16. Hayat
Chapter Sixteen
Hayat
Ali was lying beside her sister when I silently entered my best friend’s bedroom. When she saw me, the younger girl’s face filled with relief, and she carefully untangled herself from my sleeping bestie.
Downstairs, my parents were with Kin and Jace, all of them still bewildered as to what could have happened to cause Abi to leave school so suddenly the day before finals week began. On the drive to Malibu, I’d gone through my list of voice mails, pausing when I’d seen the unknown caller.
It had been from Abi, but it didn’t explain anything, just left me with more questions.
“Hey, babe. It’s Abi. I’m calling from a friend’s phone. Mine is…broken. I dropped it on my run this morning. But I didn’t want you to worry or send Lyric over to make sure I was still breathing. I’ll call you as soon as I pick up the new phone. But I’m so busy studying for finals, it might be a day or so. Love you!”
I’d felt a twinge in my chest at the slight pause while she spoke, my ears straining as I replayed the message over and over while Sparks drove, hoping to find anything that might tell me something about what had happened the day before. Background noise. Other voices. But there had been nothing except that all-too-brief hesitation before she’d said “broken.”
Fitting, because that was exactly how Abi looked. Broken.
Lying down where Ali had just been, I ran my eyes over my bestie. The sun was already fading, dusk turning into night. The lamp on the side table would have been comforting at any other time, but right then, it only made the dark circles under Abi’s eyes more stark in her pale face. Her hair looked limp, her clothes wrinkled.
She stirred, then snapped her eyes open. “Hayat,” she whimpered.
I propped my head on my hand, unable to tear my gaze from her face. We’d FaceTimed earlier in the week, but I swore she appeared to have aged five years since then. Trying to be reassuring, to show her that I was there for her—I would always be there for her—I smiled. “Hi.”
“Hayat.” She choked out my name again, throwing her arms around my neck. I fell onto my back, taking her with me as she buried her face in my hair. Sobs, the gut-wrenching kind that were so hard and painful that I worried if she would hurt her insides, came from her.
Rubbing her back with one hand, I cupped her head with the other, letting her cry it out. Abi was the sweet one of the two of us. The emotional one. The loving one who cared about everyone and everything. She was the good one, my precious best friend. Her pain was mine, and I cried silent tears—in empathy for her, in frustration for not knowing what had caused her pain, a little for myself and the mayhem that had been my last few days.
She cried until her voice became hoarse, and then she cried some more. My shirt and hair were soaked with her tears, but I just held her closer, my arms tight around her, hoping to fight whatever mental demons plagued her. Eventually, she fell asleep, too exhausted to keep going. And I continued to hold her.
Her mom came in at some point, her blue eyes so like Abi’s silently asking me questions I had no answers to. But even if I did, Kin knew I would never spill her daughter’s secrets. Nor would Abi repeat mine. My mother joined her in the doorway, the two of them holding each other much like I held my Abi. Best friends, always ready to pick each other up during any crisis.
Knowing I was there to protect Abi, they left, closing the door behind them. I kissed Abi’s brow, brushing her tangled hair back from her grief-stricken, aged face. While she slept, I finally looked at my phone again. It was on silent, so as not to disturb Abi’s sleep. My guys had texted me a few times, asking if everything was okay. If I needed anything. Telling me they missed me.
I texted them back, letting them know I appreciated them getting me to my friend and that I missed them too. So damn much. After I hit send on my last message to them, I finally dared to glance at Havoc’s social accounts.
Holding my breath, I watched the page load and went weak. According to my insights page, I’d lost two hundred thousand followers Thursday night into Friday afternoon. But then, the video Wes had posted linking me to Havoc had gone supernova viral. Since then, I’d gained over three million more followers, and I had emails from all my sponsors, plus a few others that wanted Havoc to represent them.
Seeing an email from Aunt Emmie, I clicked on it.
Just following up about the chat we had Thursday night. I know you’re going through a lot right now with Havoc, but if you are taking the drummer position for Autumn’s Slumber, we can use that to our advantage. Shane needs you all in the studio ASAP.
Love you!
Aunt E
That was exciting news for the band, which I copied and pasted into a group text to my guys. But first, I needed to take care of Abi. Only once I knew she was okay could I focus on the band and my relationship with Ky, Sparks, and Jamie.
Abi was keeping secrets.
I didn’t call her out on it. Seemed kind of hypocritical when I had some of my own. But it was something new for us, to not confide everything that was going on in our lives to each other. In truth, I was scared to ask her what she wasn’t telling me. The meltdown she’d had and the slow recovery wasn’t the Abigail St. Charles I knew.
Sweet and precious, she might be, but she was also resilient as fuck.
Yet I allowed her to stay quiet about the trauma that had sent her into whatever mental shutdown she was experiencing, and I didn’t bring up any of my own news. We didn’t talk about Havoc. Or Autumn’s Slumber. And I sure as hell hadn’t told her anything about my guys. She knew I’d kissed Kyrie Renchford, but that had been the tiny piece of my new discoveries about myself that I’d confessed before her own drama had unfolded.
