Page 16 of Raise Up, Heart
“Is it you?”
You sigh in impatience and frustration, but also sadness, because this is not ever how you wanted it to be for him, or for yourself, but definitely not for him. You run your hands up his arms; he’s shaking all over, and his breath comes in soft, wet hitches.
“Cole, what do you want me to say?”
“That you’re him,” Cole whispers, but he sounds scared.
Your hands seek his face in the darkness, and you can almost make out the glimmer of his eyes, as your fingers touch his cheeks for the first time in…too long, too damn long, and you stroke your thumb over his chin.
“Oh, God,” Cole says, and his voice is broken, devastated. His knees seem to give, because he’s in your arms, leaning against you, crying, and babbling incoherently—your name, and curses mostly, but also disbelief, and terrible hope.
“I thought I saw… I know what I saw. You died. Damon, you died.”
You help him down to the ground. You’re not going anywhere—not right now. He’s going into an acute stress reaction, and you’re going to have to find a way to snap him out of it, or at the very least keep you both warm until the sun rises. You hold him against your body. This is a bad idea. You know that. You know it even as you turn his head to you and kiss him, letting his words and sobs fill your mouth. His lips are soft and wet, and you love them fiercely. You stroke his face, trying to calm him, kissing him, and murmuring, “Shh, Cole. It’s okay. Calm down. It’s going to be okay.”
He kisses you back, one fist clenched in your hair, and the other grasping your collar, pulling you closer, deeper, and you stroke his cheek, feeling the wet tears on your fingertips. Your gut clenches. His tears always undo you; they always have. Watching him from afar the last many months has been torture for you, seeing how he flounders, how he starts to rise up, and then is felled again.
You only want him to heal, to be okay, and then you can…end this. Whatever this is. It’s all you want. It’s what made this happen to begin with.
But Cole breaks a little more every day, and you can’t keep to just watching anymore. It’s why you stepped out, why you knelt beside him, why you’re kissing him now.
His mouth rips away from yours. “No!” Cole says, shoving away, panting. “Whoareyou?”
You swallow hard. This is all wrong. You should have waited. Made a plan. If you were going to approach him, then you should have made sure that he could, oh, maybe,see you, because he’s completely unable to deal with this in the dark.
“Cole—”
“What the hell is going on? Where am I?” he asks, confusion and terror in every word.
Oh, God. It’s heart-rending, and you have to make this stop. You don’t need him to believe you. Not now. You just need to get him out of the woods. You touch his cheek, but he knocks your hand away.
You know what you have to do. You stand up. It’s hard to walk away from him; you want to slide down next to him on the ground and make soft noises until he calms, but you’re the reason he’s in this state, and you think that maybe this…this might be the answer.
“Where are you going?” he asks.
“Come with me and see.”
“Why should I trust you? You’re dead. This is a dream. And I really want to wake up now.” He sounds so frightened, so completely out of his head that you fight your instinct to approach again.
“You can come with me now. Or you can stay here and never know. It’s your call.”
You have to walk carefully, it’s dark, and the ground is uneven with downed limbs, and you stumble, but you finally head back the way you both came. Your horrible, half-broken down car is in the two-day pay lot next to the supermarket across from Cole’s office, and if he doesn’t follow, then you’ll use the barely working pay phone to call the police to come get him.
You hear his footsteps, the crunching sounds of acorns and twigs snapping beneath Cole’s feet, and you want to stop, to reach behind you and take his hand, but you don’t. If he’s spooked any more than he is now, he might take off running in the other direction, and that’s a risk you don’t want to take.
Cole is walkingthrough a nightmare of something worse than fear—it’s hope. He really can’t handle hope. It’s the thing that hurts him more than anything else, and yet he’s letting himself get deeper into it with every step forward. He’s got his hand thrust into his coat pocket, turning the stone heart there over and over, as he follows this man, this terrible, terrifying man who tastes, moves, talks, and seems tobeDamon, out of the woods.
As the man in front of him takes those final steps from the bramble and into the parking lot, the world transforms. Cole’s headlights illuminate the area around them.
“I left the car running…”
The absurdity of that, mixed with the reality of Damon standing in front of him, blends with the swirling blue and green dots before his eyes, and he’s on the pavement.
Damon…Damon?…is beside him, making sure his head doesn’t hit the ground, and hefting his legs up, bending them at the knee, telling him…what? Telling him to breathe.
“Don’t pass out on me now,” Damon says.
“Okay,” Cole says, but he doesn’t even know what that means. “I won’t.”
