This Time It’s Real

Two hands touch my shoulders. Gentle.

I don’t know who they belong to. I don’t care. My eyes blur, the hospital lights bleeding into the corners of my vision like a white haze of stars, and it’s not until I hear his voice, feel his shadow reaching over me, that I freeze.

“What happened? What did you say to her?”

His voice. Not Mingri’s, but—

My breathing stutters. My heart crashes and picks up again at a thousand miles a minute, and I twist around so fast my spine cracks, because it’s not real it’s not real it can’t be real it can’t be except it is.

It is.

Caz Song is standing in the center of the hospital corridor, gazing down at me, long lashes shadowing his cheeks, eyes liquid-black with concern. He’s alive. He’s alive and right there and he’s never looked so beautiful and even though I can’t bear to look away from him, I turn to Mingri for confirmation that I’m not hallucinating.

And Mingri is turned toward Caz, which means I must not be.

He’s really here.

“Eliza?” Caz says, and his voice is so exquisitely tender that I forget myself, forget everything, just spring up from the ground with more strength than I knew I possessed and throw my arms around his body, crash headfirst into his chest. He wobbles slightly upon impact, caught off guard, but he manages to regain his balance.

And I hold him. Hold on to him.

I breathe in the summer scent of his shampoo and feel the firmness of his shoulders, the hard places where his muscles connect, the slope of his neck, and it all feels so nice I could cry.

Then Mingri clears his throat.

We pull apart, but the moment lingers somewhere in the space between my fingertips, the leftover heat from his body warming my skin.

“Sorry. I had no idea—” Mingri says, hands half thrown up in bewildered defense. “I didn’t think—”

“What did you tell her?” Caz repeats, his eyes still on me. All the tenderness is gone. In fact, he sounds more pissed off than I’ve ever heard him. Pissed off at Mingri.

“I …” Mingri brings one hand to the back of his neck, rubs it over flushed skin. “I just told her you weren’t here anymore. That you’d left. To get water is what I meant, but I can see how she may have mistaken here for, ah, the general physical realm of the living, instead of this specific space—and maybe I shouldn’t have used Mandarin …”

Caz stares at him for a long, disbelieving beat. Then he punches Mingri’s shoulder. It’s not a particularly aggressive punch—not the kind intended to beat the crap out of someone or start a fight—but judging from the thud it makes and Mingri’s immediate wince, it’s not particularly gentle either.

“How could you say that?” Caz demands.

“I thought she already knew you were okay! And besides, I mean, I didn’t exactly get a chance to clarify before she—”

“You might have considered your word choice better,” Caz cuts him off.

“Well, it’s not like I was lying,” Mingri mumbles.

By now my despair has receded into only confused embarrassment. I brush my cheeks as casually as I can, as if I haven’t just been caught breaking down. Then I look back and forth between the two of them before settling on Mingri.

“But you …” I say, remembering. “You looked so out of it, and you were rubbing your eyes …”

“Yeah, because I was yawning. And that look on my face is what happens when you shoot the same scene forty times in a boiling tent without any breaks.” He tosses Caz a not-so-subtle look of irritation. Jerks an accusing thumb toward him. “Thanks to this guy, we’ve been working hard-core for weeks. I mean, he used to be all dedicated and shit, but recently—”

“Mingri.” Caz clears his throat.

Mingri ignores him. “Recently he’s been extra intense. Won’t even stop for lunch. Even the director was asking him to take it easy. Anyway, we figured it had something to do with you—”

“Mingri.”

“But he was scaring the shit out of us, so we didn’t—”

“I think that’s enough,” Caz says loudly, and Mingri throws a hand up in surrender.

“Okay, okay, I’ll give you two some space.” Then a small, wistful grin flits over his face. “I’m meant to be meeting Kaige outside anyway, so …”

“Yes, go, have fun,” Caz tells him with some force.

But Mingri lingers for a beat and winks. “Good to see you again, Eliza. Really. For the sake of the entire cast and crew, please take care of him”—he dodges another punch from Caz—“and, um, sorry again about the death thing.”

“It’s fine,” I say in a rush, because I kind of really want to speak to Caz alone. Mingri seems to get the message; he waves at both of us and then he’s off.

As his footsteps retreat down the corridor, I turn back to Caz.

