Chapter 2
CHASE
Am I ready to go in?
A scream builds in my throat with nowhere to go. Of course I’m not ready. How can I ever be ready for this? Can anyone?
Deep breath. Hold it. Three, two, one… and go.
Just fucking walk, you idiot.
The part of my brain that’s been permanently sewed to my best friend’s flares to life, and he takes the first step for me.
Like a thousand times before things got bad, and I started leading him out of necessity, he goes in before me.
Just one little step inside before he turns around and waits for me.
Lets me get my nerves sorted because social anxiety is a bitch that likes to grab onto my ankle like I’m stuck in some shitty zombie movie and the first one is due to climb Earth side.
Then I’d follow him wherever he’d convinced me to go.
Into the frat party with the music so loud my bones would shake.
Get on the plane to go meet his family that unsettled me for reasons I couldn’t put words to.
But no matter what it was, we were going to do it together.
That made me want to take the step. My mom jokes all the time that we’d follow each other right off a cliff one day, but there’s a steel core of truth to that.
I don’t let him walk into the unknown alone, and he is always right beside me to keep me from falling back into the safety and horrendously lonely comfort of solitude.
It’s all I know. Life before Brady, where I struggled to make even the most basic of human connections, even with my brothers and sister.
Then there’s after, when I have friends that stand beside me at my worst moments without a second thought…
Things with my family are better than I thought it could be, and anyone that met me after Brady didn’t even know the way I struggled before him.
So I do what I’ve always done best: follow his lead and take the step.
Understanding flashes in his eyes, like he felt the shift too.
The ever-present give and take that comes naturally for us going the other way because that’s what it took to get both of us through this fucking door.
Keeps us moving until we see both of our worst nightmares laid out in horrifying accuracy.
My eyes try to take it all in at once, but instead, I get the sickening pleasure of seeing it one detail at a time.
The monitor that says while technically there’s a heartbeat, no other signs of life can be found.
The tube coming out of his mouth. All the wires crisscrossing over his body.
The rainbow of colors surrounding some kind of cut on his head, just over his temple.
Pale pallor of his skin, like he hasn’t seen the sun in weeks.
He hasn’t been eating, judging by the way his bones are jutting out.
The more I look, the more I can find a myriad of marks, and that’s only with less than half of his body being visible.
Most significantly, he looks dead. There’s no fluttering under his eyelids, no twitching fingers. I know what he looks like when he’s asleep. I’ve laid awake at night and memorized his various movements. What I’m looking at is not… him.
It is, and it isn’t. None of the person I love is there, just the hollow remains.
My eyelids burn and a vibration somewhere inside me starts up, gaining ferocity until it makes me want to rip my skin off.
This is all wrong… he’s never supposed to look like that.
Easton is chaos and beauty and wit and unnatural kindness. He’s made of magic.
I look to my best friend, hoping he’ll be able to make sense of this mess. Provide whatever clarity or context is needed to make this right. He knows Easton; he knows that he wouldn’t willingly leave us like this. This was a mistake; it had to have been.
His eyes are wide, pure horror etched on his face that does nothing to ease my own.
All the words I could say—want to say—fall flat in the shadow of his wide-open grief.
He’s looking at a ghost, haunted by all the regrets that led us here.
With Easton in this hospital bed on the edge of life and death with nothing we can do to fix him anymore. Not like this.
I have a million of my own; I’m sure he has more.
Blakely appears, possibly from thin air, and demands we sit down before we fall.
After we’ve obeyed like well-trained dogs, she walks up to Easton and brushes his limp hair from his face.
“Sweet boy…” she whispers wretchedly before lightly kissing his forehead.
Careful to avoid the bruises, of course.
When she crouches in front of us, she’s got a look that I can’t say I’ve ever seen on her before.
Like she knows the ending, but just doesn’t want to tell anyone.
“His doctor got pulled away for surgery so don’t be alarmed if you don’t see him for a while, but I found some things out if you guys want to know. ”
“Anything. Please,” Brady croaks.
