“What you’re wanting for is a partner.” Maybe this time—maybe Rahil could do this right—maybe—
“I think it is,” Mercer replied, the shock in his voice resolving into realization as he said it. He tipped his head, catching Rahil’s gaze in the darkness, so close they were almost kissing. “I was perfectly happy with Leah. She was everything—She stillis.”
It was not what Rahil had expected to come next, but it touched a place of love inside him that he didn’t realize needed to be found, to be pressed against and told was real: that he could still care about Shefali, after all this time. And that those feelings were normal. It also reminded him, uncomfortably, that he needed, more than ever, to find an opportunity to talk about his own part in Leah’s death. And here they were, already broaching the subject of Leah.
But the conversation still felt one step too removed, Rahil’s own emotions making circles around the topic. Soon though. He could find a way.
Rahil cleared his throat. “Shefali and I should have been forever. I told myself that so many times after we divorced. We’d been so happy, too, and we were in love—I’llalwaysbe in love with her.” But then he wasn’t able to make it work. Rahil couldn’t say it out loud and have to hear Mercer’s encouragement, confront what it meant, so he skipped over it. “We got back together when she was diagnosed, but we had so little time then.”
“The lung cancer?”
“Late stage, yeah. Maybe we’d healed enough from losing Jonah or maybe we were just scrambling to try and make something out of the love we both still held since it could have been our last chance, but I—I made a mess of that too.”
Mercer brushed his free hand over the side of Rahil’s hair, so gently it hurt. “Rahil…”
“I offered to turn her.” He could feel the vehicle of their conversation speeding down the path, barreling toward the jump, and he’d have to take it—he’d have to tell Mercer soon. They were all but hovering around the topic without Mercer even realizing it. Rahil’s heart thudded, the excitement that had been pooling in better places now turning to knots in his gut.
Mercer tensed, as though his body knew what was coming just as much as Rahil’s did. “But Shefali didn’t…?”
“No.” Rahil shook his head, short and sharp. “She said she wanted to die on her own terms. Which was funny, because it was the same reason I gave whenIturned.”
“Youchoseto turn?” The question seemed to spill out of Mercer, before he paused and added, no less aghast, “You weredying?”
“Freak accident.” Rahil shrugged, not because it didn’t hurt, but because it had hurt for so long that its pain, like so many others in his life, was just an ordinary part of him now. “I don’t really remember it. Shefali and I had just moved in together—much to our families’ chagrin—into an apartment in the downtown area, and I was walking home just after midnight from the mart a few blocks away. We’d finally finished unpacking, and Shefali needed a pack of smokes. A driver, drunk I think, swerved onto the sidewalk—I don’t even know if they realized they hit me. I was pinned on a piece of old metal in the alley for… a long time? But a vampire smelled all my lost blood. That’s the part I really do remember—feeling so desperate. Wanting to take any option that might make the suffering shorter. I was terrified of spending weeks in a hospital with my insides stitched up, everyone praying for me, pooling money for me to stay, not knowing if another surgery would kill me or save me.”
He could feel the waves of emotion that rolled through Mercer, his body stiffening and his fingers tightening around Rahil’s, his other arm gently pulling Rahil closer. It made those scars so much easier to bear, knowing that someone who cared—maybe notloved, yet, but cared, deeply—was bearing them with him. Mercer didn’t try to interrupt, and when he did speak, it was soft, not with pity but with attention and compassion. “I’m sorry.”
Rahil leaned into his touch. “For a long time, I thought I’d made the right choice,” he admitted. “But now I feel like… like I took that choice away from someone else. The coin only flips to heads so many times. I got lucky, so someone else…”
This was it. The segue.
He knew exactly who’d died making the same choice he had, and Mercer deserved to know it too.
But Mercer was already on the move, shifting to cup Rahil’s face in his thick palm, his eyes bright in the darkness. “Babe, you are brilliant enough to know that that isnothow chance works.”
Not how chance works.
Brilliant.
Babe.
Rahil drew in a breath and was almost surprised to hear it sound like a sob. The warmth that slid down his cheeks caught him off guard, nearly as much as the sniffle that followed. This was not—it was hurting?—he washurting. He didn’t understand why or how something like love could have done this, but in that moment he felt every year of loneliness and shame and grief as one blinding flash, and pressed against the solid form of someone who cared, it finally, fullyhurt.
Mercer pulled him close, wrapping him up in a hug that felt so familiar and yet like nothing Rahil had ever experienced.
But he didn’t know yet. He didn’t know he was comforting the person who’d taken away his wife. Who’d ruined his life. Maybe now it would be all right, though—now that they both knew they wanted this. Maybe they could work through it.
“Mercer,” Rahil tried, his throat closing on the last syllable.
“I mean it,” Mercer insisted. “It was not your fault. Everything you blame yourself for, it’s—”
“Mercer,” Rahil repeated, stronger.
This time, Mercer just looked at him, not pulling away, but more pulling to attention. Soft, but firm, he said, “Yes, Rahil?”
Rahil had to swallow down every last panic fluttering through his body, and condense it all into his twisting gut as he said, “There’s something I have to tell you.” It sounded so ominous, but then so was the fact of his fangs in Leah’s neck. Maybe the best thing to do was not to shy away from that reality, but to acknowledge it. Rahil took one of Mercer’s hands in his, squeezing firmly. “I’m afraid it’s dark, and it’ll be painful at first, but I think you’d want to know now.” He couldn’t bear to look at Mercer as he continued, so he just did, one word after another. “When I was looking in Leah’s notebooks, I—”
But Mercer cut him off. “Is this—This is about her—about her death?” He didn’tsoundhorrified, yet the pressure of his fingers twisted around Rahil, until Mercer was the one holdingRahil’shand. Mercer shook his head. “I don’t want to hear it right now. Later maybe, but… This is the first night where I haven’t felt like I have to orient my life around the pain of Leah’s passing and I want to keep it that way.”
