Page 116 of Before You Fell

“I kept thinking that if you didn’t wake up, I was done.” His voice cracks on the last word and he looks furious that it slipped out. “I would still have been breathing, yeah, but that’s not the same as living, is it? Not when nothing in my whole fucked-up life would have mattered if you weren’t in it.”

I stare at him because this is the most honest he has ever been in his entire fucking life and he looks as if every word costs him something.

“It took almost losing you for good to see how I fucking treated you,” he says. “And I hate it. I hate that I was so far up my own ass that it took you lying in a hospital bed for me to understand what I should have known while you were standing right in front of me.”

His hands shift again on the wheel. “I’m so fucking sorry, Wills. I know I was wrong and I realize that saying that now doesn’t fix what I did.”

He stares at the road with wet eyes and a jaw so tight it must ache.

The treatment center sign comes into view and Phoenix turns on the indicator before turning in.

The nerves in my stomach hit hard.

We follow the curve of the driveway and a large building sits behind a low brick wall and a line of trees, making it appear gentler than the word rehab has any right to. Pale stone and glass. A path leading toward double doors. Garden beds pretending this is all normal.

A woman and a man stand near the entrance. The woman holds a clipboard under her arm, waiting.

Phoenix pulls up near the entrance and kills the engine.

For a moment, neither of us moves.

“You don’t have to get out,” I say.

He gets out anyway and walks around to the backseat, pulling my bag free. I step out of the car and the woman near the entrance smiles gently. Phoenix hands my bag to the man who comes down the steps to take it.

For a moment, we stand looking at each other.

His hands hang at his sides. In all the years I have known Phoenix, I have never seen him like this, as if one wrong move might cost him the only thing he has left worth losing.

He glances at me, then at the waiting woman, then back at me.

“Can I hug you?” He asks, which is so unlike him. Phoenix has never asked permission to take up space in my life.

I nod and he steps closer.

The hug is tentative at first, which seems wrong because nothing about us has ever been careful. Then his arms close around me and my face presses against his chest.

The familiar smell of him almost makes my knees falter. The same stupid, dangerous combination that has been eroding my common sense since I was old enough to know better and dumb enough not to care.

I close my eyes.

His chin dips near my hair and his voice comes out low. “I wish I had done it differently, Wills.”

My fingers curl lightly into his shirt.

“I don’t want to lose you from my life,” he says.

The words go straight through me.

Phoenix’s hands fall away slowly and I raise my eyes towards him.

There are a hundred things I could say. A hundred sharper ones. A hundred softer ones. I could tell him I love him. I could tell him I hate him but that would be too easy and not even true enough to be useful.

So I give him the thing that scares me most.

“You don’t know how to stay, Phoenix,” I say. “You know how to want something until it gets too real and then run before anyone can ask you to be better.”

His face changes as the words hit him square in the chest.