“Julian?”
That voice. God, I knew that voice. It washed over me, a sweet relief.
And then, there she was. Standing on two feet at the other end of the hall, though she seemed unsteady. Her eyes were wide and red and pretty. Tear tracks stained her cheeks, mixing with streaks of mascara. Her face was as messy as her hair, but fuck, I couldn’t stop looking at her.
I stared, unable to even get her name out, my mouth opening and closing in shock.
What the hell was happening to me?
“Gemma’s in here,” she said quietly, jerking her thumb toward the hospital room.
I nodded absently, striding toward her before I could second-guess what I was doing. And then my hands were on her face, my fingers in her hair, my breath skimming the top of her head. I felt her stiffen and gasp and then momentarily melt beneath my hands.
I tipped her head back so she was looking up at me, my eyes and fingers focusing on the stitches sticking out from beneath a bandage along her hairline.
“You’re hurt.”
She swallowed, her throat working slowly in a way that I understood all too well. “I’m fine,” she whispered. “Gemma—”
“Did you hit your head? You should sit down.”
“The seat belt.” She gasped as I brushed my thumb beneath her eyes, wiping the streaks of mascara away. “The seat belt cut into my forehead when the car flipped. I didn’t hit my head, Julian.”
Her words bounced around in my brain.
When the car flipped.
An image of it flashed before my eyes, and I didn’t even realize I was gripping Juni’s face too tightly until she squirmed in my grasp. I dropped my hands, balling them into my pockets instead. “What the fuck happened?”
She flinched, and I immediately regretted my tone. But I didn’t know how to control the emotions tangling inside me. I didn’t understand them, but I had to try.
“I hit a patch of ice when I was merging onto the highway, and it sent us flying toward the median—”
“You have to slow the fuck down, Juni,” I cut in, wringing my hands anxiously in my pockets. “You have to slow down when the weather gets like this. What were the two of you even doing out?”
“I know that,” she snapped, taking a step back as she glared at me. “I was taking it slow.”
“Clearly, you weren’t taking it slow enough,” I pushed back. “Jesus Christ, look at what happened to Gemma. And you, you could have—”
I bit down on my tongue, hard enough that the taste of metallic spread through my mouth. But Juni didn’t need to know how badly I’d been falling apart seconds before she called my name. She didn’t need to know that I was halfway down a spiral right now. She didn’t need to know anything.
I just needed her to never do that to me again.
