One Real Thing (8 page)

“I can’t imagine anyone
not knowing
something like that.” Sheila took another sip of wine, while her husband nodded his agreement.

“It’s a crazy situation all around,” Trey said. “Is she going to divorce him?”

“I don’t know.” Nick made a mental note to contact the senator, though he doubted she was going to want to see him. There were rumblings that some of the interns were considering pressing charges. He had to follow up about that too. His articles had set up the situation for that to happen.
Shit.
He hadn’t meant to interfere like that.

“Dessert is served,” Caroline called, carrying out a tray of cups that looked like flowers filled with chocolate mousse. Behind her, Max had another tray with a carafe, cream and sugar pitchers and five coffee cups.

As Caroline set a mousse cup in front of him, Nick’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He waited until she’d moved on to Sheila, then pulled it out to glance at the text message.

wish you didn’t trust me. sorry for everything. all of it. fucked up. love you. sorry.

From Holly.
Oh God.

Nick tensed with the need to find Holly and fix whatever was wrong, but he couldn’t go anywhere. He was in fucking Connecticut.
Shit. Shit shit shit.
Why had he agreed to come to Max’s party? He’d known—
known
—Holly might need him.

He couldn’t even tell Caroline what was wrong, why his hand shook as he spooned the mousse that tasted like acid into his mouth and swallowed so it sat like a rock in his gut. All he could do was sit there, pretending nothing was wrong, and pray Holly would still be in one piece—that he’d still be alive—when he got there.

“This is delicious,” he told Max. “Did you make it yourself?”

Max snorted. “No way.”

“He used the same service we do,” Caroline said. “I recommended it to him months ago. Don’t you remember?”

No, he didn’t remember. It didn’t matter, though. He laughed and shook his head, and conversation went on around him.

***

Holly woke to a bright light in his eyes.

“Hey there. Can you tell me what you’ve had to drink tonight?”

“I don’t…too much,” Holly said honestly. He was lying down, he was moving but he didn’t know any more than that. No, he could do better. “I fucked up,” he said, realizing what he’d done. “But I didn’t think I fucked up enough to end up in an ambulance.”

“Well, you walked in front of a cab,” the man with the light said. “Hi, I’m Jose.”

“Hi, Jose.”

“You know your name?”

“Hollister Welles—the First, in spite of how it sounds. Holly. I had about eight drinks, that I remember.”

“Anything else?”

Christ. Shit. Any…
“I don’t remember. Maybe.”

“Got a habit?” There was no judgment in the man’s question.

“No. I take…” Holly couldn’t remember the name. “It starts with a
P.
It’s kind of yellow and green.”

“Recreationally?” Jose was scribbling in a notepad. It dawned on Holly he was in the back of an ambulance and his head was fucking killing him.

“No, prescribed. And Xanax, but I didn’t have any tonight.” Then Holly remembered why he’d been out in the first place.
Shit.
How could he have forgotten? He’d been so desperate to get out of the house.

“Good thing. You shouldn’t combine alcohol with—”

“I know. I forgot I was taking them.”

“Do you need us to call anyone? We’re going to take you in, put some stitches in those cuts and then keep an eye on you.”

“No.” Holly did not want Nick to see him like this. “No, I’m good.”

“Do you remember what you were doing when you walked into the street?”

“I think…” It was fuzzy. The alcohol hadn’t worn off. “Where’s my phone?”

“It’s in a bag on the gurney,” a woman said from the front seat. “In pieces. You were probably texting or talking to someone.”

“Shit.” Holly felt stupider than stupid. “I fucking hate the phone.”

***

Holly had been sitting on a narrow gurney in the midst of an incredibly raucous emergency ward for hours. The time to think had been good for him. Drunk and, as far as he remembered, stoned—the nurses agreed with that since he reeked of pot and tobacco—he felt more sane sitting on that gurney than he had in years. Maybe since his mother had gone to Hopespring.

He was watching people come and go: the wounded, the mentally ill, wailing children, dying elderly. In the middle of all the noise, Holly finally realized that whatever was wrong with him, if anything was, it wasn’t what was wrong with his mother. He’d done coke, dropped acid, tossed back datura, drank mushroom tea, and he’d come out the other side in one piece every time. There were a lot of things Holly could break—including his head, it seemed—but his mind was tougher than he knew.

