Jason cried in the other room.
I picked my head up from my pillow and ambled down the hallway. He was sitting up on the couch, looking around, confused, as if he wasn’t quite sure why he’d taken a nap. I felt grateful that he had.
That conversation with David had been…awful.
I definitely had not wanted Jason awake for that. Or for all the tears I’d had. One horrible conversation had probably been enough for a day, but I’d gone and fucked it up with the second.
Jesus, am I purposely forcing everyone out of my life at this point?
How had everything spiraled so far out of my control?
David and I had been happy. He’d said that. It was true. We had been happy.
Happiness felt like trying to hold on to sand. All you did was watch it slip through your fingers.
“Morning, sleepyhead,” I said, hugging Jason tight to me. “Did you have a good nap?”
“Yep,” he muttered.
“Good. Ready for some dinner?”
He nodded. I took his hand, and we both walked into the kitchen. I hadn’t touched the pizza David had brought over and was now kicking myself. I didn’t want to bother in the kitchen, but I knew that cooking something would Zen me out a bit. Let my brain slow down enough to process everything that had just happened.
I went for something simple since I didn’t have a lot of energy.
“Breakfast for dinner it is,” I told Jason as I cracked a few eggs, pulled out the toast, and started to fry the bacon. I thought about making some brownies later. Baking always did the trick, and I couldn’t wait until I went into work tomorrow morning.
The eggs were on the stove when I heard my phone going off in the other room. Jason had pulled all the pots and pans out of the bottom cabinets, and he was banging them together. He’d be occupied with that for probably twenty full seconds at least.
I dashed into the room and grabbed my phone. I saw Morgan was calling. Just great. David must have spoken to her after he left. The last thing I wanted was to deal with her right now, but I wasn’t the kind of person to ignore her call.
I sighed dramatically and then answered, “Hey, if you’re going to try to talk to me about David, now is not the time.”
“Sutton, oh my God, thank God you answered.”
The panic in her voice was unmistakable. I’d never heard Morgan sound that scared before. Immediately, my heart started racing, and my throat closed up.
“What’s going on? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. It’s David,” she gasped. She sounded like she was crying. Morgan was crying. “We were on the phone, and he got into a car accident. Someone found the phone and called me back because I was his last contact. He’s being taken into the Medical Center.”
The phone nearly slipped through my fingers.
Stark terror raced through me.
Panic and desperation and fear. Straight fear.
A black hole had opened up around me and swallowed me whole.
The hospital. He’d been…taken to the hospital.
No. No, no, no. Goddamn it, no!
I wouldn’t go back to that place. I wouldn’t be there to see another person I loved die. Another person just gone. It wasn’t possible.
There was ringing in my ears. The outside world vanished, and just emptiness filled my body. I might throw up, but all I did was stand there in horror.
This couldn’t be happening.
This couldn’t be happening…again.
How is this my life?
“Sutton! Sutton, are you there?” Morgan called into the phone. “Sutton, please, answer me. I’m on my way to the hospital. Do you need me to come get you?”
That last part snapped me out of the spiral I had been falling down.
“No,” I whispered, my voice suddenly hoarse. “I’ll meet you there. I have to bring Jason.”
“Okay. You’re sure you can drive?”
“Yeah,” I lied.
I wasn’t entirely sure I could drive. Or function as a human being for that matter.
All I remembered was Annie racing toward me on the Fourth of July, calling out to me to let me know that Maverick had collapsed. Then, the mad dash to the hospital. I hadn’t even known then what was going on. I had just been nervous. It’d made no sense that he’d collapsed. He had been perfectly healthy. He had been a marathoner, for Christ’s sake. He must have been dehydrated or something. But I couldn’t figure out why he’d go to the hospital for that.
But, by the time I had gotten to the hospital, it was too late. Heart failure. No one could have seen it coming.
He was gone.
Gone as if he had left for the afternoon and would be back for dinner.
Except he wasn’t ever coming back. And I’d had a one-year-old in my arms with not a clue as to what to do with my life.
Just numb and shocked.
Death.
A word I’d heard too much in my short life. A word I’d never come back from. A word that had dismantled my existence and left me hanging in the balance.
Thank God for that toddler in my arms. I wasn’t sure how I would have gone on without him.
And, now, I needed to bundle him up and rush him to another hospital and pray that we could get me through this, too.
We made it to the hospital fifteen minutes later. Jason was not happy about missing out on his dinner, but I packed him some snacks and hoped for the best. Even as I feared the worst.
The last time I’d walked through these doors, I’d assumed it was nothing. I couldn’t have that mindset this time. My life didn’t account for happy endings anymore.
My stomach twisted as Jason and I followed the nurse’s instructions to David’s room. By the time I got there, I thought I was going to hyperventilate. I could barely control my breathing and get it together. But I knew I needed to—at least for Jason’s sake.
Before I could even knock on the door, Morgan thrust it open. “Oh my God, I was about to call you.”
“Yeah, we just got here,” I said.
“Hey, Jason!”
He waved at his aunt Morgan, and a grin broke through her tough exterior. Then, she looked back at me, and it slipped away. I wanted to ask how David was, but the words wouldn’t leave my lips. All I could do was stand there and wait…and pray.
