by Anah Crow
“Shit.” Holly felt stupider than stupid. “I fucking hate the phone.”
***
Holly had been sitting on a narrow gurney in the midst of an incredibly raucous emergency ward for hours. The time to think had been good for him. Drunk and, as far as he remembered, stoned—the nurses agreed with that since he reeked of pot and tobacco—he felt more sane sitting on that gurney than he had in years. Maybe since his mother had gone to Hopespring.
He was watching people come and go: the wounded, the mentally ill, wailing children, dying elderly. In the middle of all the noise, Holly finally realized that whatever was wrong with him, if anything was, it wasn’t what was wrong with his mother. He’d done coke, dropped acid, tossed back datura, drank mushroom tea, and he’d come out the other side in one piece every time. There were a lot of things Holly could break—including his head, it seemed—but his mind was tougher than he knew.
Time to get living. He was sane and well and fortunate. What he’d been doing was an insult to himself, and it wasn’t fair to the people who cared about him, including Nick. Then the penny dropped. He remembered what he’d been doing when he was stupid enough to walk in front of a cab—sending Nick a second text on the heels of the first…after getting drunk and high and blown in the back of some seedy strip club.
Shit. Oh shit. Oh fuck. He had to go. He had to go now.
“Mr. Welles.” The nurse tossed her clipboard on the bed. “Let’s make sure you’re seeing straight, and then I’m going to release you.”
“I was about to break out of here,” Holly said honestly. “I have to apologize to someone. A lot.”
She looked him over and snorted softly, shaking her head. “You look like a man who needs to apologize.”
Holly racked his brain to remember what he’d sent Nick. “You have no idea.” I have no idea.
Please, let it not be something I can’t fix.
***
Nick left Caroline at home with the excuse he needed to check on some notes for a story he’d left at work. When he got to Hell’s Kitchen, to Holly’s apartment, the sky was warming with shades of red, orange and pink.
Rosy-fingered Dawn. Nick felt like he’d just escaped the Lotus-Eaters, like he was finally coming home. Was he ready for what he’d find? Odysseus hadn’t been. Nick fit the key into the lock and took a deep breath. One hand on his phone, ready to call an ambulance, he pushed the door open.
The apartment was quiet, the silence pressing on him like a weight. He rushed in, past the empty love seat and the empty kitchen and the empty bed, and charged into the tiny bathroom to find that empty too. No pale, bleeding body in the tub, no corpse sprawled across the tile. Nothing.
The emptiness, the silence, was worse than finding Holly a broken, bloody mess. Holly could be anywhere, alone and dying, and there wasn’t anything Nick could do about it. His gut clenched, twisted, and he dropped to his knees to retch into the toilet, emptying his stomach of all the food he’d eaten at that damned party while Holly had been off somewhere breaking down and falling apart.
When there was nothing left in him but dry heaves and tears, Nick stumbled out to sit on the bed. He put his head in his hands and tried to breathe, tried to think, but he had no idea where to go or what to do.
He sat there until he thought he’d frozen or gone mad. Maybe he should call the hospitals. Maybe he should call the police. Maybe he should call the morgue. His stomach heaved again. But then there was a muttered curse and the rattle of the doorknob.
Nick’s heart caught in his throat, and he was halfway across the room before the door opened.
“Fucking…can’t remember to even lock the fucking door,” Holly muttered.
He looked like shit. He looked worse than shit. The left side of his face was scraped up, his hair was matted with God only knew what, his hands were bandaged and he was wearing an appalling, cheap gray tracksuit. He was carrying a brown paper bag until he saw Nick. Then he dropped it. The key went bouncing across the floor.
“I am so sorry,” Holly blurted out.
The anger surged and receded in the space of a breath as the details of Holly’s appearance were cataloged in the back of Nick’s mind. Nick just had to…He crowded Holly against the door, his hands hovering over Holly’s face, his hair, afraid to touch. “What the hell happened to you?”
“I walked in front of a cab.” Holly put an unsteady, gauze-wrapped hand on Nick’s chest. “I just…I fucked up. I was trying to text you. And I wasn’t looking. But it doesn’t matter. I am so sorry, Nick.”
