by Max Hudson
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Epilogue
“Accidental Love”
M/M Gay Romance
Max Hudson
© 2018
Max Hudson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This book is intended for Adults (ages 18+) only. The contents may be offensive to some readers. It may contain graphic language, explicit sexual content, and adult situations. May contain scenes of unprotected sex. Please do not read this book if you are offended by content as mentioned above or if you are under the age of 18.
Please educate yourself on safe sex practices before making potentially life-changing decisions about sex in real life. If you’re not sure where to start, see here: http://www.jerrycoleauthor.com/safe-sex-resources/ (courtesy of Jerry Cole).
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner & are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Products or brand names mentioned are trademarks of their respective holders or companies. The cover uses licensed images & are shown for illustrative purposes only. Any person(s) that may be depicted on the cover are simply models.
Edition v1.00 (2018.02.08)
http://www.maxhudsonauthor.com
Special thanks to the following volunteer readers who helped with proofreading: Scotty Z. and those who assisted but wished to be anonymous. Thank you so much for your support.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Epilogue
Chapter One
In the days following the accident, Luca wasn't sure what had taken him off the road. All that he knew was that it was at least a semi.
He couldn't remember when he had merged onto the highway; he couldn't remember when the truck had swerved and had knocked him off into the median. Luca had tried to regain control of the bike, but it had spun and spun, and then someone, coming from the right, had hit the bike again.
That had prompted the bike to slip down the hill next to the highway exit. Luca, of course, could hardly remember most of what had happened that day. In fact, most of the information he had gotten about the accident had been from his friends or from the news.
His family didn’t seem to want to talk about it, they appeared to be pretty traumatized by the entire thing, and it wasn't as if Luca could blame them. He was shaken, so he couldn’t imagine how they felt.
Luca was the baby of the family. He had always been the baby of the family, and until his older cousins started having children, he was still considered the baby. His cousins were all professionals with their own lives and careers, and since none of them seemed that interested in keeping the bloodline going, Luca remained the baby even though he was in his mid-twenties.
He found that it was odd to look at his parents cry from relief in front of him because he hadn't died. He was still processing the entire thing, and he wasn't thankful that he hadn’t died yet. He was just in pain.
The pain was bad. He had expected it to be, the doctors had said that it would be, but the doctors had also said that he might not survive, so he wasn't sure whether he should believe them or not.
It was finally night time and he was in his room, recovering from the worst day of his life so far. He didn’t know how long it had been. Hours bled into days.
He couldn't move, because every time he moved, everything hurt even more. There were no casts on him—he was still too swollen, too raw, basically a rag doll that he marveled they had managed to put back together again.
He felt like a rag doll with the sutures and the bruises and the metal inside of him. He looked at the calendar over the TV in the pristine hospital room, wondering why they still had an old-school calendar and why they kept it there in the first place.
This was the first night since the accident that there was no one there and Luca was grateful. He couldn't blame everyone for being worried.
He had been seriously hurt, like they had told him several times, and he was very lucky to be alive. However, he really wanted some time to himself. There were only so many times that he could hear people saying how lucky he was when he felt like shit.
The drugs helped. They didn’t help a lot, they didn't help enough with the way he felt in his head, but at least they numbed his body. He was still too shocked to really begin processing what had happened. Time had started to feel different too and he wasn’t sure how many people he had met over the past few days that he would never see again, but their faces were all merging into each other’s, and so far, Luca was sure that he was unlikely to remember any of them.
It was all blue aprons and readjusting his pillows and some of the nurses were polite and some were rude, but Luca was still finding it hard to discern the difference. Maybe when he felt a little stronger he would be more concerned about who was who, but for the time being, they all merged into the same person.
He groaned. Moving to get comfortable was hard—practically impossible—but staying in the same position was also difficult. He closed his eyes as he tried to fall back to sleep. He was still due for another couple of surgeries, but the really major ones had already been taken care of. He wasn’t looking forward to those. He had broken a lot of bones—a lot of bones—and his body was still fragile.
He sighed as he thought about the next few days. He missed his bed. He missed his boyfriend, Derek. He wondered why he hadn’t come in yet, but he couldn’t exactly ask again. His parents were already looking at him with so much pity, and every time that Luca mentioned Derek, he could see the look that they gave each other. It made him feel even worse. As if it was possible that he could feel worse.
He didn't know how many questions he could ask them about Derek, or about anything really, before they collapsed into a heap of sniveling tears. Every time they did, Luca felt extremely powerless to do anything. He wanted to give them a hug, tell them that it was okay, that it wasn’t a big deal. Except it felt like it was and he resented that he was the person that had to console them when he was the one still recovering in the hospital.
