Page 330 of Faking the Goal

"So stop giving me reasons to."

A watery laugh escapes him.

"I don't know how."

"You start... by believing me when I tell you none of this was your fault."

"...I'll try," he whispers.

But I can hear the uncertainty buried beneath them.

He falls silent after that and he just... looks at me.

His eyes wander over every bruise on my face, every bandage wrapped around my body, lingering on me with an ache so profound it steals the air from the room. It's as though he's trying to reassure himself that I'm really here, that I'm awake, that he isn't dreaming this moment after spending three days terrified I'd never open my eyes again.

There are a thousand emotions moving behind his eyes—relief, fear, guilt, love—and I have the strange feeling he's searching for words big enough to hold all of them.

He never finds them.

So instead, he says the only three that matter.

"I love you."

For one suspended second, everything inside me goes quiet.

The ache pulsing through my ribs. The sting beneath the bandage on my forehead. The steady beeping beside my bed and the distant squeak of nurses' shoes beyond the half-closed door. Even the memory of Charlie's hands on me seems to loosen its grip, retreating beneath the sound of those three words spoken in Kentaro's low, unsteady voice.

I love you.

They settle over every wounded part of me like something warm and healing, a balm sinking deeper than bruised skin and fractured bone, finding the places no doctor could ever reach. The lonely places. The broken places. The pieces of my heart I had buried so long ago that I had almost convinced myself they were never there to begin with.

No one has ever said those words to me like that.

No one has ever looked at me as though loving me is not an obligation or an accident or something they might regret once they finally understand what they have taken on. Kentaro looks at me as if the words have been trapped inside him for too long, as if forcing them out hurts him, but keeping them buried would hurt even more.

And God, I want to keep them.

I want to gather those words against my chest and hold them there until they become part of my heartbeat. I want to close my eyes and live inside this moment for the rest of my life, where Kentaro Azuma is sitting beside my hospital bed with his hand wrapped carefully around mine, telling me the one thing I have secretly wanted to hear from him so badly that I never once allowed myself to hope for it.

Because hope has always been cruel to me.

It shows me something beautiful, lets me reach for it, and then tears it away the moment my fingers touch it.

But right now, with Kentaro's thumb trembling against my knuckles and his dark eyes fixed on mine, I feel happiness so sharp it almost hurts more than everything else. It swells inside my battered chest until there is no room left to breathe, bright and impossible and sweeter than anything I have ever been given.

He loves me.

He loves me.

He loves me.

The words race through my mind with every frantic beat of my heart, and the answer rises so quickly to my lips that I almost let it escape.

I love you too.

It is right there. Four small words pressing against the back of my teeth. The truest thing I have ever known. I want to give them to him. I want to watch the tension leave his face when he hears them. I want to tell him that somewhere between our arguments and our lies, between his hand holding mine on the ice and the nights I fell asleep feeling safe in his arms, I stopped pretending.

Kentaro leans closer, his grip tightening around my hand as though he can feel me pulling away even though I have not moved.