Nick took a slow breath as realization hit. “Your message got through,” he said, forcing himself to meet Holly’s eyes. “Holly…You’ve got to stop. You have to…You can’t keep doing this to yourself.” Holly had been hit by a car. He could’ve—“You could’ve died.”
“I know, I do.” Holly brought his other hand up to touch Nick’s cheek, a brush of cold fingers. “You don’t have to believe me. I don’t even know what I said. Whatever it was, I’m sorry. You don’t deserve any of this.”
“You said you were sorry. You…Christ, it sounded like you were going to kill yourself.” Fear rose again, bitter and acidic, at the back of his throat.
“No.” Holly looked horrified, and he took Nick’s face in his bandaged hands. “No. I would…I would not do that to you. If I did…not like that.” His voice broke like he was going to cry. “I hope I wouldn’t.”
Nick slid his fingers into Holly’s tangled hair and pulled him close. “What happened, Holly?”
“My mom got my phone number, and…I meant to go for a walk. I swear to God, I did.” Holly leaned his forehead on Nick’s shoulder. “I don’t know what happened.”
Goddamn Holly’s fucking family. Okay. Nick could deal with this. He could. He took a deep breath, then let go of Holly and stepped back.
“Go clean up, Holly.” Nick needed a minute alone to pull himself together.
Holly looked down at himself and then nodded. “Going,” he said quietly and picked up the bag, then headed toward the bathroom. He felt like he was barely keeping it together. “Oh, wait.” He dug around in the paper bag and came out with a small prescription bottle. “Here.” He held it out to Nick, the pills inside rattling. “A couple days’ worth of painkillers. Because I don’t have a doctor yet. I’ll find one.”
Nick took the bottle and nodded. He’d deal with them in a minute. “Okay. Anything else?”
“This, but it’s not really important.” Holly handed over some slightly crumpled folded papers. “I’m fine.”
Symptoms of Concussion and Instructions on Wound Care. Nick sighed. No, not important at all.
“I’ll take a look.” Nick had to step back, walk away, to keep from showing how his hands were shaking.
“It’s not like I haven’t had my bell rung enough times.” Holly took the bag with him, leaving Nick alone with the paperwork and the knot of fear still sitting in his gut.
Nick glanced at the papers in one hand, the pills in the other, and barely kept himself from throwing both against the wall. Fuck. He set them down, carefully, on the table next to the love seat and tried to remember how to relax.
After starting a pot of coffee, he shed his shoes, socks and jacket and put them away in the hall closet. It was so close to the way every evening had gone when he’d been staying here with Holly.
That thought, and the warmth that came with it, was cut short as Nick sat with his coffee and saw the pills and paperwork again. He had to read the instructions and symptom sheets twice before any of it sank in.
Holly came out, a towel around his waist. The white terry cloth was liberally smudged with red. The bandages were gone from his hands, and with his hair slicked back with water, stitches were visible, leading from his temple into his hairline. The bruise around his eye socket was swelling. There was another set of stitches on the underside of his left elbow. A garden of black-and-purple bruises blossomed on his right leg. His clothes must have been ruined.
/> Holly didn’t look at Nick as he limped into the kitchen. Blood and water dribbled down his left leg from his torn-up knee; walking was making it worse. He grabbed a handful of paper towels and mopped off his leg.
“Do you have bandages?” Nick wasn’t going to help unless he had to. Holly needed to learn to follow directions.
“In the bag. I stopped at an all-night place on the way home. Didn’t want to make a mess.” Holly snorted softly. “Too little, too late.”
“Finish cleaning up, then get yourself something to eat.” Nick picked up his coffee and the paperwork from the hospital again, making sure Holly wasn’t going to do more damage.
There was quiet and then a very subdued “yes, Nick” from Holly’s side of the room. It took Holly about ten minutes to get himself patched up and into a pair of boxers, but then he came over with a couple of large bandages in hand. “I can’t get it right. The elbow…” Holly turned his left arm to show Nick the spot that was too hard to reach, a gash about an inch and a half long, held together with a dozen neat stitches. “Please?” He held out the bandages.
