Chapter 19
RALEIGH
This wedding had become the bane of my existence. It was the one thing that Angel refused to talk about, and the one thing that Eli came to me for. Angel wasn’t making any decisions, which meant it was left up to me to decide what he would want. I could pick out Angel’s favorite color, and I knew whether he’d pick chicken or fish better than anyone else, but the only thing I was certain of was that Angel didn’t want to marry Eli.
I just couldn’t for the life of me figure out why.
Despite my grievances with him taking Angel to Seattle, Eli was an amazing guy. Yeah, he worked a lot, but so did Angel and I. He had a good job. He was kind, smart, and he never questioned anything about Angel and our relationship. On the surface, he seemed to accept things as they came and understand that he was slotting into our life.
The closer we got to the wedding, however, the more I realized that wasn’t the case. Lately, Eli stiffened whenever I walked into the room. When he came to me with wedding questions, it seemed to be his last resort.
The only place I got a reprieve was at the bar. Eli wouldn’t step foot in the place, but I loved it. The pounding music, the sweaty bodies and writhing crowds, the noisy bartenders—they were my solace.
One night, I sent Jack to the door so I could spend some time with Ryder behind the bar. The man could mix circles around me without blinking, but we made a good team—when he wasn’t standing over my shoulder, chastising me for making his signature drink wrong.
Seriously, how was there a wrong way to place plastic fangs on a glass?
I started doing it on purpose to rile him up. So sue me, it was the only thing that brought a smile to my face that day.
But it quickly faded when I looked up and found Eli standing in front of me. I jolted like I’d seen a ghost. “Is everything okay?”
“I need to talk to you,” he said, shouting too loudly to be heard over the music. He was definitely out of his comfort zone.
I pushed down a flash of irritation. “Look, if it’s about the flowers again?—”
“It’s not.” A hitch in his voice caught my attention. When I looked up, there was something in his eyes I’d never seen before: pain. “Can we talk upstairs?”
“Upstairs.” Not the office, not outside. Upstairs. That told me this was serious.
I glanced at Ryder, who silently indicated I should go. I still hesitated. Not because I was worried about leaving Ryder alone, but because I feared what the looming conversation held.
Stepping out from behind the bar, I led the way to the stairs. I didn’t need to look back to know Eli was following me. His presence seemed to consume me more with each step I took. By the time we entered the apartment and I’d shut the door behind us, I felt ready to crawl out of my skin.
“Do you want anything to drink?” I asked, like Eli hadn’t been treating this place as his own for years.
He shook his head, and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “I need you to tell me everything about the accident.”
“Wow,” I huffed. “Straight to the point. Why?”
“Please, Raleigh.”
Where was this coming from? I’d met Eli in my freshman year. In the decade since, he’d never asked about the accident. Angel and I both made it clear that it was a sore subject, and outside of Angel’s nightmares, we never really talked about it.
But Eli didn’t seem keen to back down from the idea. Nervous, I gestured to the kitchen table. With the wedding only days away, we could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. The cake had been chosen, the suits had been tailored, and the linens had been carefully selected to give Eli the winter wonderland of his dreams—even if it was practically spring.
“What do you want to know?” I asked after we were seated.
Eli didn’t look at me. He scrubbed his hands over his face, then found a spot on the table that seemed especially interesting. “Everything. Angel has told me bits and pieces, but I want to know everything that you do. Everything you went through.”
Fuck. I hadn’t talked about it in years. My parents didn’t even care enough to put me in therapy like Angel’s had. He’d been my priority back then. I’d shoved everything aside to care for him. Those feelings were buried deep, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever be ready to dig them up.
But the time to be ready was over. Eli waited expectantly, and something told me that I wasn’t going to easily get out of this conversation.
So I cleared my throat and started to talk. “I was fifteen, Angel was fourteen. They were my friends.”
“Who?”
