Chapter Eighteen
MARCO
“Fuck, man! I hate this shit so much! I shouldn’t have let you drive. I should’ve insisted we take a taxi. I should have been looking at the road instead of down at my cell phone.” I’m sitting on the side of my best friend Logan’s bed for the first time since he’s been moved to San Diego.
“I’m sorry it took me so long to come and visit.
I’m a shit friend. I chose drugs and denial over being here.
Damn it! You need to wake up. I haven’t trained since the accident.
I need you to wake up and train with me.
I can’t do this alone. I don’t even think I want to do this anymore.
Please. Please wake up.” I grab my friend’s hand and squeeze it, my head falling to the side railing.
“I’m so sorry, man. I’m so sorry.” I start to sob, not being able to control my emotions any longer.
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” a soft voice says. I whip my head around to find Logan’s sister, Reese, standing in the doorway.
“I didn’t mean to overhear. I didn’t realize anyone was in here.”
“I wipe the tears from my face and stand to give her a hug. “It’s good to see you, Reese. I’m so sorry…”
“Stop saying sorry. He tested negative for alcohol. The only thing in his blood were muscle relaxers, which he had a prescription for. He didn’t cause that accident and who’s to say, had the drugs not been in his system, he still would have reacted the same way.
There’s no point in thinking about the ‘what ifs’. ”
“I know that, but if I would have insisted…”
Reese cuts me off. “What? The accident never would’ve happened? You don’t know that. The taxi driver could have gotten into an accident and killed you both. Nobody can predict anything.”
I know she’s right, and I’ve discussed this at length with my counselor, but sitting in front of Logan makes me question every decision I made leading up to that moment. I want my best friend back.
My phone vibrates in my pocket and I see my mom has sent me a picture text. I click it open and see the most beautiful baby I have ever seen complete with olive skin, black curly locks, and eyes as dark as a midnight sky.
Mom: She looks a lot like Chloe when she was a baby, doesn’t she?
She knows. I’ve seen the looks she’s given me and chose to ignore them. And if she knows, who else knows?
Instead of texting her back, something comes over me. I look at Logan and it hits me how unpredictable life is. It can end today. Tomorrow. We never know.
“I need to go.” I give Reese a hug and run out the door. I’m on the other side of the hospital, but I make it to the labor and delivery ward in record speed.
“I need to see Bella Cooper,” I tell the nurse.
“And you are?”
“I—I’m a friend.”
“I will need to approve you.” She picks up the phone and dials her room. “I have a…”
“Marco Michaels,” I tell her.
“Marco Michaels here to see Bella…Okay…I’ll let him up.”
“She let me up?” I ask incredulously.
“That was her mother. Bella is signing the birth certificate right now…with the father.”
“Not if I can help it.”
The nurse tells me the room number, and since I already have a visitor pass from visiting Logan, she presses the button to open the doors. Before they are even fully open, I’m running toward her room, not even thinking about what it is I’m going to say.
I probably should have thought about what I was going to say.