“Why don’t you go on in? I’ll stay here with Jason. We’ll go get ice cream downstairs. How does that sound?”
“Yes!” Jason cried in excitement.
“Thanks,” I muttered.
“Anytime.”
My hands were shaking when I pushed the door open and entered the hospital room. My nerves were frayed. I was barely holding on. I didn’t know how I was going to do this. How I was going to talk to him. I felt like I was holding on by a thread, and that thread was unraveling.
David was seated on the bed. Not in it, but on it. His arm was bandaged, and he had a pretty wicked bruise forming on his neck and up his cheek where it looked like an airbag had gotten him.
“Hey,” I whispered, taking another step into the room.
“Sutton.” He glanced up from where he’d been staring at his phone. “I didn’t expect you to show up.”
“Of course I’d show up.”
“I know how you feel about hospitals.”
I tried to still my shaking hands, but it wasn’t working. The hospital room. The sanitary smell. The white lights. Everything made me nauseated. I hadn’t been in one in over a year. And the last one…the last one had wrecked me.
“Do you?” I murmured.
“Yes,” he said calmly.
I nodded. There was nothing else to say to that. David always seemed to know more about me than he let on.
“How are you?”
“I’ve been better.” He tried to turn his neck and winced. “Doctor says I have a mild concussion, a serious case of whiplash, and that I’m going to be sore in my neck, back, and ribs for a while. Some glass from the windshield embedded in my arm. They had to take it out—hence the bandage. Airbag rash on my arms and face, but otherwise, I’m fine.”
“Otherwise,” I said with a tight laugh. It was really more of a grimace than anything. “What happened exactly?”
He shook his head and seemed to immediately regret it. “I was an idiot. The college kid who hit me was an idiot. It was raining. I was driving too fast. I sped through a yellow light, and oncoming traffic tried to turn in front of me, skidding through one of those stupid Lubbock puddles. Hit my Ferrari with his truck hard enough to shatter my windshield, the side window, and deploy both airbags. My car spun in a circle and hit another car before coming to a stop.”
I could see it all like watching a movie. The rain pouring down. The college kid not paying attention. David driving in anger, trying to get as far away from my house as possible.
“But I’m fine,” he repeated.
“Fine,” I whispered.
Fine.
He’d said he was fine.
He was sitting in a hospital bed because of an argument with me. He was here, in a place I could barely stand in, with a concussion, bruises, and so much pain that he couldn’t turn his neck. But he was fine. Sure.
“I’ll probably get discharged when the doctor shows up. Do you want to stick around?”
“I…” I steadied myself on the hospital table as my brain spun.
I hadn’t thought about what to say in this moment. What to do about where we had left things. I’d thrown all my shit in a bag, grabbed Jason, and disappeared. Now, I was here. Standing here with him, and it all seemed so impossible.
Like all my walls were breaking down.
Because I had stopped for a total of one second before dashing over here. No matter that we had been on rocky terms. No matter that he’d stormed out of my house. All that had flown out the window when I heard he was hurt. I’d rushed to the hospital just as fast as I had for Maverick. The same fears had hit me fresh. It was no different. And yet…utterly, incomprehensibly different.
The worst part of it all was the realization that I was all in.
He’d asked me if I was.
And, if anything, this had proven it to me like nothing else could.
I was in love with him.
Unequivocally.
Undeniably.
One hundred ten percent.
And I wanted this so much that my heart hurt. It physically ached from the need. From the desire to make this right.
And, at the same time, with perfect clarity, I knew I couldn’t do this.
Not because of David.
But because of me.
Seeing him here, no matter whether he was dying or not, just brought all those horrible memories to the surface. All of that pain. It seemed contradictory to both feel like I couldn’t lose David and to know that I had to. That I’d already lost Maverick like this. I couldn’t handle losing David, too. I remembered what it was like to watch someone I loved with my whole heart die. And it wasn’t Linda or Austin guiding my emotions. It wasn’t just fear clogging my reactions.
It was that I couldn’t face the truth.
I wasn’t okay. This was too soon. And I wasn’t over Maverick’s death.
I wasn’t over any of it.
“Sutton?” David asked. He waved a hand at me. “What’s going on up there?”
“I can’t do this,” I finally said. “It’s not…fair to you.”
“Sutton, please…”
“We should break up.”
David’s jaw went slack. “You’re not serious.”
“I’ve been lying to myself. This isn’t about anyone else. I’ve been telling myself it’s not too soon. I’ve been saying that I’m ready. I want to be with you, but you’re only getting half of me. And I feel split in two because of it.”
“No, no, no,” he said. “We can fix this. We can work on this together.”
I took a step back. “No, we can’t. You can’t fix what’s already broken.”
David was about to open his mouth again, but right then, the doctor walked in. “All right, David Calloway, let me take a look at your file here.”
“I’ll…talk to you later.”
“Sutton, wait.”
But I didn’t wait. I hurried past the startled doctor and out into the hallway. I knew I’d done the right thing, but somehow…I felt even worse.