Nik was seriously rethinking this whole coming home thing, and he dug his heels in as Rae urged him towards the white door before him. The hallway smelled of cleaning products and sick people, sterile and cold.
“No,” he said, stepping back from the door. “No, I can’t.”
He couldn’t go in there. Going in there would mean he forgave her, and he wasn’t ready to do that. He didn’t think he could ever do that.
Rae tilted her head to the side. She looked a little better today, but maybe it was just the makeup she’d thrown on before herding him out the door and onto the subway. Even after two years away, falling into the routine of New York was easy.
“Yes, you can,” she said confidently. “This is why you came.”
“I came for you,” Nik corrected her, swallowing down the lump rising in his throat as he stared at the door. She was in there, dying.
“And you can do this for me, right?”
Nik took another step backward, bumping into a cart in the hallway. It rattled, and he jumped. He shook his head.
“I don’t think I can.”
“Nik,” she said, reaching for his arm, but he jerked it out of her way.
“No, I — ” He huffed out a breath, curling his hands into fists to stop the shaking. He wasn’t strong enough to walk in there, to see his mom, to watch her die. “I can’t. Don’t you get it? This is why I left.”
Rae frowned and reached for him again. He let her this time and she led him over to a chair and sat down beside him. “I thought you left because of Andre.”
Nik rubbed his legs, willing his heart to stop beating so fast. He hated feeling like this, like he wasn’t in control of his own body. He didn’t meet Rae’s eyes, chewing on his bottom lip.
“That was part of it. But Andre, I mean, at least Andre was there. He might have been a giant asshole my whole life, but…” He swallowed around the lump again. It wasn’t getting any smaller. “At least he didn’t abandon us.”
Nik remembered being six years old, waiting for his mom to pick him up from school, waiting two hours after until Andre finally showed up and dragged him home. He was ten, and on his birthday, Rae was the only one who remembered. His mom stumbled into the apartment after midnight and spilled a bottle of beer on the couch where he’d been trying to wait up for her. He was sixteen and he found her passed out in front of the apartment. She hadn’t remembered the next morning.
“It wasn’t her fault,” Rae said quietly, but Nik shook his head, blinking back the tears forming.
“No, it was my fault. That’s what everyone always said. If I hadn’t come along, Dad would still be here. They’d be a happy family.”
“That’s not true,” Rae said, and he heard the quiver in her voice. He determinedly didn’t look at her, knowing it would only make it worse, the tight feeling in his chest. “They weren’t happy before we were born. Dan told me they used to fight all the time. When she got pregnant — I don’t know, it was just the last straw.”
It didn’t make Nik feel better, and he glanced at the door. He wasn’t ready.
“I can’t go in there,” he said. “I can’t.”
Rae sighed, quietly, and her hand slipped from his arm. “Maybe tomorrow.”
Nik wasn’t so sure about that, but he could breathe again as he rose from the chair and headed for the exit. Maybe tomorrow everything would be better. Too bad his life didn’t work like that.
A missed call from Tiernan. Nik frowned at the reminder on his phone. That made three calls this week alone. Tiernan shouldn’t have had time to call him from the Olympics. He should have been training or finding some hot French guy to insult his parents with next.
Rae climbed onto the couch next to him, shoving a pile of laundry out of the way. She hadn’t said anything else about the hospital, about the way he’d refused to go in. Andre would have said Nik was being a rude little shit, but he always said that.
Instead of bringing it up again, Rae reached for the remote and turned on the TV. They only got basic channels, and she flipped through for a minute, passing daytime Soaps and infomercials. Nik wasn’t surprised when she settled on Olympic coverage. It was the best thing on, even if he didn’t want to watch it. Opening ceremonies weren’t until that night, but press coverage was in full-force. Flashes of the USA mens and womens’ gymnastic teams rolled by and suddenly, Tiernan appeared on the screen.
“That’s your guy, isn’t it?” Rae asked, but Nik was too busy staring at the screen. A flash of anger followed by sadness hit him as he took in Tiernan’s face, unchanged though his smile seemed a little too bright, as if he were forcing it.
“Tiernan,” the reporter, a pretty brunette girl with long straight hair, said, “you’re the top ranked swimmer in the United States. How would you put your chances at medaling in this year’s Games?”
