Page 222 of A Love Like Venom

I glance away from him and stare down at my hand holding Reed's bandaged one. His hand lays limp in mine. Unmoving. I don't feel the warmth from them like I used to. But I can still feel the rough texture of his fingertips. The calluses on his palm. I try to focus on what remains the same. Like how whenever I hold his hand I still find that same strength as I had always before.

Even in his weakest and most fragile state Reed Carter is still giving me his strength.

Meeting Sticks watery steel blue eyes I say to him in a voice that is harsh and cold, "Don't say that."

He blows out a long breath filled with tension and braces his shoulders after. Blinking pass the tears he stares me down hard. "I'm giving you the news that you refuse to hear. It's been months, Alice.Months. Like you we all didn't want to believe it but the possibility remains. The longer he is unconscious the slimmer his chances are."

I swallow pass the lump in my throat but not from sorrow, from anger. I was afraid that I would never move on from the feeling of a never ending empty loneliness. Truth be told I haven't. The cavity in my chest is fucking hollow. There are days where I can't breathe. Nights that I go without sleeping. And the stars, the stars I stopped crying to long ago.

I have accepted the fact that as long as Reed is here in this hospital, unconscious with a ventilator placed in his windpipe, a machine meant to keep him alive, a machine used as the last resort, I have accepted the fact that I have to fight for him no matter how dead I feel inside.

Because half of me is missing.

The half of my heart bleeds for its other. Part of my soul longs to be connected to his. The very air that I breathe is thinning. My blood runs cold without his touch.

Our beautiful eclipse has passed.

Darkness no longer kisses the light and lives in perfect harmony creating a beautiful shade of grey.

The absence of him is everywhere.

But I refuse to believe that his absence will be permanent.

He's my beautiful moon. The night sky and the stars. I need him to wake up and remind the world what beauty the darkness holds.

"But there is still a chance," I stress to him. "You can't ask me to give that up."

"Nobody is asking that of you," he replies tiredly.

"Then what is it?"

He braces himself for a fight he knows I am about to put up. And every time he loses. They all do.

"Alice, I am not here to fight with you. None of us want that. We only want to support you and Reed." He begins like this every time and I'm tired of hearing it yet I keep my mouth glued shut. I don't want to say anything out of haste. Vipers MC along with Grace and Connor is the only family I have. "With support comes the hard conversations you have to talk about."

"Did you have the hard conversation about me?"

He blanches. "Alice-"

"Did you?"

"Entirely different circumstance. You were taken off oxygen three weeks later. In the second week we feared the possibility but didn't entertain it."

"Yet you entertain his?" My voice cracks. What's left of my heart aches viciously. I thought I was past this point. Past all the pain and sorrow. In reality all my pain, sorrow, loneliness and anger have molded together to create a massive black hole.

His face falls. "I don't want to fucking have to Alice but I do. He's like a son to me. I've seen how much of a better man he's become because of you. You don't think I want him to wake up? That I don't want to hear his laugh again? Or see the smile on his face you put there? You don't think I want to see him living and breathing? I do! But I also have to listen to what the doctors are telling me. What they are saying isn't good, Alice. I don't want to believe them but someone has to. Someone is going to have to make the hard call."

My heart leaps in my throat. Fear causes a panic in my chest and nausea to churn in my stomach. "I woke up. So can he."

"And I believe with all my heart that he will." I feel a but coming. "ButI have to listen to the doctors and so do you."

Fuck the doctors.

Fuck everyone who is against him.

I never will be.

"Our souls found each other's once. They will find each other's again." And that, that is something I believe with every cell in my body.

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