Brilliant grey eyes greeted me when I entered the room. It had been a month since the day when the least exciting event had been my high school graduation. The family welcomed baby Ariel, a healthy girl with all her fingers and toes and her dad's eyes and lungs that could only come from her mom's side of the family. If that wasn't enough, Sawyer opened his eyes again and-

He was okay.

Not perfect, never the same, but he was alive and with his faculties. That was a lot more than the doctors had expected.

"Good morning, ex-princess," he said from the bed he was confined in. The right side of his body was broken from what the doctors and the police believed to be his father's attack with some sort of pipe. It wasn't going to be easy for him to regain mobility.

I sat to his left and pulled out a pack of cigarettes from my purse that I extended to him. Sawyer's jaw slackened and he picked it up with his good hand with something akin to reverence. But then he read what the pack actually said.

"Chocolate cigarettes?" He groaned.

I laughed. "You actually though I, Aurora Maria Martinez Fernandez, was going to give you actual cigarettes?"

Never mind that this was a hospital and he was in no condition for smoking. Hopefully ever again.

"You troll," he said, but there was a smile on his face and I was happy I put it there.

"How are you feeling?" I asked, taking out a cigarette from the pack and unwrapping it. I put it between his lips and he leaned back against the pillows, no doubt pretending that it was the real deal.

"Kinda stiff," he said as he chewed. That made me choke and he laughed. "But that also might have something to do with how hot you look right now."

"Oh my God, Sawyer!" I wanted to smack him but I knew I couldn't. "Stop."

There was absolutely nothing hot about the overalls I wore, covered in splotches of paint and holes. I'd been working pretty hard the past couple of months on expanding my arts horizons and had joined a couple of summer classes at a local college. One was about classical portraiture and the other one about clay work. I now had the courage to do something like this since Sawyer bought me two cans of spray paint.

He opened his mouth in a way that told me he wanted a second chocolate stick. I obliged because all vices considered, chocolate was one I would happily indulge him on. I watched him eat. He'd lost a lot of weight and muscle from months of being confined to a bed, and it showed on his face. It was pale and gaunt and he often refused to shave, which meant he usually carried a bit of a beard until the nurses and I convinced him to get rid of it. Rinse and repeat.

Although the casts and bandages around his limbs always shocked me, it was actually the one around his head that wrenched my heart the most. With the surgeries he'd had to endure to get rid blood clots and patch him up together, they'd had to shave his entire head. Gone were the locks of blond hair that I used to run my fingers through. I leaned forward and ran my hand across the patch silky buzz cut that wasn't under wraps.

"I can't get used to this," I said with a sad little sigh. I cringed when I realized that didn't sound too encouraging. "I'm sorry, I mean—it's just-"

"No, I get it," Sawyer said, facing up to the ceiling. "It fucking sucks."

His left hand had clenched around the bed sheets and I picked it up in my hands. Gently I loosened his fingers until I could entwine them with mine.

"But he will never be able to hurt you anymore," I whispered.

Sawyer stayed silent for a few long minutes until he said, "Not physically, at least."

I bit my lips not to curse, but it was extremely difficult for me to not hold hatred in my heart for a man who could do this to his son. For years. Or for myself, for never having realized it. I'd had a lot of time to think the past few months while Sawyer slept, to all those times when we were children when Sawyer would make himself small when someone was mad at him.

Everything I'd ever thought about him that made him arrogant, larger than life and self serving had been a cover. We'd had a lot of time in the past few weeks to just chat. There was no self imposed fear of what others would think if they saw us together, and there wasn't much that we could do about the fact that we still had hormones. So all we could really do was talk, and we'd come clean about a lot of things.

Like the fact that we'd both liked each other a lot more than we let on. For years.

"Okay but if you liked me so much, why were you with one girl after another?" I asked one afternoon as I sat making a new sketch of his motorbike for his future tattoo.

He'd snorted. "You wouldn't give me the time of the day and I still had needs that had to be met."

"Ew," I'd said with a laugh. "Boys are so gross."