Tiernan leaned in to her as though they were sharing some secret, as though there wasn’t a camera shoved in his face. “I don’t know about odds. I’m just going to do my best and hopefully it will get me where I need to be.”
He was charming, Nik would admit. Charming, and a liar. He scowled at the television and ignored Rae watching him instead of the interview.
The reporter laughed, tinkling like glass. “You’ve been getting a lot of press lately. I hope it hasn’t gone to your head?”
Tiernan’s smile fell slightly but he hitched it back up. “If anything, it’s brought me back down lately.”
Nik scoffed, rolling his eyes. Tiernan could charm a rock if he tried. He bet everyone in America was drooling over him right now.
“He’s pretty hot,” Rae said after a minute, watching Nik. Nik pulled his hoodie on tighter even though the humidity was through the roof. The air-conditioner blew feebly from the window. “Even you have to admit that.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered. “He’s hot. And an asshole.”
“What, he wasn’t nice to you? I mean, you were just an intern.”
“He was nice,” Nik said, frowning as the reporter asked about his diet and Tiernan laughed. “For a while.”
Rae turned from the TV to face him, nose scrunched up in that way it did when she suspected he wasn’t telling her everything.
“What’s going on? You’re being weird.”
This was it. Nik couldn’t keep it from her anymore. He’d wanted to tell her before, before the whole wedding fiasco, but then he hadn’t wanted to admit how fucked up everything had gotten. She’d think, well, she’d think he’d come back because of some stupid fight with a guy. A guy that didn’t even matter!
Now, though, she watched him through narrowed eyes, searching his face for the secrets he was hiding.
“There’s something I didn’t tell you,” he said, but he was interrupted as the door opened and Dan entered. He tossed his keys on the counter with a clatter and hardly noticed Nik as he breezed through the living room.
“Don’t rot your brain with all that TV shit,” he told Rae, grabbing a beer from the fridge and cracking it open. For a moment, he lingered in the kitchen, checking his phone and drinking his beer. Nik felt on edge, waiting for him to leave, to do something. He hadn’t really talked with Dan yet, but Dan didn’t seem to care. Dan had never really seemed to care what he did as long as he was out of the way. He always said he wasn’t supposed to be the big brother. “Shit,” Dan said to himself after a minute, taking a few gulps of beer quickly before grabbing his keys. The apartment door slammed shut behind him.
Ignoring was better than yelling, Nik had decided. If only Andre would do the same.
Rae turned back to Nik, expectant. Right. Tiernan.
“When I was in Arizona, Tiernan and I…”
“Tiernan and you?” Rae repeated curiously then her face lit up. “Wait, oh my God! You didn’t.” She was smiling, but Nik didn’t echo it. Instead, he got up and went to the fridge, yanking it open. There wasn’t much inside but a few beers, an old case of Coke, and some eggs. He grabbed a soda and turned to find Rae watching him eagerly from over the couch. “You so did.”
“Yeah, we so did,” Nik muttered, leaning against the counter. “And we so fucked it up too.”
“What happened?”
Sighing, Nik came back to the couch and set the soda on the coffee table unopened. “He fucked it up, okay? Not me.”
“I didn’t say you did,” she said, but Nik knew she’d been thinking it. Everyone always did.
He frowned. “I thought… I thought maybe it was real. Maybe he did actually like me, but he was using me.”
“For what?” She sounded skeptical, like Tiernan would be crazy to do that. Nik wasn’t so sure.
“I don’t know. To piss off his parents, his sister, to get back at them for not supporting him.”
Nik kept thinking of the wedding, the way Tiernan’s mother had looked at him, how she wouldn’t use his name, how she’d stormed away.
“It was fucking awful.”
Rae tilted her head to the side sympathetically. “That sucks. But I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!”
Nik slumped on the couch. He felt bad enough already. “I don’t know. I wanted to tell you. I just… didn’t. I didn’t want you to feel like I was bragging or, or that my life was so much better than yours. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Lots of things,” she assured him and he rolled his eyes. “But seriously, you could have told me. You’re my best friend.”
“Built-in,” Nik replied. “It just happened so fast. One minute, I was happy and then we were at his sister’s wedding and his parents were looking at me like I was dirt under their designer shoes.”