Nick put his coffee down again, then took one of the bandages and gestured for Holly to come closer. “Hold out your arm.” His gut twisted again as he looked at the stitches. It could’ve been worse. So much worse. He carefully smoothed the bandage into place. “Are there others you need help with?”
“Just there. Thanks.” Eyes down, Holly picked up the bits of wrapping and took them to the trash can under the sink. He reached for a mug, then stopped. “May I have some coffee?”
“No.” Nick was surprised Holly had thought to ask. Surprised but glad. That was the way things needed to happen. He picked up his own coffee and took a sip. He’d deal with laying down new rules later. “Just eat and go to bed.”
“Yes, Nick.” There wasn’t any sarcasm in it. Nick could hardly hear the words, but he could read them in Holly’s body language. There was real satisfaction in Holly obeying him so readily. It was the sort of pleasure Nick never wanted to acknowledge, but it was there.
Holly made a sandwich and poured a glass of chocolate milk. He ate like a child—bread, meat and a cheese slice—but he ate it all and polished off the milk, standing at the counter.
The dishes went into the sink, and then Holly padded off to the bathroom. The water ran as he brushed his teeth. Through it all, there wasn’t a single comment, a single joke or even a single resentful glance. When he came out, he crawled straight into bed without comment and curled up under the covers, facing the wall, hugging a pillow to his chest. His shoulders were visible above the covers, almost humming with tension.
Nick watched for a while, but the tension didn’t fade. The orange-brown of the pill bottle caught his attention out of the corner of his eye, and Nick picked it up. He shook out the pills and counted them—twelve, three days’ worth, just like the label said. Holly hadn’t taken any.
Glancing at Holly again, taking in the tight lines of his body, Nick ran a glass of water in the kitchen, then carried it and one dose of the painkillers over to the bed.
“Holly. Can you sit up enough to drink this?”
Holly’s breath caught and he swallowed, then nodded. When he moved, he was so slow, biting his lip against the pain. His lashes were damp, his cheeks flushed.
“Thank you,” he said quietly, holding one scraped hand out for the pill and the other for the glass.
Nick didn’t hand them over. This, he could do for Holly. He wanted to, wanted to take away the pain. He wished he could do more than the medication would manage. He set the capsule against Holly’s lips and waited for Holly to open up for him.
Holly opened his mouth obediently, looking up this time with bloodshot eyes. He let Nick give him the medicine, then the water.
God, he looked like shit. Nick wasn’t going to think about it anymore, though, not right now. He put the glass away in the kitchen, then came back to sit on the edge of the bed.
“You might have an easier time getting to sleep now.”
Holly was staring at the ceiling, battered hands leaving smudges on the covers where he clutched them to his chest.
“I’ll try.” He was breathing slowly, like it hurt. “Hurts worse than…Remember that time I broke my arm snowboarding?”
Nick had found out about it secondhand since he’d declined to spend a weekend with twenty drunken freshmen packed in a cabin meant for eight, but it was the first time he’d really grasped what a hazard Holly could be to himself.
“I swear I thought I could pick up enough speed on the roof to clear those trees. I did the math. I think I used the wrong wax on the snowboard.”
“You got hit by a car,” Nick reminded him. “And apparently you were drunk and high enough that it seemed like a good idea to walk in front if it.” Goddamn it. That was what the rules had been for, to stop Holly from getting himself killed like that. “I’m not surprised it hurts.” Nick sighed and gave in enough to stretch out on the bed, then touched an unbruised spot on Holly’s hip. “Get some rest, Holly. We’ll talk after you’ve had some sleep.”
Holly turned toward him and brushed the back of a hand across Nick’s cheek. “Either you have no damn idea what’s best for you, Nick, or you’re as good as I am at avoiding it.”
Nick knew what was best for him. He did. It just never seemed to matter, when the other option was Holly. “Do you want me to change my mind and leave?” he challenged, but before Holly could answer, he sighed and said, “Shut up and go to sleep, Holly. If not for your sake, then for mine. I’ve been up since five—yesterday.”
Holly’s deep blue eyes were filled with regret. He looked like he’d aged a decade overnight. “I’ll sleep.” Turning away again, he closed his eyes, and his body slowly relaxed into sleep.
