ALoveSoDeep Read Free Page B

unhealthily in my temple. Gabe lost most of last summer.
    Lost. That means he lost the months we fell in love, and all the memories of who we were together.
    I’m already starting to panic even before Gabe says—
    “I know we used to steal things, but I don’t remember why.” He glances over his shoulder toward the house before continuing in a softer voice. “And then, a few weeks ago, I had this memory of my hands at someone’s throat, and an image of you, your neck covered in bruises. After that, I was afraid.”
    “Afraid of what?” The thud in my temples becomes a pain that digs into the back of my eyes. Surely he can’t mean…
    “I was afraid I had…hurt you,” Gabe says, looking down at me with shame in his blue eyes.
    Shame.
    Gabe doesn’t do shame. He rarely does regret. I’ve heard Gabe say he was sorry a handful of times, but I’ve only seen him genuinely filled with regret once. It was the night we killed Pitt, but he didn’t regret the murder. He regretted the lies he’d told, and that he’d let us fall so deep in love when he knew he would be dead before the year was out.
    And now he’s standing in front of me, alive, but missing pieces of what made him the man he was. The old Gabe would never have thought that he was capable of hurting me, not for a second. The old Gabe would have fought for me, killed for me, died for me. I knew it, and he knew it. It was the kind of thing that went unspoken between us, so obvious that there was no need to say the words.
    Sure, the old Gabe wasn’t your conventional, upstanding citizen, but he was a man who knew himself, inside and out, and made choices based on his own marrow-deep beliefs in what was right and wrong. They weren’t the same things society calls right and wrong, but Gabe’s convictions were stronger because he had worked through the big questions and come up with his own, authentic answers. But now, he seems to have lost touch with those answers, and may have lost more than just his memories of last summer.
    What if he’s lost the parts of him that made him unlike anyone I’ve ever met, the parts he was so afraid of losing, he chose to die rather than risk a surgery that might leave him profoundly changed?
    The thought is so awful that, for a moment, it feels like Gabe has died all over again, only worse. Now, he is alive, but with a mind that believes he’s capable of hurting someone he loves, and a heart that could never love me the way I love him. Even if he recovers his memories, the man who made them might never return.
    I take a step back, tears blurring my vision. I’m turning to run—somewhere, anywhere—when Gabe’s fingers wrap around my upper arms, holding me in place with that same tender strength I remember.
    “Don’t go,” he says, voice hoarse and as pained as I feel. “I know this is hard, but you have to know how badly I want to remember. I want to remember everything about you, about us , but I don’t yet, no matter how hard I’ve tried.”
    He pauses, tongue slipping out to dampen his lips, making me think of our kiss, and how it had felt like our old kisses. “But I remember that I loved you, and that you were the only person who ever made me feel worth a damn. And when I kissed you just now…I felt alive for the first time since I woke up with part of my brain gone and this feeling that something vital was missing.” He pins me with that look that always made me feel like he knew all my secrets. “That vital thing is you .”
    “How can it be me?” I ask, tears filling my eyes. “You don’t even know me.”
    “I know you,” he insists, with an intensity more consistent with the Gabe I knew at the end of last summer than the arrogant boy I first met. “If I were blind, I would know you. You’re the reason I’ve kept going, even when recovery threatened to kick my ass, and all I wanted to do was give up. I might have lost our past, Caitlin, but we don’t have to lose our future. We can get us