Page 161 of Unexpected

Hazel sat expectantly, tapping her good fingers against her sling with her eyebrows raised.

“I just—you know it was—sometimes—” I fumbled hopelessly for the right words. Giving up entirely, I scrubbed my hands over my face and massaged the sudden tension in the back of my neck as I waited for her to begin her verbal undressing. But she just stared with the same look on her face like she expected me to say something.

“Angel, this is not—why are you looking at me like that?”

She quirked an eyebrow, but a hint of a smile brushed over her lips, pulling at one corner of her mouth.

“Now, why are you smiling?” I asked, genuinely dumbfounded.

She shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe I just think you’recutewhen you’re flustered.”

I tipped my head back and laughed. It had taken her over a month, but she’d finally used the damn word against me. And I understood why she didn’t find it to be the compliment I always meant it as. The grin on her face told me she was proud of herself, and I couldn’t stand it. I had to kiss her.

I crossed the room in two strides and gingerly grasped her face in my hands. Her eyes widened like she didn’t expect my reaction, but there wasn’t a second that went by that I didn’t want to kiss her or touch her.

Her lips were soft and supple beneath my own and when she sighed into my mouth, it was like coming home. She tasted like coffee and faintly of her mint toothpaste from that morning. When my tongue flattened against her lips, she was already letting me in and shifting to wrap her arm around my shoulders and tugging her fingers into my hair.

It went against everything stoking inside of me to pull away, but I did. And Hazel groaned at the loss.

“I love you, Angel,” I said with confidence, still cupping her face as we sat only inches apart. In that moment, I watched her eyes gloss over, her lips part on a gasp and the rise and fall of her chest grow quicker as the words fell over her. Nothing else mattered, nothing existed beyond our connection. Her gaze never faltered, and once the gravity of my confession settled over her, her lips tilted in a sweet, promising smile.

“That’s good because I love you too.”

And then I kissed her again because every second her lips weren’t on mine felt like I was lost. It was the first time she’d said it, but I knew I’d never tire of hearing those words from her. She said them with the same conviction I did, and I could feel her confidence radiating through me.

I loved her with every dark, bruised, and damaged part of myself, and it seemed to be enough for her. She was so easy to love. I knew if I got to love her forever, and if she honored me by returning the favor, it wouldn’t be long enough.

“God, I need you, Luke. I need to get out of here,” she murmured against my lips, breaking our kiss for only a moment before gripping my hair tighter and pushing us back together.

“Who’s ready to get the heck out of—” The doctor walked into the room, peering up from his clipboard to see us in an intimate yet significant moment. “Here. Are you ready to go home, Hazel?”

She didn’t even have to say anything—words were inconsequential to her bright eyes and her sunshine smile that lit up the room and my entire world.

EPILOGUE

Hazel

Eight months later

“Okay,and this is the bedroom. I’ve already cleaned the sheets and the towels in the bathroom are clean as well. But there are extras in the closet if you need any. And I—”

“Hazel, seriously, this is incredible, but we’ve been here before. I know where everything is.” Becky laughed. “Thank you for dropping everything and letting us in early.”

“What are friends for? I just want to make sure you feel comfortable and have everything you need.”

The day Chris followed Becky to the hospital and accused me of having something to do with the reason she was leaving was the day she left. She’d spent the previous seven months living in her parents’ spare room with Emmy. It worked for the time she spent there, but it was affecting her relationship with her parents. So, she decided to get the hell out, which is where I came in. I offered up my little one-bedroom apartment that I only spent a total of two weeks in.

She was supposed to move in the following week, but after a particularly nasty argument between her and her parents, she wanted the keys as soon as possible.

Even being in the apartment for that short time, the memories came hard and fast and were more overwhelming than I expected. Most of them didn’t center around the apartment, but just knowing that on the other side of the dining room and bathroom wall was the place where Valerie lived for weeks was enough to keep me from the place.

The police had searched the apartment just after I was admitted to the hospital and to no one’s surprise, her shrine to Luke was expansive. One wall was littered with photos from the previous few weeks—photos taken from right outside his windows, right outside my windows, from the clinic, near my apartment. They went on and on, and as time elapsed, the creepier they became with photos of us in the middle of sex and one where we forgot to close the blinds completely when I was on my knees in front of him.

They were collaged on the wall in chronological order with notes jotted down in the corner of each. Most of them depicted what stage she thought we were in in our relationship and where the photo was taken. She drew things like angel wings, halos, and sometimes horns on my photos, and sometimes her notes referred to me as a bitch or a whore, but Luke was always referred to as Bear.

Knowing the other types of activities that may have been going on over there, I couldn’t stand to stay in my apartment. With the help I needed from just getting out of the hospital, it made sense to either go back to Nashville in the interim or move in with Luke.

I pretended like I had a decision, but I knew better. Luke, in his brazenly possessive way, was not going to let me go. And secretly, I loved it.

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