Tiger's Mate

Chapter 39

•Ethan•

I felt a nudge to my elbow and my head shot up from the desk. My eyes shifted around blearily, drifting around the classroom where the history teacher was giving a presentation on ancient...history.

The nudge had come from my desk partner, who was frowning at me with a concerned expression.

"Hey...you alright?" Katski asked, studying my face. "You look...tired."

I groaned quietly and let my head fall back down behind the textbook. I was sure I looked more than tired, and he was saving me the aggravation.

"Yeah, I'm fine," I said.

Just sleepy as shit.

I hadn't slept well last night. Or the night before that. I kept seeing that fucking rock falling overhead...And it scared the hell out of me, how quickly all that shit had — and could have happened.

I'd been going there, alone, for years, and nothing like that had ever occurred before. I would have never bought Katski there if I thought that was even remotely possible.

Dammit. That freak accident scared me more than I thought it would have. And I didn't want him to know. It was such a meagre fear after we had both come out completely unscathed — and it wasn't like he was glass, so I had no right to act otherwise. I just kept seeing that 'what if things had happened differently' scenario. More frighteningly, what would have happened if neither of us had seen it coming.

My eyes shut on instinct to clear the images that surfaced before my eyes and I wanted to crush something in my jaws.

I think he noticed.

But Katski stayed quiet — though he didn't seem happy about it. There was little he could do in the middle of a lecture.

Thank goddess.

I did not want to talk about it. For all I knew, I would make the fact that he just had a near-death experience worse.

And then it hit me.

It wasn't his first.

It was a dark realization that hadn't fallen into place in my mind until now — the truth that Katski had experienced that kind of fear before.

He'd told me how it felt. He'd described what had happened to him — and he had done so with an alarming kind of calamity that I hadn't thought about at the time, having been more preoccupied with what he was telling me than how he was telling it. I hadn't cared then like I did now. And I had selfishly let the realization slip past me. Never thinking twice about what it must have been like for him — all I could focus on was my own rage.

I was a selfish fucking bastard. And I knew it.

But when it came to him, I didn't want to be.

I wanted to be like he was to me. He just...knew how to make things better. He showed me that I didn't have to feel everything alone. The world wasn't so cold. At least not everyone. Because of him, I was not the same asshole as I used to be. It was small changes — but changes nonetheless.

I owed him the fucking world. More than he knew.

Probably more than he ever would.