All week, I stayed at her house, sleeping in her bed, eating her food, binge-watching really bad comedies. I’d texted my guys throughout the week, letting them know how appreciative I was of their understanding that Abi needed me at the moment. And that I missed them.
But I didn’t want to keep them from Abi like some dirty secret any longer. Her parents and mine were going on their usual Vegas trip to spend a little time together before Abi’s parents headed off for their summer tour in Australia. I figured the best time to introduce the three new important men in my life to the most important person to me ever was while our parents were away for the weekend.
Kin had told us to go to First Bass Friday night, because we needed to get out of the house and be around people. I texted Ky to meet us at the club that night.
I should have known those plans were going to go all to hell when Abi and I were awakened Friday morning to Aunt Emmie’s name popping up on Abi’s new phone. At first, I tried to hide from the noise and the morning by covering my head and desperately holding on to sleep. Sharing a bed with Abi wasn’t new for me. We’d been having sleepovers since we were little kids. But Abi was not fun to sleep with sometimes.
She had this itty-bitty problem with getting sleep-drunk. A state somewhere between asleep and awake. She did crazy things during those episodes, like walking from her house to Poppy’s house in the middle of the night because she knew I was having a sleepover there that weekend. She didn’t remember much of what happened that night, but sometimes when she had moments like that, she did remember. Doctors, therapists, and other specialists didn’t fully understand it, but they attributed it to Abi’s stress levels.
She and I had thought it was hilarious when we were kids. Now, however, it was kind of exhausting. Watching over her to make sure she didn’t sleepwalk out into traffic. I shuddered, wondering what she could have gotten up to, the dangers she might have unknowingly put herself in over the past few weeks, if she’d been so stressed out that she’d come home and crashed for a full week.
“Oh shit,” Abi muttered, making me groan into my pillow.
“What?” I mumbled.
“Emmie.”
Hearing my aunt’s name was enough to have me sitting straight up in bed, knowing that sleep was pointless if she had something to call my friend about. “That can’t be good. The last time she called me for no apparent reason, she told me the world knew I was Havoc. I already knew that, but she was doing what she does best. Trying to clean up the mess.”
Abi stared down at her phone with wide blue eyes. “What should I do?” she whispered.
She’d lost her damn mind if she thought she should do anything but answer when Emmie Armstrong called. For fuck’s sake. A person didn’t send Aunt Emmie to voice mail unless they wanted to have their flesh melted from their bones by her ferocious anger. “Answer it?”
“Shit.” She worried her bottom lip with her teeth for a moment before finally swiping her thumb over the screen. “Hello?”
My bestie relaxed a little when Aunt Emmie wanted to talk about how she’d made a few calls to try to sort out Abi missing her finals that week. I wasn’t sure how my aunt made the connections she did, but if anyone needed something done, we normally just went to her and it got sorted. All of us kids figured people were just too terrified of the little redhead with the big green eyes to tell her no, which only doubled our own fear and awe of the woman.
But then I felt Abi tense. “Married?” she squeaked. “I didn’t get married.”
Laughing, I fell back on the pillows. “Are you kidding me? That’s hilarious!”
Abi wouldn’t get married, especially not without me. And even if she did, who would she marry? She’d never been interested in anyone, male or female, until this past semester when she’d gotten a little attached to her history professor. So much, that she’d sort of been stalking him around campus. Nothing too crazy, just giving herself extra chances to see him. Her crush had grown—I was well aware of that. She might even be half in love with the man. But marriage?
She shushed me as she listened to Aunt Emmie. Whatever was said had Abi gasping like she’d just been punched in the chest. I turned on my side, watching her face. Abi tried to speak, but Aunt Emmie wasn’t happy now. That much was evident from the look on Abi’s pale face.
Suddenly, she dropped the phone and jumped out of bed, her pained cry ringing in my ears. Surprised by what was happening, I was slower to move, but I hopped out of bed and followed her as she ran downstairs and outside.
“Vaughn!” she shouted when she reached the porch.
I was only a few steps behind her. “Abi, what are you doing?”
But she wasn’t paying attention to me as she jumped down the steps and twirled around in front of the house, looking around wildly. I followed her gaze, tensing in case something or someone was actually waiting to harm my friend.
“Vaughn!” she cried again, at the top of her voice.
“You’ve officially lost your mind,” I muttered, moving cautiously until I reached her and wrapped an arm around her waist. Gently, I urged her back to the porch, but she kept frantically looking around. “Come on. I’ll make you something to eat, and then you can explain to me what Aunt Emmie was all hyped up about.”
“Vaughn?” she whimpered.
“Sorry, babe,” I murmured, soothingly stroking her hair as we entered the house. “There’s no Vaughn here.”