When Chris nods, I ask, “How much? How much did you shoot up?”
Chris has a decent build, but if his drug of choice the past few months has been heroin, there is no guarantee how his body will react. Long-term drug users are more at risk of overdosing than first-time users, as their bodies are already weak from prolonged use.
“P-p-promise me, Ry,” Chris begs with tears welling in his eyes.
I shake my head once more. "No. Then you'll give up. I'm not letting you give up! If you want to help Noah, you have to stay with me. You have to fight."
“P-promise. Y-you said you’d promise.” I swear I can see the life in his eyes fade with every syllable he utters.
I curl my shuddering hands around his blue-tinged jaw. "Don't make me do this, Chris. Please don't make me do this."
I don’t bother clearing the tears filling my eyes. Maybe if he sees how devasted I am, he’ll fight harder.
"P-p-promise," he begs, his words garbling in his exhausted state. "P-please, Ry.Please.” His last word is barely a whisper.
It takes me three attempts to force two minor words out of my mouth, and even then, they are strangled by a sob. "I promise."
I stop watching a tear careening down Chris’s bluish cheek when the scuffling of feet booms into my ears. I’m shocked I can hear anything, much less the stomp of Brax’s bare feet. My pulse is roaring through my body so hard, I feel like I’m submerged in three thousand feet of water.
"Jesus Christ. I thought you flushed his drugs?" Brax mutters, freezing halfway into the bathroom. He has a crowbar in one hand and his riding boots in another. Apparently, he was planning to kick down the door if the crowbar was ineffective.
“I did. Well, I thought I did. He must have had a hidden stash,” I reply, my tone partially frustrated but mostly devastated.
My panic grows when Chris's body convulses against the drugs in his system. His eyes roll into the back of his head as his hands clamp into fists.
“Call an ambulance. He’s overdosing.”
My request has only just left my lips when Brax charges out of the bathroom.
“My cell is on the kitchen counter,” I shout when I hear him rummaging through the hundreds of car magazines covering Chris’s coffee table.
While he stomps to the kitchen, I grind my knuckles over Chris’s sternum, striving to get a response from him. “Come on, Chris,” I beg when he fails to respond.
My breathing comes out in ragged pants when I lower my ear to count his exhalations—they are far and few between.
“God, Chris, don’t do this to me. Not today.”
After removing the towel I placed under his head, I tilt his head back, plug his nose, then seal my lips over his. I breathe into his mouth two times, supplementing the air his fritzing brain can’t command his body to take.
My eyes drop to his chest, waiting for it to rise and fall. It doesn’t.
“No, Chris. Come on.”
I return my ear to his mouth. He is no longer breathing.
“Brax!” I scream, alerting him to my worry. “Advise first responders he’s going into coronary failure. He’s not breathing, and he doesn’t have a pulse.”
As I rip off the towels I just placed on Chris to keep him warm, Brax relays an update to the emergency responders on the other end of the line.
"One. . . Two. . . Three. . . Four. . ." I compress his chest in the same rhythm I did to Savannah years ago while striving to ignore the horrible memories resurfacing. "Five. . . Six. . . Seven. . . Eight. . . Come on, Chris." I increase the pressure of my pumps, finally recognizing that hurting someone to save them is okay. "Don't do this to us, Chris. We can't be the three musketeers without a third man."
After announcing the paramedics are on their way, Brax falls to his knees next to me. “What do I do? I don’t know what to do.” His voice is as panicked as mine was when I pulled Savannah from her watery grave.
“When I reach thirty, blow air into his mouth two times.”
My words are as foggy as my brain. I feel like I’m watching the entire charade from above, as if I’m dreaming. This doesn’t feel real. It can’t be real. Life can’t be so cruel that I have the lives of two of my best friends in my hands within years of each other.
“Twenty-nine. . . Thirty.”