Time to get living. He was sane and well and fortunate. What he’d been doing was an insult to himself, and it wasn’t fair to the people who cared about him, including Nick. Then the penny dropped. He remembered what he’d been doing when he was stupid enough to walk in front of a cab—sending Nick a second text on the heels of the first…after getting drunk and high and blown in the back of some seedy strip club.

Shit. Oh shit. Oh fuck.
He had to go. He had to go
now.

“Mr. Welles.” The nurse tossed her clipboard on the bed. “Let’s make sure you’re seeing straight, and then I’m going to release you.”

“I was about to break out of here,” Holly said honestly. “I have to apologize to someone. A lot.”

She looked him over and snorted softly, shaking her head. “You look like a man who needs to apologize.”

Holly racked his brain to remember what he’d sent Nick. “You have no idea.”
I have no idea.

Please, let it not be something I can’t fix.

***

Nick left Caroline at home with the excuse he needed to check on some notes for a story he’d left at work. When he got to Hell’s Kitchen, to Holly’s apartment, the sky was warming with shades of red, orange and pink.

Rosy-fingered Dawn. Nick felt like he’d just escaped the Lotus-Eaters, like he was finally coming home. Was he ready for what he’d find? Odysseus hadn’t been. Nick fit the key into the lock and took a deep breath. One hand on his phone, ready to call an ambulance, he pushed the door open.

The apartment was quiet, the silence pressing on him like a weight. He rushed in, past the empty love seat and the empty kitchen and the empty bed, and charged into the tiny bathroom to find that empty too. No pale, bleeding body in the tub, no corpse sprawled across the tile. Nothing.

The emptiness, the silence, was worse than finding Holly a broken, bloody mess. Holly could be anywhere, alone and dying, and there wasn’t anything Nick could do about it. His gut clenched, twisted, and he dropped to his knees to retch into the toilet, emptying his stomach of all the food he’d eaten at that damned party while Holly had been off somewhere breaking down and falling apart.

When there was nothing left in him but dry heaves and tears, Nick stumbled out to sit on the bed. He put his head in his hands and tried to breathe, tried to think, but he had no idea where to go or what to do.

He sat there until he thought he’d frozen or gone mad. Maybe he should call the hospitals. Maybe he should call the police. Maybe he should call the morgue. His stomach heaved again. But then there was a muttered curse and the rattle of the doorknob.

Nick’s heart caught in his throat, and he was halfway across the room before the door opened.

“Fucking…can’t remember to even lock the fucking door,” Holly muttered.

He looked like shit. He looked worse than shit. The left side of his face was scraped up, his hair was matted with God only knew what, his hands were bandaged and he was wearing an appalling, cheap gray tracksuit. He was carrying a brown paper bag until he saw Nick. Then he dropped it. The key went bouncing across the floor.

“I am so sorry,” Holly blurted out.

The anger surged and receded in the space of a breath as the details of Holly’s appearance were cataloged in the back of Nick’s mind. Nick just had to…He crowded Holly against the door, his hands hovering over Holly’s face, his hair, afraid to touch. “What the hell happened to you?”

“I walked in front of a cab.” Holly put an unsteady, gauze-wrapped hand on Nick’s chest. “I just…I fucked up. I was trying to text you. And I wasn’t looking. But it doesn’t matter. I am so sorry, Nick.”

Nick took a slow breath as realization hit. “Your message got through,” he said, forcing himself to meet Holly’s eyes. “Holly…You’ve got to stop. You have to…You can’t keep doing this to yourself.” Holly had been hit by a car. He could’ve—“You could’ve
died.
”

“I know, I do.” Holly brought his other hand up to touch Nick’s cheek, a brush of cold fingers. “You don’t have to believe me. I don’t even know what I said. Whatever it was, I’m sorry. You don’t deserve any of this.”

“You said you were sorry. You…Christ, it sounded like you were going to kill yourself.” Fear rose again, bitter and acidic, at the back of his throat.

“No.” Holly looked horrified, and he took Nick’s face in his bandaged hands. “No. I would…I would not do that to you. If I did…not like that.” His voice broke like he was going to cry. “I hope I wouldn’t.”

Nick slid his fingers into Holly’s tangled hair and pulled him close. “What happened, Holly?”