“The group we snuck out to meet. I’m sure it comes as no surprise to you that Angel was always shy and quiet. He kept his head down, stayed out of trouble—unless I dragged him into it. The only times he ever got in trouble were situations involving me. That night, we were supposed to be in bed early because we had a big exam the next day at school. But I wanted some time to unwind. My friends didn’t want Angel to come along, but I made it clear they could have both of us or nothing at all. So after a lot of convincing, Angel agreed to come with me. It had taken so long to get him to agree that we showed up a little late. We didn’t know it at the time, but my friends had started pregaming. Nothing major, but they’d had a couple drinks.”
I’d gone over the events of that night so many times over the years, wondering how I hadn’t seen it coming. “Austin, the friend who drove us that night, always had to be the center of attention. He didn’t like that I took the spotlight away from him sometimes. He tended to act out when I was around.”
I clasped my hands together in my lap, trying to hide the way they shook. “There were six of us, and only five seats in the car. Austin was up front with his girlfriend, Sarah. Our friends, Noah and Ollie, sat in the back with me. Angel was the smallest of us, so he sat on my lap. We knew it was dangerous, and Angel wasn’t comfortable with it, but we weren’t going very far. Again, I convinced him to do it. We were only in the car for a couple of minutes before we realized something was wrong. Austin started to swerve. Even after a couple of drinks, that wasn’t normal for him.”
I paused, desperately hoping that Eli would have something to say. But he only watched me. His eyes shimmered with unshed tears, but he said nothing, instead waiting on me to continue—much to my dismay.
My voice quavered as violently as my hands. I swallowed the feelings, the tightness in my throat making it hard to breathe. “He was laughing. Fuck, I can’t get his laugh out of my head. It was… hollow, uncontrollable. Sarah was the first to notice. She was buzzed too, but I could see the moment that she sobered up. Sitting behind Austin, I couldn’t see what she saw, but she confronted him. Things got loud, then…” I trailed off, then forced out the words. “The next swerve sent us into oncoming traffic. We hit a minivan head on. Sarah wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and she crashed through the windshield.”
I choked down the bile that had risen in my throat. The memories of that night came slamming into me. I could practically feel the heat of the fire, the sound of crunching metal that was so real I found myself looking around the apartment for the source. I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Austin and Sarah died on impact. Angel flew out of my lap when the car flipped.” My stomach roiled again as that sickening crack echoed through my mind. You’d think something like that would’ve been drowned out by the sounds of squealing metal and the screams of our friends. It wasn’t.
I rushed through the rest of the story. “His neck broke when he hit the roof, separating from his spine when he fell back into my lap. The car landed upside down. I managed to get myself out and pull Angel with me, but flames broke out before I could get to Noah and Ollie. They survived but died later from full-thickness burns. Angel spent six months in the hospital.”
“Atlanto-occipital dislocation,” Eli muttered from behind his hands.
“That’s what they called it.”
“Angel never told me more than that he hurt his neck.” Eli pushed a hand through his hair. “That type of injury is nearly impossible to survive.”
Pushing aside what I now knew, I nodded. “He was a miracle case. Even more so, considering how quickly he healed.”
“What about you?”
“Me?” I sniffled, barely keeping tears at bay. That wasn’t me. I didn’t cry, ever. “What do you mean?”
“There’s no way you came out of that uninjured.”
“I hit my head on the window. When the glass shattered, it cut me here, in my hairline.” I pointed out the scar. Then I lifted my shirt, tracing the outline of long-healed bruises, now covered in tattoos to mask even the faintest memory. “I had bruises all over. They faded in a couple of weeks; the cuts took longer to heal. You can’t see the scars because I covered them with tattoos, but I’ll never forget them.”
I dropped my shirt and tugged it back into place, suddenly feeling exposed. Eli sat quietly, the silence stretching between us. As this was his show, I sat back and waited. The apartment was so quiet that I could hear the tap in our bathroom dripping. I counted the drops that splattered to the porcelain: fifteen before Eli spoke again.
“Do you realize that in that story, you talked about yourself last?”
I shrugged. “I was the least injured.”
Eli stood, pacing the length of the kitchen. My heart picked up speed. What was he building toward?
