Page 143 of The Love Haters

“I want to say I’m sorry,” I blurted out then. “About how everything happened.”

Hutch just nodded. “Me, too.” Were we both sorry in the same way? I really couldn’t read his face in those glasses. I thought about reaching up to take them off.

Everyone was still waiting for him. He took another look at the helicopter, and then he said, “I’m sorry about this, too—but I’ve really gotta go.”

He held my gaze for one more second. Then, in slow motion, he turned and strode away.

I watched him go.

That was it? That was all? No goodbye? No closure of any kind? He was just going to tell me to evacuate and then fly off to Miami?

I never made a conscious choice to run after him. By the time I realized it was happening, I’d dropped all my stuff, and I’d launched into a full George Bailey–style gallop.

“Hutch!” I called, but he didn’t hear me over the noise of the bird.

I sprinted faster to catch up. “Hutch!” I called again, and this time I caught his wrist.

He turned back and looked at me.

The sight of him there—windblown and suited up for duty—kind of stopped my heart.

“Hutch!” I shouted over the whirring of the blades. “Do me a favor, okay?”

He was listening.

Even recounting it now, I can’t believe what I was about to do. All I can figure is that circumstances had raced out ahead of me, and my rational thinking hadn’t caught up. That’s the only way I could possibly have said what I said:

“Before you go—can you kiss me goodbye?”

“What?”

One more time, louder. “Kiss me goodbye!” I shouted.

Omar was waving his arms now for Hutch to hurry up.

Hutch glanced that way and then back to me. He still had his backpack over one shoulder and his helmet under his arm. Everybody was waiting. A hurricane was coming. What the hell was I thinking, chasing Hutch down the tarmac?

It was foolish. We hadn’t talked about anything or cleared anything up. We were surrounded by the chaos of half-truths and random explanations. I had no idea how he felt about me. But it did seem likely that I might evacuate, go home to Texas, and never see Hutch again. And if that’s how things were going to go… I wanted one last kiss.

The one I hadn’t been able to ask for before he knew the truth.

I braced for Hutch to shake his head.

Of course he would.

But then, instead, he took a step closer—and pulled me to him by the waist with his free arm, clamping me to him so tightly that I tilted backward. And then he gave me the only kind of kiss there was time for—or room for, or reason for. A no-time-for-chitchat kind of kiss. A you-asked-for-it-you-got-it kiss. A kiss churning with things unsaid. Intense. Melting. Just his arm clutching me tight, his mouth eclipsing all my racing thoughts, and the storm, and the future… all our time already borrowed. How long did it last? Three seconds, tops? But it was like emotional lightning—as if we’d stepped into a current of something bigger than both of us. Something vast, and awe-inspiring, and something I knew, even as it happened, that I would never—not ever—forget.

And then it was over.

He let go and took a step back.

I blinked at him for a second—breathless, my knees feeble, my heart slumped and panting against my ribs.

“There’s your kiss,” Hutch said with a nod, taking another step back. “Now get the hell out of here.”

Twenty-Four

SO I DID.

---