Lainey, his sister and my other best friend, stands beside him, and as I shift my attention down to her, I see her eyes are red and swollen, matching Luca’s.
“Don’t make this any harder on yourself or your mom, dude. Come on. I didn’t dive into that river just for you to be a dick afterward.”
He pulled me out?
Shit. Luca shouldn’t have put himself at risk like that. But I know I would’ve done the same for him and Lainey, so it’s hard to judge his actions when he’s the reason I’m alive.
He knows how to get through to me, how to reach that reset button in my brain. But I suppose that being best friends means knowing one another better than anyone else. It’s too bad that right now, I care more about finding Carly than I do about keeping him happy.
I take another step forward, and a hand flattens against my chest. Warmth spreads out from her fingers, and I find her stare, seeing the agony and desperation in her eyes.
Her thumb strokes the hospital gown on my pec, and I stop in my tracks. Lainey has always been one of my greatest weaknesses. I just wish she wouldn’t use that against me right now.
She parts her lips, sucks in a breath, and whispers, barely loud enough for me to hear, “Whale shark.”
Pain slices through my heart.
My voice is breathy and raspy when I say, “You can’t use that on me right now, Lain.”
“Please,” she murmurs, and I bite down hard on my bottom lip. “Please, Jensen.”
Time stands still as my heart beats in her hand, my eyes glued to the pain in her eyes. I exhale, knowing that I won’t take another step, no matter how badly I want to.
The nurse disappears as Luca and Lainey become the only things before me, the room falling away around us as they throw their arms around me. Seconds or minutes pass by as I melt into their embrace, tears flowing down my cheeks and sobs bursting from deep in my chest.
“We’re just going to give you something to help you relax, okay? You’re probably already feeling it,” someone says.
They’re right. Everything is slowing down around me, the room getting quieter.
“We’re going to help you sit down.”
Hands gently grab me, and before I know it, I’m lying back down in bed, my eyelids struggling to stay up.
“I love you,” my mom whispers as she takes my hand.
“I love you too,” I murmur.
Anxiety consumes me, my breathing quickens as I fight the medication. My body starts tingling, every cell buzzing rapidly before they power down, one by one.
Lainey takes my other hand and whispers something that I can’t understand. She brushes my worries away with the stroke of her thumb across my fingers, and for a split second, everything seems like it’ll be okay.
I’m slipping, my mind drifting further away with each breath.
“Stop fighting it, Jensen,” she murmurs, and my eyes drift shut.
“Lainey—” I can’t even finish saying her name before I succumb to the medicine and sink into the floor, slipping into the darkness, where a part of my soul will always stay.
CHAPTER 2
JENSEN
TWO WEEKS POST-CRASH
I spentthree days in the hospital after the accident, each one somehow harder than the previous. But thankfully, the pain of my injuries was a reprieve to the agony terrorizing my every waking thought, and as they weaned me off of painkillers, I welcomed the discomfort as a distraction from the prison that had formed in my mind in those passing days.
Apparently, the wreck was far worse than I recalled. The car was smashed like a tin can beneath someone’s shoe when it was pulled out of the water.
I walked away with two broken and four cracked ribs, a severe concussion, a broken arm, and a fractured orbital socket from nearly going through the windshield.
