Chapter 8

I needed to see Nicky, and I needed it right away.

He was slumped on the couch in a tight t-shirt and sweats, a vicious bruise on his jaw already blooming. His left hand was wrapped in a bandage. I pulled up in the doorway, just taking in the scene, and he saw where my gaze landed.

“I didn’t have my gloves on,” he said grumpily. His thin face was even more pinched, his skin almost white, though there were patches of high colour on his cheeks like odd, painted spots. “Yeah. Don’t lecture me, right? I’m not in the mood—”

I don’t know why that was the turning point.

I just kept thinking, it could have been so much worse. He could have broken something; he could have been permanently maimed. He could have died.

No more Nicky. The realisation hit like a bolt from the blue, yet my gut told me I’d known it from the start. What he really meant to me. What the familiar aching, the painful and deeply-felt terror of what-ifs…what they were telling my heart.