Chapter 25 #2
For the short period of time I’d known Alec, he hadn’t been very emotive—almost robotic in nature (as those kinds of engineering people were).
But when I glanced over at him, he seemed like a completely different person than the one I’d come to know.
His whole face was red and puffy, his eyes were bloodshot, and he seemed younger somehow.
Someone too young to take on these kinds of burdens.
He must have felt me looking at him, because he glanced over at me, and his features softened.
“Are you all right?” he asked me.
I let out a humorless chuckle. “Are any of us?”
Alec sighed deeply. “No.”
Maybe it was just because we were all too tired and too vulnerable to bother with niceties, which was why I didn’t feel bad asking, “You’ve known this whole time, haven’t you?”
“Knowing things isn’t as objective as you think,” he replied. “But I had a feeling. I—” His voice cracked and he paused, pressing his hands hard into his thighs. “I could say I wish I’d done more, but there’s nothing any of us could have done. Not really.”
The truth of Alec’s statement hurt more than it should have, and maybe that’s what finally allowed my tears to flow freely. I leaned my head on his shoulder, and he gave me a gentle pat on my arm.
“I’m sorry about you and my sister,” I said to him.
I felt Alec’s body shift underneath me as he let out a sigh. “Me too. I liked her.”
“She liked you too.” I sat back up and looked at Alec head-on, seeing so much human vulnerability in his bloodshot eyes and his pale cheeks. “I don’t think she was as ready as she thought she was for someone to see her. I mean really see her, like you did.”
Alec nodded, pinching his lips together. “Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.” And I wished it didn’t.
Another eternity went by before the same nurse came back out to us.
“I can take one of you back there now.”
Without hesitation, Alec motioned for me to go. I got up shakily, my body almost numb as she walked me through a long, sterile hallway.
“He’s okay,” she said softly.
“Oh.” I had to tell myself to actually breathe. “Thanks.”
She led me through another set of doors to the emergency room bays sectioned off with plastic curtains. Outside one of the bays Brooklyn’s parents were talking with another nurse. I exchanged a sympathetic glance with Annie before the nurse brought me into the bay.
Brooklyn was mostly upright in the hospital bed, his shirt torn off and draped over the side of the bed.
There were breathing tubes up his nose and an IV in his arm, and although the color was starting to come back to his face, his eyes were dull and lifeless as he noticed me walk in.
He barely looked human, and it scared the shit out of me.
“Hey,” he croaked.
My body moved on its own again, lowering into the lone plastic chair beside the bed.
I sighed and rubbed the corners of my eyes, blinking back the tears that threatened to fall.
I thought back to last night, and felt sick to my stomach as I replayed every word he had said to me.
Every single perfect word that made me feel like I could fly.
That guy was long gone. The boy who lay in front of me now felt like a stranger, and I was no longer flying. I was falling—hard.
“Hi.” I put whatever energy I had left into keeping my voice steady.
“I feel real sick.” He groaned.
“Do you want me to get the nurse?” I asked.
He moaned and shook his head.
The exhaustion seemed to hit me all at once now that all the adrenaline had worn off, and I could have fallen asleep in that stiff plastic chair. I wasn’t sure how to decipher the feeling that was left. It was murky and sad.
“Nat, do you hate me?” He spoke up again, his voice scratchy and raw like someone had rubbed sandpaper on his throat.
I clenched my jaw, feeling tears sting the corners of my eyes. “Why would you even ask me that?”
“Because I hate me.”
I opened my mouth to say something—I wasn’t even sure what—but nothing came out. It was my body interfering again, desperate to keep me out of harm’s way.
“Please.” Brooklyn’s words were barely audible through his heaving breaths. “Help me.”
Somewhere deep in the back of my mind, I must have known.
It was there, buried under movie nights and singing in the car with the roof off and laughing over chips and salsa.
I just couldn’t have borne to face the truth, because despite all of that, I really did love him.
But I only truly knew that now, because nothing but love could hurt this fucking much.
I stood up, scraping the chair back against the linoleum floor. Alec was right. What could any of us have done? What could I have done? Brooklyn wasn’t ready, either, but I wasn’t sure he’d ever admit that. So I had to.
“I can’t.” My chest ached as every word I said made my heart crack into tiny pieces. “How am I supposed to help you when you can’t help yourself?”
He reached out to me with a trembling hand, but I backed away from him until my back was pressed against the wall.
Brooklyn choked back sobs, gasping like a fish out of water, tears streaming down his blotchy red cheeks.
The machines he’d been hooked up began beeping, and a few nurses came scrambling in, giving me a way to slip out of the bay.
I found an empty spot to lean against the wall, heaving to catch my breath while all the emotion in me came rushing in like a landslide. Stella appeared beside me from seemingly out of the void, and she put a hand to my back.
“You knew, too, didn’t you?” I barely recognized my own voice, muddled under all of the tears and the hurt. “You knew he was using, and you didn’t tell me.”
“I don’t know,” Stella said haltingly. “I didn’t know what to do. I guessed maybe he was getting high again, but I couldn’t accept it. I thought maybe he’d change. That his feelings for you would have made a difference. He loves you so much. I know he does.”
I struggled to find my words. I wanted to scream, I wanted to throw up, I wanted to unravel, but I didn’t. I kept it together, because that was what I did, and that was what I’d always do. But this wasn’t for anyone else; this was just for me, because for once, I had to think about myself.
“It doesn’t matter, does it? He loves drugs more.”
Stella led me out to the emergency room lobby to Alec, rubbing at her tear-stained cheeks as she hugged me goodbye. She might have said sorry, but it sounded far, far away.
Alec and I took Stella’s car back to the estate complex, and I threw anything of mine that I could find into my suitcase. I took Brooklyn’s car keys, and I drove home.
As I sped down the empty back roads along the bay, I blasted the radio to his stupid grungy rock music and let the wind from the open windows tear through the car.
He had promised me he would tell me in the morning.
He would tell me that he loved me, and we’d wake up happy to the sound of the ocean and a beautiful sunrise.
It was almost 5 a.m. by the time I got home.
I parked Brooklyn’s car in front of my house but I didn’t go inside.
I walked down the street shoeless, willing myself forward until I got to the beach.
The sun rose over the ocean, calm and tepid, lined with streaks of orange and gold.
It was morning, and it was beautiful. But he didn’t love me, and I didn’t really feel happy, or sad. I felt nothing.