In any case, it wasn't as if he felt much like speaking anyway, because moving his mouth hurt like a bitch.
He heard someone walking into his bedroom and tried to set his gaze on the door. He was lucky because he didn't have to share a room. He had when he had first arrived at the hospital in a stretcher a couple of days ago, but he could hardly remember that. He could remember bits and pieces of it—people talking about coding, how much pain he was in, the fact that he still had most of his body, because for a second, he was sure that he didn’t.
He tried to stop thinking about that as he heard footsteps approaching.
“Hi,” a deep voice said. He strained himself to look, but the pain held him back enough that hi
s head went immediately back on the pillow.
He tried to mumble something like a reply back.
“My name is Brooklyn,” the deep voice said. “I’m going to be taking care of you at night. I understand you were in an accident?”
Luca groaned his assent.
“Are you currently in pain?”
“No,” Luca said.
There was a pause, for a second. Luca thought that his words had startled Brooklyn. It wasn’t that he was suddenly mute, it was just that talking hurt and so he tried to avoid doing it if he could.
He couldn’t always, and in truth, it was nice to have someone there that wasn’t fussing over him and talking about how miraculous it was that he hadn’t died.
“Okay, good,” Brooklyn said. He could hear Brooklyn moving to the other side of the bed, his steps quick. “I’m going to readjust your pillow now.”
He was closer to him now, so Luca opened his eyes once again. He hadn’t realized that he had closed them. He felt like it had been so long since he was in charge of his own body that even the most basic things felt foreign to him.
When he saw the nurse, though, his breathing turned sharp and quick. Brooklyn was gorgeous. He didn’t look like a nurse; he looked like an actor playing a nurse. His scrubs were purple, not blue, which Luca noted with interest. But the thing that he couldn’t help but focus on was the way that they fit Brooklyn. The rest of the nurses had seemed to be wearing the wrong sizes, but this uniform was sticking to this man in a way that looked like it had been designed specifically for his body type.
And oh boy, his body type. Luca didn’t think that in that hospital bed, he would ever be attracted to another human being ever again. He hadn’t even thought about his dick for the last few days, something that most men at his age would consider to be something of an achievement. But now that he was seeing Brooklyn, all that he was thinking about was how attracted he was to him. As if the uniform that clung to his strong looking body wasn’t enough, he had a gorgeous face.
He had big eyes, maybe blue, though they could have been gray or green and Luca wouldn’t have been able to tell. It was too dark to see him very well, but he could still see the outline of his face and he was all angles and cheekbones and this gorgeous beard that covered most of his face.
There was something about him too. Luca wasn’t sure if it was that he was lonely and he missed Derek, so he was projecting things onto him, or if it was that he was genuinely kind and seemed to enjoy what he was doing.
He tried to flash him a weak smile. “Thank you, Brooklyn,” he said.
Brooklyn shook his head. “You’re welcome,” he said. He winked at Luca and his heart jumped in his chest. “I’m going to check your chart to see if you’re due for any painkillers, okay?”
Luca watched him, saying nothing. Brooklyn moved to the bottom of the bed and grabbed the chart. Luca closed his eyes.
“This says you don't like morphine,” Brooklyn said.
Luca groaned. “It's not that I don't like morphine,” he replied. He was surprised at how quiet his voice sounded. He wasn’t sure when the last time he’d had a real conversation was, and while it was hurting him slightly to talk, he couldn’t let himself lose his voice.
It was nice to have a conversation with someone that wasn’t family, anyway. It didn’t hurt that he happened to look the way that he did.
Brooklyn patiently waited for him to finish his thought, which Luca appreciated immensely. “I just don't like the way it feels when you first get morphine. I mean, I like what it does.”
Brooklyn had walked over to his side and was looking down at him again. “And how does it feel?”
“Like all your intestines and stuff are getting soaked in ice cold water,” Luca replied. “It’s not pleasant.”
It made Brooklyn laugh. He was obviously trying to contain his laughter, putting his hand in front of his mouth so that people wouldn’t hear him laugh. His laughter was loud and Luca realized that it was the first time in what felt like forever that he had heard someone laugh since he’d been in the hospital.
He couldn’t help but smile at him, and though the muscles in his face hurt, he had been told that it wasn’t because his face had been hurt. If anything, he had been lucky. When he first had the ability, someone had handed him a purse mirror and he had checked his face, very thoroughly.
