Getting Over It: Sapphire Falls Book Six (30 page)

“Quit looking at me like that,” Bryan said, lifting his left foot up onto the wheelchair footrest with his hands. His leg muscles and control were improving, but he still couldn’t lift his leg enough to get it onto the chair or into bed.

Ty scowled at him. “Like what?”

“Like you’re about to hug me. Or puke,” Bryan said.

“I’m not about to do either thing.” Though his stomach was definitely in knots. “You want a hug from me you’re gonna have to do more than roll down a hill.”

Bryan gave him a grin. “Fuck you. That
mountain
tried to take me down, but it never had a chance.”

Ty forced a smile past the holy-shit-he-could-have-died thought that hit him at random moments.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re a big tough guy,” Ty said.

Bantering with Bryan had always come easily. The first time they’d met, they’d been five. Ty had been talking to Tessa Sheridan, a girl who would become one of his favorite classmates and, recently, Hailey’s assistant.

Bryan had walked up to them both, told Tessa he liked her hair and asked Ty to be his best friend. Ty had asked if Bryan could ride a dirt bike, Bryan had said yes. Bryan had asked if Ty had a skateboard, Ty had said yes. They’d been best friends ever since.

And when they’d been in high school, Bryan had admitted that if Ty hadn’t been with Tess, Bryan probably would have decided to be best friends with Marc Larson. Marc had a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle backpack. Thankfully, he’d liked Tess more than the turtles.

They’d hung out all through high school and college. The first time they’d been apart had been when Ty had moved to Denver.

And then, a month later, Bryan had walked up to Ty at a race, looked him up and down and said, “Not every guy is comfortable wearing pink.”

It had been a marathon for breast cancer awareness and research and everyone had been wearing pink T-shirts.

“Everyone’s got one,” Ty had told him, hiding his surprise and pleasure at seeing his friend.

“Yeah. I’m just saying not everyone is comfortable in them. You, on the other hand, look like you’re made for wearing pink.”

“It’s not the T-shirt that’s important. It’s what you do in it,” Ty had said, putting as much cockiness into his tone as he could.

The truth was, he’d been nervous about the race. He couldn’t explain it. It had been his first race after college. It had been his first race against the next level of competitive marathoners. It had been his first race in Denver. He hadn’t known what all had been going on, but he’d been wound tight.

Seeing his friend and trading insults as if it was any other day had taken his mind off the race and relaxed him. He’d set a personal best that day.

Bryan was kind of like the clown in the rodeo of Ty’s life. He made Ty laugh, made him not take everything so seriously, he diverted and diffused a lot of the pressure around Ty and had, in Ty’s opinion, kept Ty competitive for so long. He would have burned out a long time ago without Bryan there.

Now Ty was feeling the pressure building. Bryan couldn’t do his thing for Ty because he had a lot of his own stuff going on. The pressure wasn’t about racing now, though. It was about bigger issues, life-altering issues, issues Ty had absolutely no clue about.

And there wasn’t a thing he could say about any of it because being partially paralyzed and in a wheelchair was pretty fucking life-altering, and Ty’s questions and issues were nothing next to that.

“You look like your best friend just ended up in a wheelchair. What’s up?”

Ty’s head came up and he focused on Bryan. “
What
?”

“People say, ‘You look like your dog died’, but you don’t have a dog, so I went with something else shitty that’s happened.”

Ty frowned. “It’s not funny.”

“You think I don’t fucking know it’s not funny?” Bryan asked. “My ass hurts from sitting around all the time. But then I’m happy that it hurts because it means I can feel it. There was a chance I might not have been able to
feel my ass
, Ty. And you’re looking all miserable and pissed off. Knock it off.”

Ty started to respond and then decided that being honest was the only way to go. He scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed. “I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t know if I should help or let you do things yourself. I don’t know if I should ask the questions I’ve got. I don’t know how to have a best friend in a wheelchair, okay? But I’m figuring out that I’m a jackass, so that doesn’t really surprise me.”

“What you don’t know is how to be there and build somebody else up,” Bryan said bluntly. “It’s not about the wheelchair, so let yourself off that hook. If I’d broken my arm or ended up in jail or decided to quit our scene and start painting landscapes in the countryside, you wouldn’t have known what to say either.”

Ty blinked at him. “Jesus, Bry, have you always thought I was the biggest asshole you’ve ever met?”

“You have to make
everything
a competition, don’t you? You’re actually
not
the biggest asshole I’ve ever met,” Bryan said. “Sorry, man. You’ll have to try harder to get that number one spot.”

Ty slumped back against the couch. “The two most important people in my life need me to step up, and it turns out that I suck at it. I hate sucking at things.”

“Assuming I’m one of those two people, I’m not super thrilled that you suck at stepping up either,” Bryan said.

Ty scowled at him. “Thanks. That’s really helpful.”

Bryan laughed. “You want
me
to give
you
a pep talk about you giving pep talks to me? That’s messed-up.”

Agitated, Ty sat forward, leaning his arms on his thighs. He pinned Bryan with a direct look. “I’m used to people coaching me and cheering
me
on. I haven’t been on the other side of it. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to be, okay? I just don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”

“Bullshit.” Bryan rolled his chair closer. He leaned forward, his arms on his thighs too, and met Ty’s gaze. “You know all about it. Your family and friends—including me—are awesome at that shit. We’re always there, we’re always supportive, and you know that. So you know everything you need to know about coaching and cheerleading. You’re scared that you won’t do it right or be enough. And
that
, my friend, is your problem.”

Ty stared at him.

Damn.

All the years of riding and running and swimming next to this guy, having Bryan spotting him in the gym, blowing off steam with him with women and liquor and parties, Ty hadn’t realized that they’d actually gotten to
know
each other.