“I always knew you and Angel were close,” he finally said. “That was something I accepted early on. From the minute we moved into our dorms, he was all you talked about. Then I met him and I finally understood. On the night that I made a move on him, I fully expected him to turn me down. At every turn, every single milestone in our relationship, I expected him to toss me to the curb. But he never did. I kept telling myself that I was the luckiest man in the world. Turns out, that spot’s already taken.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, sitting back in my seat and crossing my arms over my chest.
Eli sat back down, and he looked at me with glossy eyes. “It’s you.”
Did he know what we had done? Had Angel told him out of guilt? No… Ryder was the only other person who knew, and I trusted him to keep it to himself.
Carefully, I did the only logical thing anyone could do: I played stupid. “ What is me?”
“I wasn’t surprised when Angel asked for time to think after I proposed. The man doesn’t decide what T-shirt to put on in the morning without considering every option. I was happy to give him that time, but it was unusual for him to go an entire night without texting me. When he showed up at the hospital the next morning, I noticed something. Angel had a mark.” Eli circled a spot on his neck, below his ear. “Here. It was faint, and it was nestled between two tattoos, but when you spend so much time memorizing someone, you notice the smallest of changes. Then he said yes, and I chose to ignore my suspicions because he’d chosen me. Whatever happened that night, he’d gotten it out of his system.”
“I’m—”
“Save your apologies, Raleigh. I’m not finished.” Eli wiped his eyes, then continued. “I know I fucked up with the fellowship in Seattle. I changed the plan. We always thought we’d settle in Vegas, but I had to take the opportunity, I might never get another like it again. God, I thought it would be the biggest fight we’d ever have. But in the end, it wasn’t even a fight. Angel walked away. When he came back, he’d made the decision to come with me. I was too elated to recognize that he wasn’t running away with me toward something new.” He swallowed hard. “He was running from something.”
“I’m not following.”
“Angel looks at you like you hung the sun, moon, and every star in the sky. For years I’ve wondered why he never looked at me that way. Now, I feel like I’ve woken up. I can see it.”
Frustrated, I rubbed my temples. I’d never been any good at implication and subtlety, and Eli was talking like the old wizard in a fantasy movie. “See what ?”
“He’s in love with you.”
Oh, Christ. Not this again. “He’s not in love with me, Eli. He’s marrying you.”
“He’s settling for me. But only because he thinks he can’t have you.” He held a hand up to stop me when I opened my mouth. “He loves me, I don’t doubt that for a second. I’ve never been the one to claim his whole heart, though, the only person he would sacrifice himself to save.”
Well, he hit the nail on the head with that one.
“That piece of his heart is reserved for you,” Eli finished.
My throat tightened again. I’d realized already that I might have feelings for Angel, but it was too late. The wedding was happening in three days . I hadn’t come to my senses in time. Besides, what did I have to offer him? I’d never had a relationship in my life. I didn’t know how to have a consistent partner. The most consistent thing I’d ever had in my life was… him.
Fuck .
I closed my eyes and willed away the burning, swallowing against a tight throat. “You’re the better choice.”
He gave me a sad smile. “I might be the smarter choice,” he agreed, “or the one that makes the most logical sense, but I’m not the better choice for him , Raleigh. I’ll never be able to complete him like you do. He’s not going to thrive in Seattle. He needs to be here with you— together with you.”
“How do I make him see that?”
“Only you know.” Eli stood from the table, and it only felt right to walk him to the door.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I never intended to hurt you.”
Eli laughed ruefully, waving off my apology. “I should have seen it years ago. Frankly, I should have seen it the night we met. I was angry at first, but then I realized I never stood a chance. It was always you.”
The click that echoed through the apartment when the door shut was deafening. Suddenly, I found myself alone. Thoughts swirled in my mind, and I struggled to grasp any of them. One, however, made itself too prominent to ignore: Angel was in love with me.
I’d always done anything I could to make Angel happy. Hell, I would have set the world on fire just so he could watch it burn. Seeing him nearly end up with someone who’d gotten it so wrong had my mind a blur, but now that the smoke had cleared, I could see my roiling, conflicting emotions for what they were. Love.
I loved him too.