Sweet Nothing(37)

He put his hand against my chest and held me back. “Josh, stop. You’re going to regret this.”

I looked down and then glowered at him.

“You’re my friend, Daniel, but if you don’t take your hand off me, I’m going to break your f*cking fingers.”

Daniel sighed. “I can’t. You know I can’t. If you bust in there now, she’ll hate you for it.”

“You think I don’t know what you did?” I said through my teeth. “What you’re hoping you’ll get out of this?”

I stepped back. I could have easily overpowered him, but I was so gutted I couldn’t find it in me to follow through on my threats. Maybe what was really holding me back was what it would mean if I stopped her.

My face crumbled, and I rubbed the back of my neck. Maybe I was the selfish bastard Brooke had accused me of being.

“She needs me to be there for her,” I said.

“If you had been, she wouldn’t be here,” Daniel spat out.

In one movement, I shoved him against the wall. He tried to push me off him, but I didn’t budge.

A short, squat woman with chains hooked to her glasses touched me on the arm. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave if you can’t calm down.” Her slicked-back bun barely moved when she moved her head. Her matching blue scrubs had been ironed and starched, but the bags under her eyes told a long story of hard work and experience. She wasn’t going to allow any nonsense, and even if she did, I couldn’t make her day even harder. She was a nurse, just trying to do her job.

“Keep it down or you’ll be sent outside,” she said, her eyes focusing on my grip on Daniel. She would keep order, but I could see she was sympathetic to the guilt in my eyes. “Don’t make me call security.”

I released Daniel’s shirt and shoved him one last time, walking several steps away, breathing hard.

“I should have left earlier,” I said, pacing. “I wouldn’t have hit traffic.”

“It wouldn’t have made a difference, Josh. She made her decision.”

I thought back over the morning commute back to college after break. An accident on I-95 set me back a few hours. It was stupid, turning off my phone when she was two hours away, scared and pregnant.

“I didn’t get her voicemail until this morning,” I said.

Daniel stopped trying to pretend to comfort me. He was only there for one thing. He wanted to be the shoulder she cried on after she ended the only thing standing between them.

“We got in a fight,” I said.

“I know.”

“Of course you know,” I snapped. “You just loved it, didn’t you? Her crying to you about what a selfish jackass I am.”

He didn’t respond.

“I had to clear my head, Daniel. We don’t even know each other, and we had a baby on the way.”

Daniel barely listened, watching the door for signs of Brooke.

“I knew she was just scared. I knew she didn’t mean it, but I’m scared, too,” I said to no one. Daniel had turned his back to me. “I wasn’t sure if I could handle this. I was terrified something bad was going to happen … to her and the baby … because of me. Because of my past. I’m a f*cking tragedy magnet, you know that.”

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Daniel said, all pretenses vanished. “You ran because you were scared of something bad happening to them. Now Brooke is behind that door, doing something she swore she couldn’t do. You look away for a second, and someone dies. Just like Kayla.”

“Fuck you,” I said, sinking down on my haunches. I hung my head in my hands as I thought about the disastrous visit with my parents. I’d gone home to take a break from Brooke and the mess I’d created. Instead, Mom and Dad yelled at me for an entire evening. They’d said they didn’t blame me for what had happened to Kayla, but I could see it in my mother’s glassy eyes and smell it on her whiskey-laced breath. I’d managed to ruin everything for everyone who got close to me. I was f*cking cursed.

“I just need to see her,” I pleaded to the nurse.

She looked down at me, sad. “I’m sorry, I can’t allow that. Family only.” Her painful words were cut off by the door opening behind her.

I quickly pushed to my feet as Brooke came into view. Not so long ago, we had been strangers. The past two months had been a crash course of getting to know each other once she told me she was pregnant, and that the baby was mine.

Her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, her platinum hair mussed. Her russet irises fell on me, and she wrapped her arms around her waist.

“It’s done?” I asked, feeling the blood drain from my face.

Brooke nodded, a fresh sob racking her body. I wanted to wrap my arms around her, but it felt too familiar for two people who’d spent one drunken night together.

“I had to do it, Josh. I’m not ready to be a mom.”

I nodded, linking my fingers behind my neck and blowing out a long breath. There was a lot I wanted to say. I couldn’t understand how she could be so impulsive, why she didn’t wait for me to call her back so we could discuss it, but I wasn’t angry. We had both been so scared, and now I wasn’t sure how to feel. She’d made her choice, and neither of us could take it back.

I watched, helpless, as Brooke fell into Daniel’s arms. Daniel’s. He’d made sure it was him she ran to for comfort, and I stood there alone, feeling like I’d stepped into an intimate moment between them that I had no business interrupting. Perhaps I didn’t. Daniel had told me after I’d slept with Brooke that he’d been in love with her since high school. When I told him the news about the baby, he had gone to her and promised to stick around, no matter what I decided.