“Are you injured or—”

“Just a shallow cut on my arm,” he says, rolling up his sleeve to show me. There’s a bandage stretching from his elbow to his wrist, running almost parallel to his old scar. “We didn’t even need to come to the hospital for this, but they were scared it’d be infected or something.” He shrugs and pushes his sleeve back down before I can look closer. “It’s really fine.”

“And are we—” I swallow. Make myself finish the sentence. He’s already rejected me once. The worst that could happen is he rejects me again, and I lose him, and I spend the rest of my life nursing a broken heart. But if I don’t tell him how I feel, when I feel it? That’s another kind of heartbreak: more fatal, more terrible. “Are we fine? Are you—are you still mad?”

Surprise dances over his features. Then he stuffs his hands in his pockets, leans back, and looks at me with such intensity that for a moment I forget how to breathe. “What do you think?”

“I …” I’m forced to trail off when two nurses appear down the corridor carrying dark vials of blood. They smile and nod at us as they pass. We smile back. Everyone’s very polite, and I want to tear my hair out. My heart feels like it’s trying to fight its way free from my ribs.

As soon as they’re out of earshot, I try again. “I was thinking—”

Another group of nurses walk past us, chatting, seemingly in a competition to see who can walk the slowest. We repeat the whole excruciating process again. I smile until my teeth grind into dust, until my jaw physically hurts from my effort to keep from screaming.

“You know what?” I decide, unable to stand it anymore. “Follow me.”

All the hospital rooms are completely occupied, as are the waiting areas and the downstairs lobby, so we end up sneaking into a cleaning closet on the far corner of the second floor.

“Feels like home,” Caz remarks as I push him gently against a cabinet of disinfectants and shut the door behind us. The space is even smaller than the janitor’s closet at our school; a few more inches, and we’d be touching. We’re standing so close, in fact, that I can feel the subtle change in his breathing when he looks at me. “So. What were you saying before?”

All this time, I’ve prided myself on my ability to lie, to spin a story out of nothing, to act like I don’t care about anything. But insincerity is easy. Bullshitting your way through things is easy. It doesn’t require any emotional attachment; there aren’t any stakes involved. It can’t hurt you, because you never believed in any of it anyway.

But telling the truth—saying exactly what you mean, how you feel, to the people you care about most … That’s one of the hardest things in the world. Because you have to trust them. Trust that they won’t hurt you, even when they have the power to.

I take a deep breath. Open my mouth.

My only source of comfort is that I’ve already done this with Zoe, and it didn’t kill me. Maybe, just maybe, I can do it again.

“Before I came here,” I begin, reaching for the right words, “I was actually watching that interview we did. With the confession scene. I mean, okay—that was, like, the catalyst, but I guess I’ve been thinking about this long before … But I just didn’t know it, you know?”

Caz’s brows crinkle faintly, and I realize I’m making no sense. God, I’m terrible at this.

I flush, try again. “What I mean is—well, first, if I’m going to be serious about my writing, I don’t want my whole career to be built around a lie. More than likely the truth is going to come out one day, and I think … I was just trying to delay it, because I’m a total coward, and there are too many people out there I didn’t want to let down. Except by continuing the lie, I was letting them down anyway.

“Second, I realized that—and trust me, believing you were dead for a few moments back there has really reaffirmed this—I don’t want our relationship to be built around a lie either. I want to be with you,” I say, and my voice softens on its own, like the words are too sacred to be spoken aloud in this dim, cramped room of bleach and feather dusters and tangible longing. I move forward, tilt my head up. The excruciating distance between us narrows down from three inches to two to one. “For real, this time.”

The seconds that follow are some of the most terrifying ones in my life. Maybe I’ll always be scared. Maybe the fear of getting hurt, of being left alone, will never truly go away. But even if it’s my default setting, I can fight it. So many beautiful things lie on the other side of fear.

Like love.

Like this.

Caz stares down at me for forever, the look in his eyes asking and answering everything. Then he brings his fingertips slowly to my jaw, as if he’s not entirely convinced I exist. “Really?”

“Really.” I inhale. It seems impossible that half an hour ago I felt like I would die, and now here I am, more alive than I ever thought I could be. “Hey, your face isn’t injured or anything, right?”

He stills, confused. “No, why—”

“Good,” I tell him, smiling, and I press my lips to his.