“He took a lot of pills. Xanax, to be specific, and chased it with a decent amount of hard liquor. They pumped his stomach, got him stabilized, but he hasn’t woken up yet. Before he does that, it’s hard to tell if there was any long-term damage done. It’s on him; he’s got to fight.”
Brady takes a ragged breath and nods. “Who found him?” I interject before one of them says any other shitty news.
“Is that motherfucker here somewhere?” he asks in a bone-chilling tone.
Blake is quick to smooth it over. “No. I don’t think so. The emergency call came from the postman, and there was no one else there when the paramedics arrived besides him. But I wouldn’t rule it out as a possibility, especially with how little we know right now.”
God, I just want to talk to him. Hear his voice.
Let him tell me what is going on for himself.
All this speculation is making me sick. It’s unfair to Easton; this is personal to him.
I had to earn every little piece of backstory, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Now he’s like that… and we can’t ask him what happened or what he wants to do about it.
We can theorize and wonder and worry, but what does any of it mean without Easton?
“We won’t leave him,” I find myself saying. I look to Brady for confirmation, surely the thought of leaving Easton vulnerable makes him sick too. He nods resolutely.
He doubles down. “I’m never leaving his side again.”
Blakely takes a deep breath in through her nose.
“Yeah, I’d be careful who you say things like that to around here.
They know what they see and they’re looking out for it.
I had to show one nurse a picture of you and Easton cuddled up on that ugly purple chair to get them to not call the cops.
I don’t feel good about telling them his history like that, but the staff here is amazing, and they are definitely looking for red flags. ”
Wait, did she say—“You have a picture of us? From when?”
She rolls her eyes affectionately. “When I hung out with you two? You do remember that, right?”
My voice cracks. “Can I see it?”
When she hands over her phone, my heart lurches.
There we are. Curled around each other like if we get close enough, we could become the same person.
My hand is on his hip, anchoring his small frame to me.
Predictably, he’s all over the place. Nose buried in my chest, one hand grabbing my shirt, the other tucked behind my shoulder, hair all over the place.
Even sound asleep, there’s a slight smile on his face with a dimple visible and everything.
He’s the most perfect thing I’ve ever seen, all happy and warm and safe.
“It was like that with you two, even straight from the beginning.” I force my eyes away from the screen to find Brady staring at it with tear tracks down his face.
Fuck. Did I ever even tell him how I felt about his brother? Was I so wrapped up in falling in love that I didn’t tell my best friend?
Blake uses my leg to push herself up before I can speak. “All right. Chase, babe, is there anyone we should be calling about this?”
Brady realizes the same time I do. “Oh, shit,” we say in unison. My parents and brothers are probably still waiting for us to come home. It never even occurred to me to tell them what’s going on.
“If we get Logan to tell them, think it’ll delay them rushing over here?”
One can only fucking hope. Even the thought of all one thousand of them—four—seeing Easton like this, the crying, the hugging, makes my skin crawl.
It’s an effort not to physically recoil. Someone should protect Easton’s dignity. He’d be horrified to wake up and have so many people looking at him like this. And someone should save me from the fucking touching.
It never makes sense to me. Sometimes it’s fine; nonexistent even.
When it’s Easton, I crave physical affection.
Brady and Blakely have me almost entirely desensitized, where I don’t even have to pretend to go through the motions.
It just is. But with my family, the people I share DNA with, at best, a hug is something I have to remind myself that they’re probably looking for, and at worst, a chore that makes me feel like I’m about to break out in hives.
Well, my niece isn’t a problem for me. Just my parents and siblings, the humans that I have known for literally my entire life.
Maybe it’s an exposure thing. Before too long, I’ll reject all creature comforts and retire to a dark cave; living the life of a hermit.
Not a comforting thought to have in a fucking hospital room, where the only thing keeping me from turning to that is if someone who apparently attempted suicide decides to fight to wake up again.
“What did you tell them?” I ask, looking at Blake. She raises an eyebrow in response, and I realize that it didn’t make any sense. “To find out what happened. Aren’t there, like, laws and shit about telling random people someone’s medical information?”