Chapter 38 Théo #2
“Don’t.” He shook his head, a ghost of a smile flickering across his face. “Don’t apologize. I can’t handle another apology right now. Everyone keeps looking at me like I tried to—” He stopped, swallowed. “It wasn’t like that. I just wanted to sleep.”
I waited, not trusting myself to speak.
“I hadn’t slept in four days,” he continued, his eyes fixed on the thin hospital blanket.
“Not properly. Not more than an hour or two at a time. And I was so tired, Théo. I was going out of my mind. So I took a pill. And then it didn’t work, so I took another.
And then I just… kept taking them. I wasn’t trying to die. I just wanted it to stop.”
“The not sleeping?”
“Everything.” His voice cracked. “The noise in my head. The pressure. The feeling like I’m failing at the only thing I’m supposed to be good at.” He finally looked at me, eyes wet and red rimmed. “I just wanted to rest. I didn’t think—I wasn’t thinking at all.”
“But they’re treating it like—”
“Like a suicide attempt. Yeah.” He laughed, hollow and humourless. “Because technically that’s what it was, even if it didn’t feel like one. You take enough pills to stop your heart, they don’t really care about your intentions.”
I flinched. He saw it.
“Sorry. That was—” He exhaled, pressing his palms against his eyes. “I don’t know how to do this. I asked to see you and now you’re here and I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything.” I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. “I’m just glad you’re alive.”
His hands dropped. Something flickered across his face—not quite agreement, not quite disagreement. Something more complicated.
“I am too,” he said quietly. “Now. I think. It’s hard to explain.
When they pumped my stomach and I woke up, I was so angry.
That they’d found me. That they’d brought me back.
But then my mom was there, and she was crying, and I realized—” He stopped, took a shaky breath.
“I realized I didn’t actually want to leave her.
I just wanted the pain to stop. There’s a difference, apparently.
At least that’s what the therapists tell me. ”
“There is.” I understood that more than I wanted to admit. “There really is.”
He looked at me then, really looked, and something shifted in his expression. Recognition. The awful kind that came from shared experience.
“You know what I mean, don’t you.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah.” I swallowed hard. “I do.”
Silence stretched between us. Not uncomfortable, just heavy. The weight of everything we’d never said when we were together, all the ways we’d hidden our worst parts from each other while enabling them at the same time.
“Does it get better?” Nico asked suddenly. His voice was small, almost childlike. “Everyone keeps telling me it will. The doctors, my mom, the therapists. But they don’t—they haven’t—” He stopped, frustrated. “I need to hear it from someone who actually knows. Someone who’s been where I am.”
I thought about the last few months. About Chicago and Derek and the slow, painful work of rebuilding myself.
About the nights I still woke up gasping, the mornings I had to convince myself to get out of bed, the constant low hum of anxiety that never fully went away.
About sitting on Derek’s bathroom floor with a razor in my hand, wanting so badly to relieve the pressure.
But also—Derek’s voice in my ear, steady and sure.
Aspen’s warm weight against my legs. Sabrina’s laughter through the phone.
My mom’s arms around me at the airport. Bonding with Hana over bad reality TV and brutally honest feedback on her cooking.
Even Avery, trying so hard to bridge the distance between us—learning how to be my brother again.
And the first time I landed a clean triple axel in Chicago and felt, for one sharp moment, like myself.
“It gets different,” I said finally. “The bad days don’t go away completely. But they get further apart. And the good days—they start to feel real. Like something you can hold onto instead of something you’re just waiting to lose.”
Nico’s eyes were fixed on my face, drinking in every word.
“It’s not linear,” I continued. “Some weeks are shit. Some days I still want to crawl out of my own skin. But then there are moments where I think—okay. This is worth it. Being here is worth it.” I reached out and took his hand.
“You have to fight for those moments. Even when it feels impossible. Especially when it feels impossible.”
“How do you do it?” he whispered. “How do you keep fighting when you’re so tired?”
“You find people who fight with you.” I squeezed his fingers. “You let them help, even when every part of you is screaming to push them away. And you take it one day at a time. Sometimes one hour at a time. Sometimes one minute.”
A tear slid down his cheek, then another.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” I said. “When things got bad. I’m sorry I left.”
“You had to leave.” He said it simply, without accusation. “You would have died if you’d stayed. I could see it happening. We were destroying each other, Théo. Slowly. Loving each other and destroying each other at the same time.”
My throat was too tight to speak.
“I don’t blame you,” he continued. “I never blamed you. I blamed myself for not being strong enough to walk away first. We were on this... carousel, you know? Round and round, same patterns, same pain, and neither of us could figure out how to get off.” Another tear slid down his cheek.
“You were the one who finally said enough. You stopped the ride. I wish I’d been brave enough to do it myself. ”
I swallowed hard.
“But I didn’t get off. I just... found a new partner for the ride.” A bitter exhale. “And then Julien left. And my skating was falling apart. And I stopped sleeping. Stopped functioning. And then I was so desperate for rest that I did something stupid.”
“I’m so sorry.” The words were useless, inadequate, but they were all I had.
“I know.” He squeezed my hand back. “I didn’t ask you here to make you feel guilty. I asked because—” He hesitated. “Because I needed to see that you were okay. That leaving actually helped you. That at least one of us was getting better.”
I thought about lying. About pretending I had it all figured out, that I was fully healed, that Chicago had fixed everything.
But Nico deserved better than that.
“I’m trying,” I said honestly. “I’m not there yet. But I’m trying. And that’s more than I could say six months ago.”
“Good.” He smiled, watery and fragile but real. “That’s all I wanted to know.”
We sat like that for a while, holding hands, not speaking. The nurse came in once to check on us and left again without comment. Through the narrow sliver of window, the light shifted from afternoon to early evening.
“There’s someone, isn’t there?” Nico asked eventually. “Someone who won’t just stand there watching you spiral. Someone who’d stop the ride and pull you off.”
I hesitated. It felt cruel to talk about Derek here, now, in this room.
“You can tell me,” he said. “I want to know. I want to know you’re not alone in Chicago.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “There’s someone. It’s… new. Complicated. But good. I think it’s good.”
“Is he kind to you?”
“Yeah.” My voice cracked. “He’s really kind.”
Nico nodded slowly, something like peace settling over his features.
“Then hold onto that,” he said. “Don’t do what I did. Don’t let it get so bad that you can’t see any other way out.”
I leaned forward and pressed my forehead to our joined hands, crying in a way I hadn’t cried since the night on Derek’s bathroom floor.
“I’m going to get help,” Nico said, his free hand coming up to rest on my hair. “Real help. They’re transferring me to a residential program next week. Somewhere outside the city, away from skating, away from all of it.”
“That’s good,” I managed. “That’s really good.”
“You said it gets different,” he said quietly. “I’m going to hold onto that. I’m going to try to believe you.”
“It does.” I lifted my head and looked at him—this boy I’d loved, this boy I’d almost destroyed, this boy who was somehow still here despite everything. “It really does. And you’re going to get there. I know you will.”
“Maybe we can both make it,” he said softly. “Wouldn’t that be something?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That would be something.”
The nurse knocked on the door. My time was up.
I stood, still holding his hand, reluctant to let go.
“Théo?” Nico’s voice stopped me at the door.
I turned.
“Thank you for coming. I know it wasn’t easy.”
“I’d do it again,” I said. “Whenever you need me. I mean that.”
He smiled—small, tired, but genuine. “I know you do. That’s why I asked for you.”
“Take care of yourself, Nico.”
“You too.”
I walked out of the room, past the locked doors, past the nurse’s station, into the hallway where Sabrina was waiting. She took one look at my face and opened her arms.
I fell into them and let myself break.