Blake laughed again and pulled me closer.

   “And?” I placed my hands over his and linked our fingers. “What did you tell them?”

   “This is so fucking bad.” Josh shook his head. “Hunter and I looked at each other, and I don’t even know what happened . . . I think we were both so paranoid from the weed that we thought we couldn’t tell them the truth.”

   “What did you say?” I needed to know.

   “Hunter here—” He stopped, unable to speak through his cackle. When he finally calmed down, he continued, “Hunter said that vampires came and tried to attack us! We tried to fight them off, but they got me, hence the blood, and then they hung me off the end of the bleachers as a warning to the werewolves that they’d been there!”

   We all roared with laughter.

   I looked up at Blake, with teary eyes. The good kind. “Vampires? Werewolves?”

   He just shrugged and said, “Twilight had just come out.”

   “Where to next?” The cab driver asked as he started to reverse out of Josh’s driveway.

   Blake pulled me so close to him that I was almost on his lap.

   “My house, I guess.” I looked up at him, but he was looking out the window, his mind somewhere else. “Blake?”

   His gaze dropped to mine. “Huh?”

   “The cab. My house or yours first?”

   His eyes fell shut. When he opened them, they were glazed and red. He was holding in tears. “Stay with me tonight?”

   And that was all it took.

   I’d known it was coming. And I’d known it would be soon. But I wasn’t prepared for it. I wasn’t ready for the moment where my mind caught up to my heart and the walls I’d built crumbled.

   I wasn’t ready to admit that I’d fallen in love.

   Without a word, he took my hand and led me up to his bedroom. I stood in the middle of his room while he went through his dresser and pulled out a shirt. He didn’t hand it to me like I’d expected. Instead, he set it on his bed, turned to me, and slowly slipped my dress over my head. I stood in front of him, in the darkness of his room—lit only by the moon outside—in nothing but my bra and panties.

   And I’d never felt more beautiful in my life.

   My eyes drifted shut. I waited for him to touch me. For his hands to follow where his eyes had roamed. But it never happened. The touch never came. Then the soft material of his shirt covered me. His voice came out in a whisper: “I like you in my clothes, Not Abby.”

   He waited for me to get into his bed before following. Then he pulled me into him—the heat of his bare chest against my back. His hold was tight. So tight I almost couldn’t breathe. But that was fine—because in this moment, all I needed to breathe was Blake.

   His nose skimmed along the back of my neck, moving my hair to make way for his lips. His kisses were soft and slow, but they were also commanding. His hand moved under my shirt and flattened against my stomach. Then his palm crept higher. And higher. “Blake.”

   “Mmm?” The wetness of his open mouth, followed by his tongue, made me shiver.

   “What are you doing?”

   “I don’t know,” he said. The frustration, the plea, the need in his voice was enough to make me turn in his arms. Once we were face-to-face, he continued, “I feel like I need to—no, we need to—do something so that you don’t forget me.”

   I reared back. “You think I could forget you?”

   He dropped his gaze, but he didn’t speak.

   “So you want to have sex?”

   “No,” he said quickly, lifting his eyes to meet mine. “I don’t know. Yes. I just want you to remember me.”

   My chest tightened at his words. “Would you forget me?”

   “Never.”

   “Then what makes you think I’d forget you?”

   “Because that’s your goal in life, Chloe. To be forgettable.”

   “That’s not fair, Blake.”

   He sighed. “Maybe not, but it’s the truth.”

   I let his words sink in and settle before I spoke. “I’ve had sex, Blake.”

   His eyes narrowed.

   “With lots of guys.”

   His lips thinned to a line.

   “And I don’t remember them.”

   “So what are you saying?”

   “I’m saying that it didn’t mean anything. Sex. It probably never will.”

   He leaned his forehead against mine. “I wish I was enough,” he said quietly.

   “Enough?”

   “I wish that I could ask you to stay, and that it would be enough. That I was enough.”

   I wanted to tell him that he was. He was more than enough. But it wasn’t just about him. It was about me, too. It always had to be about me, and the people I’d leave behind.

   He took my silence as an answer. Sighing, he leaned in and placed a chaste kiss on my lips.

   I kissed back, lingering longer than he’d probably expected.

   His fingers on my back curled, gripping the shirt.

   “You know what I’ve always wanted? What I never let myself dream?” I said against his lips.

   “What?” he whispered.

   “To meet a guy that wanted to kiss me. Not because it would lead to sex, but because he felt like he would die if he couldn’t. I want to fall asleep, kissing someone, and for that kiss to be enough, to be everything. Just kiss. Sometimes when I’m with you, that’s all I want. I want to kiss you like my life depends on it.” My voice cracked, but I kept going. “If I could dream the same dream a million times over, it would be you—you would be my last kiss, my last breath.”

   “Chloe,” he sighed.

   And then he kissed me.

   He kissed me with everything he had.

   Every piece of him.

   Like his life depended on it.

   We never broke apart.

   Not even when fatigue set in, and we struggled to move.

   Or when fatigue won out, and we fell asleep.

   Not even when I dreamed that the cancer had won, and I was dying.

   And that Blake Hunter—he was my last dying breath.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

   Blake

   Her eyes fluttered open, and a slow smile spread across her face.