His eyebrows had gone up. "Girls are too, just for the record."

I also confessed that I had like a million sketches of his face stashed in my room, which I didn't know why I admitted because now he would never let me live it down.

"You think I'm hot, you think I'm sexy," he chanted like a petulant little brat, louder with every iteration. A nurse walked by and burst into laughter. The only way I found to make the chanting stop was to kiss him.

Courtney and Lina came to visit as well. One time they brought an extra yearbook that they'd thought to save for him and it turned out the entire class had signed it for him. Although he didn't officially belonged to the Metropolitan High School Class of 2019, by virtue of the fact that he missed an entire semester in a coma, we did include him in the yearbook. He was going to get his GED when things calmed down, and since Toni was taking a sabbatical from college to take care of the baby, she promised she could help him study.

The moment Sawyer met Ariel, his entire expression turned to mush.

Ariel had a checkup with her doctors one day and I convinced Toni and Adam to make a detour, so they could show her off to Sawyer. That was when, after seeing her and getting shockingly emotional over the baby, Sawyer declared to everybody in the room, "Sorry, Rory. This is now my new princess."

As Toni and Adam laughed I just rolled my eyes. "I'm fine with that."

I thought that would mean he would stop calling me princess, but for whatever reason he started calling me ex-princess instead.

Manny walked in while that was going on and I prepared for awkwardness, because he'd always had a bit of a thing for Toni. Instead he also succumbed to the sweet little bundle of joy in Adam's arms and we all saw Manny turn into a cooing mess.

That was what we all tried everyday, to bring a bit of joy and hope to Sawyer, which was why I had brought him the chocolate cigarettes that day. That, and I also had some small ulterior motives.

There was a topic Sawyer was avoiding discussing, and I hoped my little gifts eased him into it.

I looked at his hand, the long fingers that were powerful and dexterous, the soft skin that covered strong muscles. I wished I didn't have to let it go.

I tried for a bit of levity when I asked, "So you like Ariel better than me now?"

A small smile drew his lips upward. "She's nicer to me."

"Hey! I'm plenty nice to you."

I thought he'd say something like I could be nicer, that maybe I could give him a lap dance. And I wasn't coming up with this by myself, it was an actual line he'd thrown at me a week ago. But his lead grey eyes turned serious as he took me in for long, silent minutes.

"I'd have made you my queen."

I sucked in a sharp breath.

"But even if this hadn't happened," he said, looking down at himself. "We were still going to head in two different paths, weren't we?"

My eyes welled and I bit my lower lip.

This was it, what he'd been avoiding. What I also hadn't wanted to face.

"Maybe if things were different and I had all my limbs intact and my motorbike I'd have been able to go up to South Carolina to visit you every once in a while," he said, running his thumb across my hand. "But you wouldn't have been able to visit me as much. Between lessons, new friends and an adorable baby niece that would captivate you every time you came to visit your family, there would have been less and less room for me."

I hung my head, because those had been my thoughts exactly as I hesitated between the two colleges. The business and arts program that would help me pave a bright future, or the local college that would keep my world smaller, focused on my family and yes, maybe on Sawyer.

But if anything, I was a selfish person and I made the decision on what was best for me.

Sawyer let my hand go and grunted. Next I knew, he was wiping my tears clumsily but with so much care. I held his hand against my face.

"I'm sorry," I said. And I was. I wish I could have my cake and eat it too. Go to an amazing college and keep him in my life.

"Don't be," he said. When the strain was too much, he leaned back and I let him tuck his arm against him. "You did the right thing. I'm proud of you."

I shook my head in wonder. "I don't deserve you."

His eyebrows went up. "Agree. I'm an excellent non-boyfriend."

With my heart breaking I asked, "Would you like to be my yes-boyfriend for the next two months and then break up, or break up now?"

His chest vibrated with a laugh. "I choose door number one if it includes the lap dance you promised me last week."

I threw my head back and laughed.

God, I loved him. I always would.

you:

me: