the floor, scattering shards across the tiles, and Peter flinched but didn’t stop, so Aaron scrambled around the bench, trying to put distance between them. He grabbed another object—a heavy metal Bunsen burnerstand—and flailed it. Peter dodged, the stand clanging onto the counter with a deafening crash.

“You’re making this more fun than I expected,” Peter said, his voice tight with exertion, grin widening as he cornered Aaron against a cabinet. “But you can’t run from this. It’s your destiny.”

“Really fucking hate this destiny shit.”

Aaron barely registered the movement before a cold mist sprayed across his face, icy droplets clinging to his skin like venom. He staggered back, coughing violently, chest tightening as if iron bands were wrapping around his ribs. His eyes burned, watering uncontrollably, and a strange numbness spread across his lips and cheeks.

“Oh, fuck,” Aaron gasped. His skin felt wrong, tingling and alien, as if something crawled just beneath the surface. He clawed and scratched, desperate to rid himself of the sensation, but his movements were slow, disconnected, like a puppet with tangled strings.

Peter’s laugh was low and guttural, cutting through the fog in Aaron’s brain. “I’m going to enjoy this.”

Aaron’s legs buckled, and he reached blindly for something—anything—to keep upright, but he only met air. He went down hard, the impact rattling through him, though he barely felt it. His body wasn’t his own anymore. It was heavy, unresponsive, as if he was submerged in thick, freezing water. His vision blurred, shapes and shadows blending together. Somewhere above him, Peter’s voice loomed, muffled now, distorted as if filtered through layers of static.

Move! Get up! Don’t let them win!

But the fog thickened, Aaron’s thoughts unravelling. The cold tile beneath him pressed against his cheek, grounding him just enough to hear the surrounding sounds—the scrape of a stool being dragged, Peter’s heavy breathing, the soft metallic clink oftools being arranged.

Oh, God.Was this it? Was he really going to die here? The thought clawed at his mind, brutal and unrelenting. He lay on the cold, unfeeling floor of the lab, the sterile air choking him as his vision blurred and darkened. The bright, unforgiving fluorescents above burned through him, searing into the last fragments of his consciousness.

This can’t be how it ends. His heart pounded in a wild, erratic rhythm, echoing in his ears, the only sign that his body was still fighting. Still alive. But everything else was slipping away. His limbs leaden. Thoughts tangled as the fog crept over his mind.

From somewhere far away, a voice cut through the haze. Sharp. Commanding.Familiar. But Aaron couldn’t make sense of it. Couldn’t focus. Everything around him blurred together into an overwhelming cacophony. Crashes. Metallic clangs. The scrape of something heavy. It was chaos. And distant. Like a dream.

Dream a little dream of me…

“Aaron!” The voice was closer now, cutting through the noise and the desperation in it pulled deep within him, forcing him to cling to the fraying edges of reality.

A sudden jolt. Hands gripping his jacket, shaking him with enough force to rattle the fog loose for a fleeting moment. Aaron blinked, vision swimming until, finally, it cleared just enough to see.

The sight might be enough to restart his heart.

Because the most beautiful man he’d ever seen loomed above him, panic etched into his features, eyes wide and wild.Kenny. His lips moved, calling Aaron’s name, but the muffled words were coming out as though he were underwater. Aaron tried to focus, tried to pull back, but his body felt foreign, uncooperative. Even now, on the edge of something unspeakable, the sight of Kenny still sparked something in him—a fleeting, achinglonging.

He blinked, mind spinning with the cruel, bitter irony.Ofcourse it’s him. The last thing I get to see before I go and I can’t even kiss him.Life really wasn’t fair.

He opened his mouth, his voice barely more than a whisper, hoarse and broken. “Don’t kiss me, doc. Please don’t kiss me.”

Kenny crumpled above him, expression twisting between heartbreak and fury. “Stay with me, baby. You better fuckingstay. With.Me.”

Aaron wanted to laugh, to say,yeah, all right, but the effort was too much and the outcome futile. He wasn’t supposed to be with Kenny. That wouldn’t balance the world. And the world tilted then, slipping further into the shadows.

The last thing he felt was Kenny’s grip tightening on him, anchoring him as everything else fell away.

chapter twenty-three

Only Love Can Hurt Like This

Kenny couldn’t function.

The irony wasn’t lost on him. Sitting in the sterile, clinical hallway of Ryston Hospital’s Accident and Emergency wing, surrounded by doctors and nurses trained to keep people alive, yet he felt like he was dying. He hunched forward, digging his elbows into his knees, clutching his hair as though he could rip the panic out of his skull, and tried to focus on his breathing.

Inhale. Exhale.But no matter how hard he tried, it wasn’t working. Every inhale was jagged, every exhale shallow, and the thought kept hammering in his mind:What if I hadn’t got there in time?

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