But Bryan was exactly right.

“I hate not being good at something,” Ty finally said. “I
really
hate
almost
being good at something.”

The things he wasn’t good at—baseball, accounting, saying the right thing at the right time to help someone—he either avoided or paid someone else to do. The things he was
almost
good at—winning the big race, for instance—he kept torturing himself over.

“You’ve avoided being a supportive friend and boyfriend because you don’t want to have it not work,” Bryan said. “You came to the hospital after my rehab was over for the day and you came to my house early in the day when you knew I’d be up on crutches and not tired enough for the wheelchair yet, because that way you can say encouraging things and not have to see me struggle and your magic words not work immediately.”

That all sounded terrible.

And accurate.

He nodded miserably. “Yeah. I can’t make it better and that kills me.”

“But it’s not about you.”

Bryan’s words hit Ty hard, directly in the chest. For a second, it was difficult to breathe.

But then, slowly, he nodded. “Yeah. I’ve been making it about me.”

“You have.
You
want to be the good friend, the best cheerleader, the biggest support. Because you have to be the best and the biggest at everything,” Bryan said. “You want to see that what you’re doing and saying produces a measurable outcome. But you know what, Ty? Stuff doesn’t work like that all the time. You don’t get a medal every time you do something hard. You don’t always get a spotlight shined on doing something good. And not every challenge is measured by miles or minutes.”

Ty sat looking at the guy he’d seen jump off a bridge on a bungee cord, take a bike up and over a ramp, flip it twice in the air and land on one tire, down more tequila in one sitting than anyone he knew and coax a girl into an airplane bathroom only twenty minutes after her best friend had been in there with him.

How the hell had
Bryan
gotten so wise and insightful?

“So how do I know when I’m doing the best-friend thing right?” Ty finally asked.

“When you’re the one I call when I need someone to talk to,” Bryan said simply. “When you’re the one I tell the not-pretty, not-fun, scared-and-pissed-off stuff to. Anyone can listen to the good stuff, you know?”

Ty swallowed hard. He was not going to get all teared up here. He’d never hear the end of it. He nodded. “Okay. I’m that guy. From now on.”

Bryan gave him a grin. “I promise to tell you the good stuff too.”

“Good.” Ty looked at him closer and noted the twinkle in Bryan’s eye. “For instance?”

“Two words—hot nurses,” Bryan said. His grin grew. “Two more words—sponge baths.”

Ty couldn’t help by laugh. “Jesus. You’re seducing nurses?”

“Well, not anymore,” Bryan said. “I’ve moved on to physical therapists.”

“So you can…” Ty asked.

“Well, up against a wall is out, but yeah, I can,” Bryan confirmed.

Ty laughed again and felt the tension drain from his body. This was Bryan. The same guy he’d always been. His legs didn’t work exactly the way they used to, but the main stuff, the big stuff, was still the same. And the new stuff—the adjusting to the stuff—wasn’t about Ty. It was whatever Bryan made of it, and Ty just had to love him.

That wasn’t actually a challenge at all.

And as for Hailey…

“How do I know when I’m doing the boyfriend thing right?” he asked Bryan.

He’d filled Bryan in on everything that had happened in Sapphire Falls and between him and Hailey. Including the fact that Hailey wasn’t his perfect dream girl after all.

“I’m guessing the same way,” Bryan said. “When you’re the one she wants beside her for all the stuff—not just the good, happy, fun times.”

That didn’t make him feel better. “I don’t know if that’s going to happen,” he admitted. “She already has people who are there for the…other stuff.”

“That’s because Hailey’s like me,” Bryan said. “You weren’t the only one who got used to
you
being the one that needed the coaching and taking care of. Hailey and I put you at the center of things a long time ago.”

Ty frowned. “She took care of me?”

“Didn’t she?” Bryan said. “That girl let you lead the way, make the decisions, feel like the king. That’s Care and Feeding of Ty Bennett’s Ego 101.”

“She
liked
me leading the way.”

“Sure. Because she’s in love with you. She let you have your way in all things, and believe that things were perfect because
you
made them perfect, because she loves you and knows that’s what you needed.”

Ty felt his head spinning. “You think she’s in love with me?”

“Why else would she do things your way for so long?”

“Because she
liked
my way,” Ty insisted.

“I’m not saying she didn’t get anything out of it,” Bryan said. “It was obvious she loved coming out here for a lot of reasons. But do you really think she didn’t want to also tell you all these secrets she kept? You don’t think she wanted to talk about her stepmother being a bitch—because if you think that’s ended now that Hailey’s grown up, you don’t know bitchy stepmothers very well—or talk about her job and the things she was stressed about? When you two were together, it was like rainbows appeared overhead and there were unicorns prancing in your backyard and everything smelled like cupcakes. It was kind of sickening really.”

Ty let all of that sink in and realized Bryan wasn’t just insightful—he was actually better at this than even TJ.

“You saw all of that and knew that the rainbows and unicorns and cupcakes were going to disappear when I went back to Sapphire Falls and you didn’t say anything?” Ty asked. “What kind of best friend were
you
?” But he didn’t mean it. Bryan was the best.

“The best friend who, like Hailey, protected your fantasy bubble for you because I cared about you and knew that you wanted your full focus on the gold.”

“Were you ever going to point all of this out?”

“When it mattered. And when you were ready to hear it,” Bryan said. “Like now.”

Ty let it all roll around in his head. “I’m right to give up the training and the gold and focus on the center and put things back to the way they were with Hailey?”

Bryan laughed. “No.”

“No? To which part?”

“All of it.”

Ty sighed.

“You need to work your knee, get back into shape and race in Rio,” Bryan said. “You need to put the center in Sapphire Falls and you need to live there. With Hailey. Without the unicorns.”