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Nick
“Nicholas Ardito.”
My eyes shoot up as Maia walks into the waiting room, angry mama-bear gaze set on me.
“What the hell is the matter with you?”
“I—what—”
She grabs my arm and yanks me out of the chair, then starts marching me down the hall. “You’re going to see him.”
Adrenaline shoots through me and I manage to wrangle out of her grasp. “I—I can’t. He’s—”
“He is going to be okay, but he has a long road to recovery, both physically and emotionally, and he needs you. So, you’re going to see him. I know you’re scared. I know you feel guilty. But you know what doesn’t fix it? Hiding in the goddamn waiting room. Okay? Now. Go.”
She pushes me down the hall, and I can’t argue. Not that there’s any arguing with her tough-girl mama-bear shit when she hits that point. She’s all Leo when she gets like that, and she’ll put you through a wall if she needs to. Or a door, in my case.
Stopping outside his room, she pulls me into a tight hug. “You can do this.” Then she lets go, steps away, and shoves me through the doorway of his room so hard that I actually stumble.
The first thing I hear is Braden laughing.I never knew how welcome that sound could be.
He’s still laughing when I get around the curtain, but the sight of him stops me in my tracks. Bruised all over and covered in all kinds of bandages with wires and tubes coming off him. If he looks this bad now, I can’t imagine how he must’ve looked a few days ago. He’s propped up in bed and, shockingly, smiling at me.
“Did she just chuck you through the door and run?”
I nod slowly. “Yep.”
Awkward silence settles over us. He looks down at his bed as I stare into the distance.
“You’re making this even weirder than it needs to be by standing there and staring. Sit down.”
I stare at him for a moment and the emotion hits. Forcing myself to move, I sit down next to his bed as my heart slams into my ribs.
“Why didn’t you come in and see me? Maia said you’ve been here the whole time.”
“Because I couldn’t,” I choke out as tears pool in my eyes. “Not after what I said to you. I—I never wanted to lose you. I was just so fucking mad. I’m still mad. You left us. You left Harper. You left me. And then just when I thought maybe we were finding our way back, you cut me out again. Do you have any idea how that felt? Watching you hanging out with shitty people. All while ignoring me? You’re not the only person in the world. I’ve fucking needed you,” I yell, throwing it all on the line. “And you left me. After everything I’ve been through—” I pause, trying and failing to collect myself. “Then you do something dumb like this? Driving shitfaced? What if you’d killed someone like the person who killed my mom? What if you died?” The words are a whisper coming out of my mouth. “Do you have any idea how badly that would’ve destroyed the rest of us? We’re pissed at you, Braden. But we all still care. I still care. Stop taking advantage of that.”
When I finally look at him, his eyes are shut tightly and his breath is shaky. When he opens his eyes, he looks directly at me and any playful demeanor he had is gone.
“My dad said I was lucky that I wasn’t hurt worse than this. That there are no legal consequences. And maybe that’s true but—” He stops when he chokes up. “I have to live with what I did. How I hurt the people I care about, especially Maia and you. If I’d left someone else with the mess you and Vince had to endure… I don’t know how you come back from that. I’m sorry. For a lot of shit, but especially that.”
I huff out a sigh. “Where the fuck do we go from here?”
“Forward, I guess. If you still want to.”
“I still want to. Like I said, I’ve needed my best friend, and you missed out on all the crazy shit with Leigh and me.”
He looks around the room, then down at his bed. “I’m not going anywhere. Tell me all about it.”
“Well, it starts with Leigh kissing the shit out of me on Maia’s couch and builds to me getting her pregnant my very first time having sex.”
His eyes widen and he hits the call button next to him. “I need snacks for this.”
As Braden schmoozes the nursing assistant into bringing him more pudding, I watch his movements. I can see how much pain he’s in, both physically and emotionally. It’s a miracle that he’s alive, maybe more so that he didn’t hurt anyone else in the process. My anger at him won’t just magically disappear. I’m not stupid enough to believe that, but I want to try to find our way through this. And as naïve as it might be to let him in again, I can’t help it. I need my best friend. And hell if I don’t want something to feel a little bit normal right now.
Once Braden has a suite of pudding flavors in front of him, I start telling the story, going from looking at Leigh’s boobs and then us making out for half the night to us hooking up to me issuing an ultimatum, to our fight on the back road, to finally getting together for real, to me being a virgin—which Braden actually knew, he was one of the few people I confided in about that—to Leigh getting pregnant.
“Then you did some dumb shit, crashed your truck, and now here we are. Fuck, these last few days have been awful.”
