<i>This isn’t the first time this has happened.</i><br/><br/>Those were the words he wanted to speak, but while his mouth gaped in stunned silence and his throat convulsed in another wheezing cough that ended in more dark red bubbling forth like some morbid horror scene from a B rated movie, he felt his heart do another near fatal leap in his chest. Now his pulse had slowed down to a sluggish pump that had his head nodding even as he tilted his chin up to meet her eyes. Finally, he shook his head and motioned with a chin dip to the bag that he had pulled out to take her blood earlier.<br/><br/>“Epi pen in there somewhere,” he panted out between a gasp for air and a cold chill that ran up and down his spine, pausing only to freeze his lips, toes, and fingertips to almost numbness. The power that had just moments before been rushing through his system had crashed – too quickly. He was supposed to be able to ride it longer than that. Perhaps the morphine effected the serum, something he hadn’t tested before. That and the quick burn of her own power had probably burnt him out too quickly.<br/><br/>When her hand moved to his chest and he felt her heat radiate inside him, like a cold cadaver being warmed again by a rejuvenating hand, his own feebly lifted to press against the back of hers. “Don’t,” he pleaded faintly, head shaking. “Don’t want you to get hurt from my reaction, OK? The epi pen will work. Has before.”<br/><br/>Except his nose had never started bleeding and he had never had a fire burning in his lugs to make it hard for him to breathe like this. His fingers curled through hers, squeezing first, then trying to pry her hand away from where her beautiful warmth was spreading through him like a blanket on a winter’s night. He could be happy like this. Having Lane warm him every night like this. It was a comfortable thing, causing his eyes to drift close and his head to roll back against the back of his chair.<br/><br/>“I think it might be the morphine and my.. special juice from earlier. Gave me too good of an uplift. I felt like I was dragging a little too much this morning,” he confessed with a wry grin, but his lashes remained shadows against his cheekbones and his breath continued to rattle in his chest. He no longer tried to pry her hand away from him, but clung to it instead as he waited to see if his heart would stop completely in his chest.