I felt it all around me. Love wasn’t just guiding me, it was pulling me, prodding me, filling me up, and pushing everything else out. Love was going to win and I simply had to let it happen, so I surrendered the fight and let love take me by the hand to lead me the rest of the way out of the darkness.

I was really uncomfortable, but when I finally managed to pull my eyes open, I was looking up at the prettiest cloudy day I had ever seen. The sky was stormy and there was rain falling from the clouds and landing on my face, but it was still the most welcome thing I had ever locked my eyes on.

She was blurry. In fact, I was seeing triplets that looked just like my Key with different hair, but there was no missing that my feisty fighter of a woman was hovering over me, pulling me from the threshold. Love wanted me more than death did. I tried to blink so that I could bring her into focus but that didn’t work, and every time my eyes closed it felt like it took a monumental effort to get them back open.

I opened my mouth to ask her what happened, to ask her where I was and why her hair was now a deep, rich chocolate brown instead of Crayola red, but nothing came out. I wheezed like I was a thousand-year-old man, and suddenly Key’s pretty, concerned face was replaced by a much sterner one. The guy had a stethoscope around his neck and was barking orders across me, and I vaguely felt my arm being picked up and the sheet that was covering me get shifted off my body.

I’m sure they had all kinds of important medical mumbo jumbo to take care of, but all I wanted was Key. I tried to shake the doctor off as he leaned over me, only to find that I was down to one working appendage. It seemed like my right arm was strapped pretty effectively to my chest, meaning I couldn’t reach for my girl. That made me agitated, but I was pinned down and so very weak. I tried to call her name and realized the reason I couldn’t was because I had something hard and plastic shoved between my teeth. I went to move my head to dislodge it only to have the doctor put his hand heavily on my forehead. I growled and went to jerk my head away, but that made black spots dance in front of my eyes and pain slice across my brain.

“You’re upsetting him. Move out of my way.” Key sounded annoyed and assertive. Yeah, everyone get out of her way so I can see my girl . . . my love.

The doctor’s face was replaced with the one that had saved me, the one that meant everything.

“Nassir, you got hurt really, really bad. You need to let them check you out, okay? I promise I’m not going anywhere.” Her hand reached out and brushed over my forehead. It felt really nice, so I closed my eyes and relaxed against her touch. It soothed me. It settled me, and before I knew it, pain and sleepiness sucked me back under.

It went on like that for days. I would wake up and Key would be there, touching me, talking to me, holding me, and then the doctors and nurses would get their hands in the mix and aggravate me until they had to pump sedatives into my system to get me to calm down. Eventually the ventilator was pulled out and she could touch her lips to mine. When she did she told me how close I had come to dying before her very eyes. One of the bullets had broken my clavicle and the one fired into the center of my chest had shattered when it hit my sternum and a few tiny pieces had gotten dangerously close to my heart. I’d needed immediate surgery and had barely pulled through. To make matters worse, I’d apparently had an allergic reaction to one of the heavy painkillers they were pumping into me and had almost kicked it again. It hadn’t been an easy few weeks for her but she rarely left my side and she did more to calm me down and get me to cooperate with the hospital staff than the sedatives did.

When I could finally speak without coughing or feeling like my throat was a river of fiery pain and that my words were made of razor blades, I asked her about her hair.

She raised her hands to her head and started crying. Before I could hold a hand out to her, she climbed onto the side of the bed that didn’t have my broken wing on it and put her head on my shoulder. She was delicate about it but it still hurt, not that I would ever complain. She put her hand over the obnoxiously thick dressing that was covering the center of my chest.

“I never want to see the color of blood again. Every time I looked in the mirror . . . all that red. All I could see was all of that blood flowing out of you. I couldn’t take it anymore.”

Now her hair was the color of mink. It looked sophisticated, still sexy and flirty in that uneven cut that hung longer on one side than the other, but it made her seem more refined than she had been before. Maybe a tad more grown up and mature, and after everything she had witnessed, how could she not be?

I told her about dying. I explained how I was there, ready to cross the threshold, but this time no one was there to answer the door. I told her about how there was nothing. How I was stuck and empty. I told her that the only thing that made any sense in all of it was her. I told her that in the nothing there was still the memory of how I felt about her. I told her that when I burned on the pyre of pain and agony, I remembered that her love was worth it and then I told her that she was what I needed to live for. She was what I had always lived for.

She was crying silent tears. I could feel them hitting my skin where the hospital gown was twisted between us. I found her hand with mine and squeezed.

“I probably have never done it right, but I have always loved you, Keelyn Foster.”

“Neither one of us got it right from the start, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try harder from here on out. I love you too, Nassir Gates. We’re bound to figure it out eventually.”

Maybe that was the point. There wasn’t a right or wrong way to love, there was just understanding that it was there and trying your best to treat it like the fragile, valuable, precious thing that it was.

I rubbed my thumb along the inside of her wrist and told her I wanted to talk to Dovie when I was released from the hospital.

Of course, she didn’t want me anywhere near the redhead. She told me that Bax would freak out if I so much as looked sideways at his shy and sweet girlfriend. She was right, so I asked her to do me a favor. I told her that she needed to let Dovie know about the situation with Tyler French’s little sisters. Those poor girls were really the biggest victims in all this tragedy. I told her that I wanted to make sure the girls got in with a good family, and I wasn’t above dropping some cash around if that’s what it took. Dovie worked with Social Services and the foster families in the Point, so I knew she could get me the information I needed to make sure those kids didn’t have to suffer any more consequences of actions that weren’t their own.