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“I’m not.”
“These are all photoshopped.”
“They’re not.”
I set his phone onto the table in front of me. “Do you think I’m stupid, Merchant? Gaynor photoshopped me into all of those photos back in my room just fine.Theylook real. Do you really think I don’t know when I’m looking at fake photos?”
He takes a steady breath and reaches for his phone. He quickly flicks through the images and finds the one he’s looking for. After a long moment, staring down at the screen, he bites down on his bottom lip, sliding it towards me.
I’m lying in a hospital bed. My eyes are closed. I’m wearing a hospital gown, and my head is wrapped in thick bandages. I’m hooked up to too many monitors and machines to count.
“Gaynor was your nurse,” he says. “She was on the night shift most of the time, which was when you’d wake up the most. You remember the accident sometimes. Most of the time…you don’t.”
I push his phone away. “What are youtalkingabout?”
“It was summer break and we’d gone to stay at West’s friend’s place in L.A. There was a party in the hills. I was supposed to drive us all home, but I’d had too much to drink. You’d only had one beer, so you offered to take us back instead. Sebastian and Ashley were fooling around in the back of the car. I was fucking around with them too, being an idiot, but I passed out halfway back to the place. There was oil on the road. You tried to slow down in a corner and ended up going through the guardrail into oncoming traffic.”
He rushes through this with zero inflection in his voice, quickly, as if he’s rattling off a list. As if it’s a story he’s told many times before.
But it’s not true.
I’d remember if it was true.
“I’mfromLos Angeles,” I tell him.
“You’re fromhere,” he says. “From Sumner. So am I. We grew up next-door to one another, Sorrell. I’ve known you my whole fucking life.”
Andthat,ladies and gentlemen, is right about where I black out.
I don’t remember how I end up back in my room. I wake up in my bed somehow, though. I’m out of my soaking wet clothes and in sweats and a t-shirt, shivering beneath my covers. Theo sits in the chair beside my bed, staring out of the window. He sighs when he realizes I’m awake.
“Sorry,” he says tightly. “I tried to ease you into it slow, but…I guess it wasn’t slow enough.”
I remember everything he told me back at the diner. I wish I didn’t, but his words are emblazoned in my mind, cycling around on repeat. “Why are you doing this?” I whisper. “What are you getting out of this? Is it some attempt to assuage your guilt over Rachel?”
“Rachel—” Theo flares his nostrils, looking back out of the window. A vein pulses in his temple, signaling a flare of frustration that looks very real. “I don’t know how to do this without triggering you again,” he says.
“Triggering me?”
“You passed out back at the diner. You pass out a lot.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yeah, you—you fuckingdo,” he says, laughing bitterly. “We’ve been through this before, okay, and it never goes fucking well, so just...” He throws his hands up, letting them fall back into his lap. A deep breath seems to even him out a little. “We were all wearing our seatbelts that night, thank God. The car didn’t hit any other vehicles, just the guardrail. The driver’s side airbag didn’t deploy, though. You hit your head on the steering wheel. We all managed to get out of the car, but you were stuck. I couldn’t drag you out from the passenger side.” He chokes out a laugh. “And your window was stubborn as fuck andrefusedto shatter.” He looks down at his hands. At the jagged scars there—the faint, silvery lines that crosshatch his skin.
“I put my fist through it,” he says matter-of-factly. “The safety glass wasn’t supposed to be sharp, but…I guess they were wrong about that, weren’t they? Sebastian and Ashley waited by the median for the ambulance. I didn’t wanna move you that far, though, so I stayed with you in the road. The car’s engine caught light. It didn’t explode like in the movies, but…it was bad. Traffic was bad, bumper to bumper, and those fucking idiots wouldn’t pull over for the emergency services further down the road. It took thirty minutes for them to reach us. If they’d gotten there sooner, I don’t know…” His eyes shine too brightly. “Maybe shit wouldn’t have been so bad. But you didn’t even have any open wounds. There was no blood. They said I didn’t make it worse by moving you, but…”
“Stop,” I rasp.
“If I’d left you in the car, maybe they could have stabilized your neck properly. You were fine for a day or so. But then you got compression. Your brain swelled up to the point that they had to cut a giant fucking hole in your skull. They didn’t think you were gonna make it. You had three separate contusions on your brain. Your surgeon said the largest one was catastrophic. Said you wouldn’t even make it through that second night. But there was another surgeon. This fucking…cowboy.” He shakes his head. “She swore she could fix you, and she did. Kind of. She was reckless as hell…but you survived. You were in a coma for eighteen—” He stops talking. I’m horrified by the tears that streak down his cheeks.
This isn’t fucking happening.
Dashing those tears away with the backs of his hands, he finally looks back at me. “Eighteen…days,” he finishes. “You were a fucking miracle. After making it through the swelling, and the bleeds, and the surgery, the other doctors said there was no way you were waking up after an eighteen-day coma. And if you did, you’d be a vegetable for the rest of your life. But you woke up. And you were fine. You could see. Speak. Move. Walk. It was the best day of my fucking life.”
“You aresick.” I try to get away. My arms are like lead when I attempt to throw the covers back. It’s as if I’m moving through thick, cloying mud, and my body won’t respond to me. Theo jumps up from the chair and sits next to me, taking hold of my hand.
“What about this doesn’t feel true to you?” he demands. “Logically,whywould I make something like this up?”
