Page 90 of This Time It's Real
Then I spot a familiar figure waiting outside one of the closed rooms—broad jaw and cropped hair and even broader shoulders, half his body still covered in plates of fake armor.
Mingri.
Relief crashes through my chest, but it’s cut short by the look on his face.
His lips are set in a hard, tired line, his eyes vacant and rimmed with red. As I stare, he wipes his face roughly with one hand. Is he . . . crying?
No.
My footsteps falter, and suddenly I want to turn right back around. Get out of here. Go back to not knowing. But he’s already seen me.
“Eliza?” Mingri rubs his eyes one last time and straightens, walks over slowly, exhaustion written all over his body. Exhaustion, or . . . grief. His voice is hushed. “What are you doing here?”
“I . . .” There’s something stuck in my throat, something painful. I try to clear it. “Where’s Caz?”
His features pinch, and I know—even before he says the words—I know. I steel myself with every cell in my body, but it’s still not enough to stomach what he says next, in Mandarin:
“Ta bu zai.”
I do a quick translation in my head—he isn’t here—and everything stops. My ears ring. Ring on and on and on like an unanswered call before the static turns to silence. I think I collapse to the ground, because next thing I know my knees are bruising against the gray tiles, the cold of the floor creeping into my skin, into my bones, sinking its sharp teeth into everything. Mingri moves forward with hands outstretched, starts to say something else, but I can’t hear him. Can’t even think.
Not here. Not anymore.
Dead.
A nail deep in my chest, twisting. That’s what it feels like, and I don’t want to feel this, but when did that ever stop anything? It’s over. All of it. And I never even got the chance to tell him how I really felt, never even got to give him a real apology. I breathe in and out and the world is still moving, it must be, but everything is frozen inside me. I had always feared Caz Song would break my heart, but this—
This is the kind of heartbreak you never recover from.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Two hands touch my shoulders. Gentle.
I don’t know who they belong to. I don’t care. My eyes blur, the hospital lights bleeding into the corners of my vision like a white haze of stars, and it’s not until I hear his voice, feel his shadow reaching over me, that I freeze.
“What happened? What did you say to her?”
Hisvoice. Not Mingri’s, but—
My breathing stutters. My heart crashes and picks up again at a thousand miles a minute, and I twist around so fast my spine cracks, because it’s not realit’s not real it can’t be real it can’t be except it is.
It is.
Caz Song is standing in the center of the hospital corridor, gazing down at me, long lashes shadowing his cheeks, eyes liquid-black with concern. He’s alive. He’s alive and right there and he’s never looked so beautiful and even though I can’t bear to look away from him, I turn to Mingri for confirmation that I’m not hallucinating.
And Mingri is turned toward Caz, which means I must not be.
He’s really here.
“Eliza?” Caz says, and his voice is so exquisitely tender that I forget myself, forget everything, just spring up from the ground with more strength than I knew I possessed and throw my arms around his body, crash headfirst into his chest. He wobbles slightly upon impact, caught off guard, but he manages to regain his balance.
And I hold him. Hold on to him.
I breathe in the summer scent of his shampoo and feel the firmness of his shoulders, the hard places where his muscles connect, the slope of his neck, and it all feels so nice I could cry.
Then Mingri clears his throat.
We pull apart, but the moment lingers somewhere in the space between my fingertips, the leftover heat from his body warming my skin.