“My mom got my phone number, and…I meant to go for a walk. I swear to God, I did.” Holly leaned his forehead on Nick’s shoulder. “I don’t know what happened.”

Goddamn Holly’s fucking family. Okay. Nick could deal with this. He could. He took a deep breath, then let go of Holly and stepped back.

“Go clean up, Holly.” Nick needed a minute alone to pull himself together.

Holly looked down at himself and then nodded. “Going,” he said quietly and picked up the bag, then headed toward the bathroom. He felt like he was barely keeping it together. “Oh, wait.” He dug around in the paper bag and came out with a small prescription bottle. “Here.” He held it out to Nick, the pills inside rattling. “A couple days’ worth of painkillers. Because I don’t have a doctor yet. I’ll find one.”

Nick took the bottle and nodded. He’d deal with them in a minute. “Okay. Anything else?”

“This, but it’s not really important.” Holly handed over some slightly crumpled folded papers. “I’m fine.”

Symptoms of Concussion and Instructions on Wound Care. Nick sighed.
No, not important at all.

“I’ll take a look.” Nick had to step back, walk away, to keep from showing how his hands were shaking.

“It’s not like I haven’t had my bell rung enough times.” Holly took the bag with him, leaving Nick alone with the paperwork and the knot of fear still sitting in his gut.

Nick glanced at the papers in one hand, the pills in the other, and barely kept himself from throwing both against the wall.
Fuck.
He set them down, carefully, on the table next to the love seat and tried to remember how to relax.

After starting a pot of coffee, he shed his shoes, socks and jacket and put them away in the hall closet. It was so close to the way every evening had gone when he’d been staying here with Holly.

That thought, and the warmth that came with it, was cut short as Nick sat with his coffee and saw the pills and paperwork again. He had to read the instructions and symptom sheets twice before any of it sank in.

Holly came out, a towel around his waist. The white terry cloth was liberally smudged with red. The bandages were gone from his hands, and with his hair slicked back with water, stitches were visible, leading from his temple into his hairline. The bruise around his eye socket was swelling. There was another set of stitches on the underside of his left elbow. A garden of black-and-purple bruises blossomed on his right leg. His clothes must have been ruined.

Holly didn’t look at Nick as he limped into the kitchen. Blood and water dribbled down his left leg from his torn-up knee; walking was making it worse. He grabbed a handful of paper towels and mopped off his leg.

“Do you have bandages?” Nick wasn’t going to help unless he had to. Holly needed to learn to follow directions.

“In the bag. I stopped at an all-night place on the way home. Didn’t want to make a mess.” Holly snorted softly. “Too little, too late.”

“Finish cleaning up, then get yourself something to eat.” Nick picked up his coffee and the paperwork from the hospital again, making sure Holly wasn’t going to do more damage.

There was quiet and then a very subdued “yes, Nick” from Holly’s side of the room. It took Holly about ten minutes to get himself patched up and into a pair of boxers, but then he came over with a couple of large bandages in hand. “I can’t get it right. The elbow…” Holly turned his left arm to show Nick the spot that was too hard to reach, a gash about an inch and a half long, held together with a dozen neat stitches. “Please?” He held out the bandages.

Nick put his coffee down again, then took one of the bandages and gestured for Holly to come closer. “Hold out your arm.” His gut twisted again as he looked at the stitches. It could’ve been worse. So much worse. He carefully smoothed the bandage into place. “Are there others you need help with?”

“Just there. Thanks.” Eyes down, Holly picked up the bits of wrapping and took them to the trash can under the sink. He reached for a mug, then stopped. “May I have some coffee?”

“No.” Nick was surprised Holly had thought to ask. Surprised but glad. That was the way things needed to happen. He picked up his own coffee and took a sip. He’d deal with laying down new rules later. “Just eat and go to bed.”

“Yes, Nick.” There wasn’t any sarcasm in it. Nick could hardly hear the words, but he could read them in Holly’s body language. There was real satisfaction in Holly obeying him so readily. It was the sort of pleasure Nick never wanted to acknowledge, but it was there.

Holly made a sandwich and poured a glass of chocolate milk. He ate like a child—bread, meat and a cheese slice—but he ate it all and polished off the milk, standing at the counter.