Nick only meant to touch Holly, to be sure he was still breathing, but he ended up sliding closer, curling around Holly’s body like a wall between him and the rest of the world. If Nick couldn’t protect him any other way…
Holly’s body curved back into his until Nick could feel how thin he was instead of just seeing it. He could feel him breathing too, could smell the tang of blood on his skin. Holly inhaled deeply, and his breath caught. Then he sighed heavily in his sleep.
Petting gently, so he wouldn’t hurt him, Nick tried to soothe Holly into a deeper sleep. Holly needed the rest. Nick needed the rest too, but it wasn’t likely to come when he was so twisted up inside. He mulled over his options, ways to prevent a repeat of tonight’s chaos, and dozed here and there as he put the pieces together in his mind.
***
The pain that woke Holly brought his foolishness into perfect focus before he’d even opened his eyes, but it was nothing next to the stab of clarity through his head. He felt like he’d seen his life from the outside for just long enough that he couldn’t deny what he was doing anymore. Driving himself crazy for fear of being crazy. Losing himself because he’d felt lost for so long.
The one good choice he’d made, it seemed, was Nick. But it hadn’t been a good choice for Nick. Holly had to do what was best for both of them. He took a breath and opened his eyes.
The sunlight angled against the white wall said it was already afternoon. Holly inhaled again; it was hard to breathe, like there was a weight on him. Panic welled, but then his hand touched another, warm and limp. Someone’s arm was thrown over his side. Oh fuck, what had he done? Last thing he remembered, Nick had told him to sleep…
“Go back to sleep.”
Nick. Holly was in so much pain, he couldn’t have done anything stupid with Nick. Nick wouldn’t have done anything stupid with him. That was good. Holly’s breath was still coming shallow and fast, though.
“I thought I fucked up again,” he mumbled. It felt like his whole face had gone bony and resistant overnight.
“No.” Nick pulled his arm back, and the bed shifted as he rolled away. The soft pat-pat sound was Nick’s bare feet hitting the floor, and with another shift, Nick was gone. “You slept
.” There was the familiar noise of pills rattling, water running, and then Nick was back. “Can you sit up? It’s time for your next dose.”
Now Holly was really sorry he’d woken up. If he’d remembered it was Nick, he’d have lain there and enjoyed it longer, feeling safe.
“I’ll try.” Trying was less successful than he’d anticipated. Holly couldn’t help his whimper or the tears that came to his eyes. But he managed to get up enough that when he fell back, his head hitting the wall with a dull thud, he was partly upright. “Okay, done.”
Nick sat beside him and, like before, pressed the pill against his lips and then offered him a sip of water to wash it down.
“You should lie back down. Let it work before you try to get up.” Nick didn’t seem inclined to stay there with him, though. He crossed the room to put the glass back in the kitchen, then headed for the love seat.
“Nick, I am so sorry.” He almost regretted he was going to be in less pain in a few minutes. Hurting was fair punishment. So was leaving so Nick could get his life back. “I can go. As soon as I can get my dad to send me some money. I’ll pay you back too. I never meant for this to happen…I mean, not the part that involves you.” Driving himself into the ground, yes, he’d meant that to happen. Not anymore, though. It was time to stop hurting himself. “I’ll be okay. I promise.”
Nick rounded on him, stalked back over to the bed. His face was stony, but his eyes were hot.
“You aren’t going anywhere, damn it. You aren’t setting one fucking toe out of this place without permission, not anymore. And you’re going to wear a fucking GPS tracker from now on, because I am never going to sit here again and wonder where the hell you are and which fucking hospital or morgue I should start with.”
“Okay.” Holly felt warmed through and then felt guilty about it, seeing how much he’d hurt Nick. “You’re right. Anything you want.” Saying it brought a rush of giddy relief that was better than the drug that had yet to kick in.
“Good.” Something flickered over Nick’s face—relief? pleasure? satisfaction?—and he nodded. His voice was quieter, but no less firm when he added, “You’re going to text me before and after all contact with your mother too, so I know if there’s a problem.”