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“Piper, I don’t want to talk about it.” He laid out each word with such precision, I might as well have been speaking to a lawyer. “I really don’t. Let’s just forget it, okay? We can just get coffee.”
But I was too hungover to let it go. And maybe I wasn’t completely sober.
“Your accident—” I blurted out, drawing in a sharp breath.
“Piper.”
“Your dad did that to you. You were just a—a kid—”
When I’m angry, I cry, and tears threatened to spill over. It was hard to keep myself together. To push past the waterworks. But just imagining gangly, teenage Adam—slamming his bone back into place to please his father was too much.
For the first time ever, I wanted to physically hurt someone. I wanted to track his dad down and hurt him. At the bare minimum, I wanted to give Adam’s parents a piece of my mind and tell them they weren’t allowed to do that to him ever again. They weren’t allowed near him. I’d make sure of it.
“Piper.” Adam ushered me to the corner. “This is why I don’t tell anybody - this is why I didn’t tell you. I don’t want your pity.”
“It’s not—”
It is pity.
“I mean—I just—I’m so sorry—”
“I don’t need your apologies,” he said in a curt tone, recoiling back from me. “Fuck. This isn’t…just drop it. Pretend like I didn’t ruin this.”
“You didn’t ruin anything.” I wanted to touch his arm, but he wouldn’t let me. “I’m so—”
“Stop.”
“I’m just sorry—”
A breathless laugh escaped him. “Why do you give a shit?”
He was shutting down right before my eyes, and everything I was doing was making it worse. This was outside of my expertise. I had no experience with anything like this. I hadn’t even known someone who had something like this happen to them. He asked me to stop but the alcohol didn’t burn out of my system yet.
“Because…because you’re in this—this rut of pushing people away—” I tried to explain and cringed on the inside. “You’re messed up because of this and—no. Adam. Wait.” I had to get control of my own rambling. “It makes sense. It’s why you’re—you’re like this.”
“Like this?” Adam repeated, his voice dead.
“No, I—because we’re friends, Adam.”
He didn’t move a muscle. “Who said I wanted to be your friend?”
Oh.
Nothing anyone had ever said had hit me so hard. Not even the stories about what Thomas had been up to at the bleacher bunny party. The breath left my body, and I watched Adam, stunned, as he typed something into his phone and held it out.
“I changed the number on the account. I’ll get the calls from the desk assistant,” he said, purposely looking away. “You don’t have to worry about the end of the shift. I’ll clock you out on the spreadsheet.”
“Adam—I—I—”
“I’ll see you later, Piper.”
No ice princess. No grin. Just a simple goodbye before he turned back around. With long steps, he headed off towards the elevator bank and I couldn’t move from my spot.
How could I do that to him?
He didn’t even stop. He pushed open the door to the stairwell.
We weren’t on a low floor. It’d take him so long to get back to where we were. He just didn’t want to see me.
