Page 106 of Whiskey Kisses

“Nah, I’m good,” he says stubbornly. “I found your edibles and took one a little while ago.”

“Ah.” A smile bubbles up through the haze of my painkillers and sleep-deprivation. “That’s why you’re so mellow.”

“Want one?” he asks, kissing my forehead.

“Maybe when Jamila leaves.” Our room is quiet except for the faint sound of music coming from the backyard. I close my eyes, inhaling Tristan’s clean-laundry and lemongrass scent. “You’ve been using my soap again,” I say with a smile.

He returns my smile, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. I can see how tired he is, how wrung out, but he refuses to leave my side. I guess I don’t blame him. If the situation were reversed, I wouldn’t leave his either. “Every time I smell it, it reminds me that you’re still alive.”

My heart pangs. “I love you,” I whisper, stroking his beard. It’s getting long again. “We’re gonna be okay.”

Jamila pops back into the room with my Tylenol, and Tristan straightens up as I swallow the pill with a glass of water. “Okay?” she asks with a kind smile.

I nod. “Thanks.”

“Get some rest, and I’ll see you tomorrow.” Her kind, brown eyes find Tristan, who’s still lingering close by. “You keep on taking good care of her, hear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says.

She leaves, closing the door behind her, and Tristan pulls the chair beside the bed closer before dropping into it.

“Maribelle texted again,” I murmur. “Earlier, when you were in the shower.”

“How’s she doing?” he asks neutrally.

“I don’t really know.” I lean back against my propped-up pillows, closing my eyes. “I think she still has a lot of guilt.”

“She should,” he says. “But about how she’s treated you for the past twenty years, not what happened at the parade.”

I bite my lip, nodding.

“I keep thinking about it,” he says after a minute. “I can barely sleep, and when I do, I dream about it.”

“Me, too,” I admit. It’s awful. The feeling of Cole’s arm choking me, the weird non-sensation of being stabbed, the wooziness, fear and confusion. Tristan and Cole, fighting. The gunshot, which I later found out was from DJ’s gun. He’d been aiming for Tristan but had, by the grace of God, missed. A random group of guys heroically took him down, holding him until the cops arrived.

Tristan nods, threading his fingers through mine on the bed. “Bria keeps pushing me to go to therapy. I never told you this, but the day Cole and his boys took me, I almost had a panic attack in their truck. Having a gun pointed at me like that brought back all these memories from the day I got shot.”

My heart aches, hearing this, and I tighten my hand around his.

“I didn’t realize how much fear I still had inside me.” He raises my hand to his mouth, dropping a kiss onto it. “I used to be so fearless, Evie. Nothing fazed me.”

“I know. I used to envy that about you,” I whisper. “But you’ve been through some horrible things, and fear’s a pretty normal byproduct.”

“Seeing Cole hurt you …” His eyes redden, and he closes them. “It was worse than every bad dream coming true. Like every fear I’ve ever had, multiplied.”

“But you were there for me,” I say softly, feeling the sting of tears in my own eyes. “You saved me, and you saved yourself.”

“It was a joint effort. Cole was easy to take out because he was weak, and he was weak because you poisoned him.”

“But he attacked me because I poisoned him,” I say unevenly, remembering with chilling clarity Cole’s text and the things he said to me seconds before the stabbing.

“He was gonna attack, regardless, Evie,” Tristan says. “He was a rabid dog who needed to be put down.”

We’re quiet for a moment, the weight of our shared trauma hanging over us like a noxious cloud. I still have no regrets in how I chose to deal with Danny and Cole Deschamps, but it’s not something I’m proud of. It came down to choosing the lesser of two evils.

“Hey.” He taps the blanket near my arm.

I look up.

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