We're no sooner in the door to our hotel room, and Blake sweeps me into his arm, his lips connecting with mine.

"All night I've been thinking about how good this dress is going to look on the floor," he murmurs as his fingers find the zipper and the teeth open along my spine.

Instead of bantering with him, I go with the strip down, throw my own enthusiasm behind removing each piece of his medieval suit. Any suit, even one like this, only enhances a man's appeal, and Blake didn't need that help in the first place. He's always been attractive, but now that I know him, he takes my breath away. A single glance across the room tonight, and I melted.

Focusing on the details of his suit helps me to forget about tomorrow, about what's staring us down in a matter of hours. When he's naked, he spins me against the wall, his breath hot in my ear as he undoes the body shaping wear I squeezed into.

Everything between us is frantic and fast, as though we're both warding off sadness with sex. I should remind him that we were going to talk, discuss what comes next, but I'm almost too nervous to bring up the potential job. The idea of not being with him beyond tomorrow causes my stomach to clench and then sour. It's easier to sink into this than to wade into that.

We're kissing and moving and then we're at the bed. He hovers over me for a beat, slowing things down. There's such tenderness in his kiss while we mold ourselves together.

"I don't want to waste one second with you," he says, cradling me close with one hand while urging my body to the brink with the other.

The words I haven't dared to say are on my lips, but I feel them so hard it's almost painful. He means everything to me. Absolutely everything. I cannot imagine saying goodbye to him in the morning.

I grip his face and kiss him, hard. He goes with the change in pace, driving us faster and deeper until both of us are gasping and then crying out, pressed so tightly together I can feel every minuscule movement he makes.

When he tries to draw away, I cling onto him. "Don't go," I plead.

He nuzzles my neck. "I'll just be a minute." Then he slips away to the bathroom.

As soon as he's back in the bed, he draws me tight to his side, and he sighs into my hair. We lie in the dark room, holding onto each other, saying nothing, when I'm sure we should be saying a lot. The seconds become minutes become hours become goodbye.

Waiting for him to bring up what he implied in the church earlier today is torture, and I can't hold my tongue any longer. Maybe the job interview next week won't go anywhere, but Blake might be able to nudge Doctors International toward hiring me. Once I'm in, figuring out how to make a relationship work seems less complicated. I won't be a tourist in the DRC; I could be right there beside him.

"I think I might have a way for us to stay together," I whisper. Everything I'm about to say relies on me getting the job, which is far from a guarantee.

"Long distance?" Blake's tone is neutral and hard to read. "I've been thinking about it too."

"Not long distance. At least, I hope it wouldn't be." I rise onto my elbow to stare down at him. "I applied to Doctors International as part of their supply chain management team. If I get it, I could come to the DRC. I don't know if we'd be—"

"You what?" Blake cuts me off, and his tone is no longer neutral. It's icy. He draws away from me to sit on the edge of the bed. "Please tell me this is a joke."

"Why... Why would it be a joke?" I can barely get the words out around the lump in my throat. The change in him is so swift, so disarming, I'm not sure how to get him back.

"No," he says, slashing a hand through the air, but he's still not facing me. "Absolutely not. No."

"I could do the job," I say, indignant, forgetting momentarily about how high the stakes are in this moment. "I'm actually quite good at supply chain management."

"If you're doing this in some misguided bid to follow me—don't."

"It's not misguided. Travel, work, and you. It's perfect. Think about it—"

"There's no 'me' if you take this job." He glances at me over his shoulder, and then he stands up, strides over to his discarded clothes and tugs on his boxers. "I don't want you there, Gwen."

Tears pool in my eyes, and we stare at each other in the semi-darkness, slivers of light coming through the half-closed curtains. Why would he say that?

"You don't mean that," I say. He can't. Whether he'll admit it or not, he looks at me like I matter, like he cares. A few short hours ago, he was telling me we could figure out a way to make things work between us. But when I offer him the best way to do that, he says no? No matter what way I look at it, his frosty attitude makes no sense.

"I do mean it." His jaw is like granite. "You cannot follow me."

"I love you," I choke out, unable to stop myself. "And I want this job. I don't understand why you're saying this to me."

"For how long?" His hands are on his hips. "You've told me so many times that love for you is transient and unreliable and as changeable as the wind. You're not throwing your life away on something that won't last. None of your relationships do, right?"

His words sting, and for the first time in a really long time, I feel like I don't know him at all. Blake has never once been cruel or mocked me for my flightiness. He's always been patient or amused by my spontaneity. This time, he's on the attack, or maybe it's defense, but whatever it is, I don't want like it, barely recognize him.

"I have never felt for anyone what I feel for you," I say, trying to keep my voice steady when all I want to do is run to him and cling on for dear life. If I let myself lose control like I want to, we'll end here, tonight. I can feel it. Somehow, even as cracks spider across my heart, I can't let myself shatter.

