Wicked Need (The Wicked Horse Series Book 3)(55)

“It’s fine,” she reassures me with an understanding smile. “I hope she’s okay.”

“Me too.” I absolutely hate leaving Cat right now, especially on the heels of her revealing the terribly low opinion she has of herself. She needs affirmation of her strengths, not to have me abandon her. But shit… it’s not like I can’t not go to the hospital. If anything happened to Tarryn and I didn’t go, I’d never forgive myself for being so callous.

So I have to go.

Another kiss, this time on Cat’s lips, and I leave the Snake River Brewery.

The drive to St. John’s takes no more than fifteen minutes as it sits only about ten blocks east and I manage to catch almost every green light. It’s a small medical facility but given the amount of ski injuries in this area, they’ve got an excellent trauma unit.

It takes no time at all to park and make my way back to the surgical suite that the front receptionist directs me to. A nurse greets me at the door and leads me back to a curtained room where I find Tarryn. My eyes quickly roam over her, taking in pale skin but no other outward signs of injury other than an elevated leg wrapped in a temporary splint and bandages.

“What happened?” I ask as I walk up to the side of the bed opposite the IV pole that she’s hooked to.

“Stupid really,” she says as she reaches a hand toward mine. I take it and give a supportive squeeze. “I was stepping off the sidewalk, crossing right there at Cache and Pearl, and I just stepped down wrong. Ankle buckled and snapped.”

“You’re kidding?” I say in disbelief that something so simple could cause a break that needs surgery. Rotten f*cking luck.

“I knew I could count on you to come,” she says as she looks up at me with an adoring smile as the nurse walks into the cubicle room and hangs something else up on the IV stand.

“How soon before she goes back?” I ask the nurse.

“It won’t be tonight. Probably first thing in the morning, around six or so,” the nurse says briskly. “They want to make sure all the alcohol is out of her system, and the X-rays show the break is fairly clean and stable.”

“I was out with Laney and Gayle for some cocktails,” Tarryn says with a laugh. “You know how it goes.”

“Did that have anything to do with why you fell?” I ask.

She shrugs and moves a thumb over the top of my hand to stroke it. “I don’t know. I doubt it. I really just stepped down wrong off the curb.”

The nurse writes something in her chart and then walks out of the curtained area. I pull my hand from Tarryn’s and try to ignore the hurt look on your face. “Why did you have them call me?”

“Well, because I’m having surgery. Who else would I call?” she responds seriously, as if this was the most common sense thing in the world. Despite the fact we’ve been broken up for four years.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I say sarcastically. “How about your roommate and best friend Laney? Or your next best friend Gayle? You know, the girls who were with you when this happened and who you spend almost every day with.”

Tarryn still doesn’t get it. She waves an impatient hand at me. “Laney will be back. She was going to go handle a few things first, pack me a bag and stuff. She’ll be back later. But I knew you’d want to be here too.”

Taking a deep breath as the anger rises, I try to remember that she’s lying in a hospital bed with a broken ankle and facing surgery. I try to retain a measure of sympathy, but I still can’t help it when I say, “Tarryn… I don’t want to be here. We are not together. There shouldn’t be any expectation on your part that I would be here. Now, while I care for you because of things we’ve shared in the past, we don’t have anything past a casual friendship. And when you do stuff like this, you’re making it harder on me to want to even maintain that.”

She blinks at me several times, eyes wide with surprise. As if this is the first time she’s heard this line from me. But it’s not. It’s just the first time she’s heard it while lying in a hospital with a broken ankle and facing surgery. The other time was when she got a flat tire and called me to change it. Or when she got drunk on her birthday and called me at midnight to come out and celebrate with her. Or let’s not forget the time she found mouse droppings under her sink and called me to come over and set traps.

“Tarryn,” I say gently as I squat beside the bed and put my hand on her shoulder. “It is over with us. Totally over, and I think to make the boundaries clearer, I really need you to just stop reaching out to me.”

“No communication whatsoever?” she whispers after a hard swallow.

I don’t want to hurt her, but I still say it anyway. “None. I’ll stay here with you until Laney gets here, but then that’s it, Tarryn.”

“I don’t understand how you couldn’t want to continue our friendship,” she says in a small voice.

“Because you want more than that,” I tell her simply. “Despite you just calling it a friendship, you want more.”

“And you don’t?” she asks with her head tilted. “Not ever?”

How can she keep such hope alive? Maybe because I still did stupid shit like change her tire or set her mousetraps, although I didn’t go celebrate her birthday with her. I was pissed she woke me up on a work night. Still, I’m just as much at fault because I would usually drop what I was doing to help her out when she called. I was a sap that way. While I’d always make it clear to her I was doing these things out of friendship, I can see why she’d have continued hope. It’s because I was still always there for her.