“He took you to a wedding?”
“So?” Nik didn’t see that it made any difference. It was a good a place as any to humiliate someone in front of friends and family.
“So you don’t just ask anyone to a wedding,” Rae pointed out, but Nik didn’t see where she was going with this.
“If you need a date, you do. He asked, like, two days before.”
“So he didn’t plan it, then.”
Nik frowned. “What are you saying?”
“Why would he take you to a wedding just to piss off his parents?”
“Because he’s an asshole.” Nik had come to that conclusion already. He’d as good as admitted it.
“But if he was planning it, don’t you think he would have asked before?” Her eyebrows went up as though he should have understood. He didn’t.
“No.” He frowned. The television had switched to diving coverage instead. “Why would you bring someone you know your parents will hate to a wedding, unless you want to piss them off?”
“Because he liked you,” she suggested. “Why else do you bring dates to weddings?”
“To get laid.” Nik had no idea. He didn’t go to weddings. This had been his first, and probably last. Nik glared as Rae opened her mouth again, probably to try to convince him that this had all been some big misunderstanding.
“Okay, sorry,” she said, changing tact. “You’re right. I don’t know him or what happened. You just seemed kind of sad.”
Nik huddled into the couch. He wasn’t sad. He was angry. Disappointed. Confused because he still liked Tiernan.
“Well, it’s over now and he can do whatever he wants with Parisian guys.” No doubt, he was out fucking as many as he could, now that he didn’t have to deal with Nik.
Rae was silent for a moment as the voiceover on TV talked about determination and spirit.
“Is that why you came home?” she asked after a minute, quiet, and Nik couldn’t bring himself to look at her.
“No,” he said, but when she didn’t reply, he sighed. “Maybe a little. I didn’t want to see him every day and just keep remembering. But Mom’s sick, and you’re here.”
Rae fixed him with that look, that look that Nik hated. It was the look she’d given him when he told her he was moving to Chicago, that he wasn’t coming home again. Somewhere between disappointed and annoyed.
“You’re running away again,” she said, so matter-of-factly, like it was something he did on a regular basis.
“What are you talking about?” He crossed his arms over his chest and sunk into the couch.
“You do this all the time, Nik,” she said, not being at all sympathetic, as he’d hoped she’d be. “You ran away to Chicago when things where bad with Andre. You ran away to Phoenix when Mom started getting worse. And now, you ran here, away from that guy. You always run away.”
Nik stared, indignant. “I do not.” He’d left because Andre was insufferable and he couldn’t live his life like that. He hadn’t come back because his mom didn’t deserve his forgiveness. He’d come home because Rae needed him. He wasn’t running away. “Don’t think you can trick me with your psychology crap.”
“It’s not psychology,” she said, annoyed. “It’s the truth.”
Nik didn’t appreciate the accusation. He’d done whatever he had to get out of here, and she accused him of running.
“I’m not saying you made the wrong choice,” she said in that forced calm voice she had. “You went to college and you almost escaped this family, but we’re still your family. I’m just saying that sometimes, you have a tendency to avoid things that are hard.”
“Avoidance is a religion in our family,” he said, but the weight had settled on his chest. Why did she always have to be right? It was all that reading she did. Where Nik had drowned himself in fantasy, she’d opted for the more practical route of the human psyche. He sighed. “Maybe I did run away from here, but I had to. You know I had to.”
“I know,” she agreed. “Sometimes it’s your only option. Staying in a bad situation never makes things better. What I’m trying to say is that maybe you didn’t come home for all the right reasons.”
Looking at her, Nik saw the doubt behind her eyes and the weight on his chest attempted to suffocate him. He was a terrible brother.
“I’m sorry, okay? I…” he said. “I want to be here; not for Andre or Mom or whoever else — for you. You’re the only one who ever really cared about me, and I should have been here for you, and I am now. I want to be now.”
For a moment, she didn’t reply, watching him. His heart throbbed in his chest, stomach twisting into knots. He’d been so stupid, so selfish. He hadn’t even come home for the right reasons, but he was going to make it up to her.
Rae shrugged finally. “I don’t care why you came home. I’m just glad you’re back.”
Nik said nothing and watched the camera swooping over Paris with an ache in his chest.