The briefest glimmer of anguish crosses his face before he squashes it, but it's enough to bolster me. His words don't match how he feels. Earlier today, his actions and words were in sync. They aren't now, and I take a deep breath, trying to figure out how to save us.

"Who's Diana?" I ask on impulse, following an instinct.

"What?" Blake rears back.

"Does this..." I wave my hand at him. "Does whatever this is have something to do with how she broke your heart? I'm not going to break your heart, Blake." My bottom lip trembles, and I suck in a shaky breath. "And I don't want you to break mine either. We can be together. I know we can."

He rubs his face and sinks into the office chair, far away from me. "You can't join Doctors International. You can't come to the DRC. Those are... Those are non-negotiables. If you do those things, we will not be together."

"Your brothers talked about Diana like I should know. Your sister did too. But I don't know, Blake. What haven't you told me?"

His elbows are braced on his knees, and he buries his face in his hands. I gather the sheet around me, and I tame it into submission until I'm kneeling between Blake's knees, coaxing him to look at me.

He sits back in the chair, and his face is haggard. The lightness he's been projecting for weeks is completely gone. "Diana..." He shakes his head when his voice cracks. "She died. In Syria. Six years ago. We were on a... She was a doctor too."

I stare at him, dumbfounded. There was no doubt from the little I'd heard from his family that Diana's impact on him had been huge, but my mind never made the leap to her being dead. That's a wound I did not see coming, and I rock back onto my heels. "Oh, Blake," I whisper.

His voice is raspy. "I can count on one hand the number of times I've said any of that out loud."

"Can you... Are you able to tell me what happened?" Though I can almost picture it. The Syrian Civil War has been going on for years. They must have been there with Doctors International.

The old tension I used to see in him all the time floods his posture, and his jaw tics. He stares over my head. "It was our first assignment. Dangerous, obviously. But it felt manageable. That's the thing about those places, though. The danger is manageable until it suddenly isn't." He swallows. "Hospitals are supposed to be off limits. Protected space, or whatever we like to tell ourselves. We were done our shift and being escorted out, back to where we were staying. And a bomb went off."

He stalls and seems to be fighting tears, and I drape myself across him. "You don't have to tell me. You don't. It's okay."

"No, I—you need to understand. We weren't in the building, but other people were. Lots of other people. And Diana, she..." He shakes his head. "She ran toward the explosion. Back to help everyone. And I told her to wait, but she didn't listen, and then the second explosion went off. Something inside the hospital must've caused it."

He covers his face with his hands. "When I got to her, she was on the ground, riddled with shrapnel, and there was just—there was nothing. Chaos. People running around, screaming and crying. The building crumbling." When he looks at me, there are tears in his eyes. "Somehow, she was still conscious, and she noticed that I was hurt." He points to the scar above his eye. "And then she made me promise I'd stick to the plan." His voice cracks. "That's the last thing I remember, making that promise, her still alive."

Tears streak down my face at how hard retelling that was for him, at the wound she left behind that still seems so raw, even six years later. "I'm so sorry, Blake. So so sorry."

"I can't let you come to the DRC. I can't let you join Doctors International," he says.

"What happened to Diana is terrible, but—"

"I love you, Gwen." He frames my face, and there are tears covering the steely resolve of his blue-green eyes. "I love you in ways I thought I'd never love again, at a depth that feels impossible. There is no one in this world that I love more than you." He scans my face. "You cannot come with me."

"If it's that dangerous," I say, tears coloring my voice too, "then you shouldn't be going either. How can you tell me it's too dangerous, that you'd be too upset if something happened to me, and then do that to me? How is that fair?"

"I made a promise." He closes his eyes and lets me go. "The last thing I remember saying to her, and I can't break it. I can't."

"Don't do this to me," I whisper. "Please. Please don't do this to us."

"I love you, Gwen. I'll love you for the rest of my life, but whatever future you think you see between us, I can't give it to you. I'm a stopover for you. I'm not a final destination."

"I'll wait." Tears have blurred my vision, and I brush them off my cheeks. "However long you want to stay there, I'll wait for you."

Blake sighs, and he presses his lips to my forehead. They linger there, and I soak in his closeness, breathe in the feel of him.

"That wouldn't be good for either of us," he says.

"I don't care," I say. "I can't let you go." I wrap my fingers around his neck, and I hold him close to me. "You don't have to do this." But even as I say it, I know he's not going to listen to me. He's stubborn with a loyal streak I used to find endearing, and I won't keep begging him to reconsider, to pick me.

He scoops me into his arm and settles me against his chest on the chair. I curl into him, and the steady beat of his heart makes me wish I could somehow crawl inside of him and live next to this sound, forever.

We cling onto each other in the darkness, and every time another objection rises to my lips, I swallow it down. There's no way to compete with a promise made to a ghost.

Well, this doesn't seem good. Can Blake and Gwen find their happy ever after?

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