Luca had always been vain, but he didn’t realize exactly how vain he was until he knew that his face might have been affected by the accident. Luckily, his helmet had protected him—both from a more serious brain injury and from anything happening to his face. There were a few scrapes, but overall, his face had been mostly unaffected. Any scars that he had, and he was sure that he was going to have a considerable amount, wouldn’t be on his face.
He was sure that was a blessing, no matter how small.
“I’ll speak to your doctor,” Brooklyn said. “Maybe we can put you on something else. Something not quite as intense. How does that sound?”
“I’m already on painkillers.”
“But you’re in pain,” Brooklyn said.
Luca didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say to that.
“I don’t want you to be in pain.”
This time, smiling wasn’t such a struggle. “Thank you, Brooklyn.”
“You’re welcome,” Brooklyn said with a smile. His smile was beautiful. “I’ll be back soon.”
Before he could leave the room, Luca heard himself speak. He wasn’t sure if it was because he was so doped up on everything, because he would have never asked something like this if he wasn’t high. “Will I see you again?”
He heard Brooklyn stop walking at the door. “Yes, you’ll see me—”
“That’s not what I meant,” Luca said. “The nurses keep rotating and I… think I like you the most.”
This time, Brooklyn couldn’t contain his laughter. Luca grimaced, quite aware that he had just made a fool out of himself. It wasn’t as if he could just walk away. He had to lay there, facing his embarrassment. The good news was that he was pretty sure that this was the kind of thing that Brooklyn would have heard before. The bad news is that it didn’t make him feel that much better.
“I will make sure to come check in on you throughout my shifts this week,” he said. “How does that sound?”
Luca smiled. “It sounds good.”
He couldn’t see if Brooklyn was smiling back at him, but he hoped that he was.
With that, he heard Brooklyn take a few steps out the door and close it softly behind him. Luca realized that Brooklyn was probably just humoring him, but it still made him feel slightly happy that he even cared enough to humor him in the first place. It didn’t occur to him to think that it was his job, that would only come days later, but right then, he went to sleep feeling satisfied.
Chapter Two
It had been weeks since Luca had first arrived in the hospital, since he had seen Brooklyn for the very first time, and it felt like it had been forever. All of his responsibilities, his job, his apartment, everything that made his life his, had been shoved off to the side from the very moment that he had been in the accident.
Now he was starting to recover, the doctors were telling him that he was going to be able to go home soon. Luca kept wondering what that meant—he certainly wouldn’t be able to go back to his own place. He would have to go into rehabilitation, maybe even learn to walk all over again. They had still not let him walk to the bathroom, and if Luca never saw a bed pan again, he would be a happy man.
Well, he was starting to recover from the surgeries. Everything else… well, he could think about it later.
His sister was saying something, but Luca had zoned out a while ago, until she cleared her throat and looked pointedly at him. He wasn’t that interested in what she was saying—he was too tired to be interested—but he knew he had to make an effort. He straightened up, something he could mercifully do with almost as much ease as before the accident now, and smiled at her. “I'm
sorry, what were you saying?”
She smiled back at him. “I was just saying that if you want, you can come live with me. You know my apartment is on the ground floor of my building and it's close to your office.”
His mom shook her head. “Luca should come live with us. We don't mind making adjustments in his room for accessibility.”
The way she said the word adjustments made his heart sink. But that wasn’t the worst word in that sentence by far. He was going to live with them? He understood staying with them for a bit, but living with them seemed like far too much and far worse for everyone involved.
He missed his bed. His apartment. His boyfriend.
For a second, Luca was very confused. Why hadn’t Derek been included in the decision-making process? Why wasn’t Derek the one that was taking him home?
He sat up slightly, though it still hurt a little to move, and trained his gaze on his mother. She looked like she had lost weight, all sunken cheekbones and dark green eyes. It was a little disturbing to look at her. She had always been a little chubby, sweet, full of energy. Now she seemed like a shell of her former self and Luca was sure he had something to do with that.
“Mom.”
“Yes, dear?” she said, raising her eyebrows.
“I don't want to go back to your house. I want to go to my apartment. I'm sure Derek will take care of me.”
His mom and his sister exchanged a look. Luca wasn’t sure what the look was about, but it was getting on his nerves. It had become something weird and psychological. Every time he mentioned Derek, someone’s gaze would dart away from him.
Luca assumed it was because Derek hadn’t visited, but honestly, he couldn’t blame him. Derek being as busy as he was, it made sense that he hadn’t come visit him yet. He was also squeamish and it wasn’t as if Luca was looking well. There was blood everywhere when he had first arrived, and Derek fainted at the very sight of blood, even when he saw it on television.