“We’re going to have to put you under to set those bones in your hand, and it seems you nicked an artery. That little bugger won’t stop bleeding unless we get a little stitch in it. You sure did a number on yourself, handsome.” I was feeling a little woozy. Possibly from whatever she put in the bags hanging over my head, or maybe it was from blood loss. I remembered a doctor coming in, followed by my mother, who was crying and shaking. Words were exchanged, paperwork was signed, but I was sleepwalking through all of it. Between each blink I found myself looking for a familiar face with almost purple eyes and freckles. I wanted her to kiss me and tell me it was all going to be fine. I wanted her to hug me and tell me this was all no big deal.
She wasn’t there, and I couldn’t blame her because neither was I. I vaguely felt my eyes getting too heavy to hold open. I felt my mom squeeze my good hand. The lights above me started to move, and then everything was gone. Everything went black, and I really was drifting, lost in an abyss I wasn’t sure I would ever find my way back from.
When I woke up, I was in a hospital room, and there was no longer a way to shut out how much I hurt all over, inside and out. My busted hand felt like it weighed a thousand pounds and sure as shit there was plaster wrapped all around it. My head was fuzzy, and my mouth was dry. It was like coming down off a particularly potent high. I lifted my good hand to rub my eyes and blinked when a guy in a lab coat came through the door. He had a tablet in his hands and was squinting at the screen. His tie was crooked, and his shoes squeaked on the floor as he made his way over to the side of my bed.
“How you feeling, Mr. McCaffrey?” He sounded bored, and somehow that was reassuring.
I lifted my injured hand and let it fall. “Been better.”
“I bet. You shattered two of your knuckles, dislocated two fingers, and gave yourself a hairline fracture along your wrist. You’ve got an army of stitches holding your hand together, and that arterial bleed was a bitch to close.” He looked up from the tablet and lifted an eyebrow at me. “On a scale of one to ten, what’s your pain level?”
I wiggled the tips of my fingers that were sticking out of the cast and sucked in a breath as sharp, searing discomfort shot up my forearm. “About a nine.” It wasn’t anything I hadn’t felt before. I’d been more banged up after the accident that night, but it definitely didn’t feel good.
“I’ll have one of the nurses bring you something for the pain. Your chart says you’re not allergic to anything, is that correct?”
I swallowed hard and licked my lips. Now was when I was supposed to come clean. Now was when I was supposed to make the right choice and tell him I didn’t want narcotics.
“No, I’m not allergic to anything.” I felt the hole in the center of my chest widen and the space between me and Affton grow bigger than it already was.
“Great. I’ll have the nurse bring in something that goes in the IV, and I’ll write you a prescription for something when you are discharged later today. Your mother has been in and out of your room waiting for you to wake up. I’m sure she’ll be happy to see you’re functioning properly. You gave her quite a scare.”
He didn’t know the half of it.
I didn’t care that my mom was worried about me. What I cared about was that I was going to have something in my system soon that made me forget I didn’t care.
The doctor went over a few things with me, mentioned I should consider anger management classes, and told me my stitches were going to itch like a son of a bitch when they started to heal. I closed my eyes when he left the room and didn’t open them again until I heard the door open. I was expecting the nurse with my painkiller or my mom with her tear-stained face. What I got was the pale blonde hair and purple-blue eyes the color of a bruise. Her pretty face was pinched in concern, and her eyes were wounded.
I blinked at her as she made her way over to the side of the bed. When she took my good hand in hers, I couldn’t stop myself from flinching at the contact, and she immediately let me go. She sighed and reached up to tuck her hair behind her ears. “That was stupid, Cable. You were the one who told me we weren’t going in the same direction. Did you want to be the one who veered off first? Would that have been easier for you? Because if it would, then do it. You pull the plug, so I’m the one who’s left watching you leave.”
I closed my eyes again and turned my head away from her. “That’s not it. I knew we had to end, but I wasn’t ready for how that was going to feel. I’m not used to . . . emotion.” I wasn’t used to feeling anything, and she made me feel everything. “It needed somewhere to go.” I snorted. “I was kind of hoping all those feelings were going to go with you when you left.”
She moved to the other side of the bed and touched her fingers to my cast. She sighed again and bent down so that her lips touched the plaster. “Those feelings aren’t mine to take. They’re yours to keep. You need to learn how to deal with them without hurting yourself.”
If that’s what feeling normal meant, I much preferred being shut off and locked away. At least when I was numb, my heart didn’t hurt.
“Cable McCaffrey?” We both turned and looked at the door as a male nurse said my name. He was wheeling a machine into the room and reading information off a little vial of something in his hand. “Is that you?”
I nodded. “It’s me.”
He rattled off my date of birth and asked me a couple more questions while Affton watched him through narrowed eyes.
“We’ll get you fixed right up. As soon as this hits your system, you’ll be feeling right as rain.”
Affton stiffened next to the bed and shifted her gaze back and forth between the two of us. “What is that you’re giving him?”
The nurse gave her a look and then looked back at me. I didn’t say anything, so the moment dragged on until it became oppressive and uncomfortable. Finally, the nurse cleared his throat and told her, “It’s Dilaudid. It’s for the pain.”
Affton hissed out a wounded, painful sound and stepped away from the bed. “He didn’t tell you that he’s a recovering addict? There is no way in hell you should be injecting him with an opiate of any kind.”
The nurse looked at me and then back at her. “Umm . . . that’s not in his paperwork anywhere. This was prescribed by the floor doctor.”
“He’s also on parole. If he gets called in for a drug test with any kind of opiate in his system, he’s going back to jail unless someone clears that he needs it with his parole officer.” She stared at me so hard I could feel the press of it against my skin. “Don’t take that, Cable. Do not start back down this road. If you don’t watch where you’re going, you’ll end up exactly where you’ve always been headed.”
The nurse waited, obviously uneasy and unsure. My hand was throbbing, and so was my head. “Give us a minute, will ya?”
He looked at the vial in his hand and then up to Affton. “She’s right. If you’re in recovery, you shouldn’t mess with this stuff. The doctor wouldn’t have approved it if he’d known.”
I sighed and pushed my good hand through my hair in aggravation. “Just bring me some Tylenol or Advil for now.”
Once we were alone, I waited for her to unleash on me. I could see every line of her body tensed in anger and her face was flushed with barely contained fury. She looked an awful lot like she did that day she confronted me in the parking lot. She called me an addict then and told me I needed help. I had no idea what she was going to call me now.
“My mom started off using pain pills.” Her voice shook, and her knuckles turned white as her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “We were in a car accident. She got severely injured. She ended up needing a whole bunch of back surgeries and she never really got her range of motion back. The doctors gave her OxyContin for the pain, and at first, she used it only when she really needed it.”
“Come on, Reed . . .”
She held up a hand and cut me off. “You said you would listen when I was ready to talk about my mom, so listen. I remember her starting to
act different. She’d always been active in my life. She came and helped in my classroom; she took me to Girl Scouts and dance class. We did something together every Sunday, as a family, and then all of a sudden she was too tired for all of that. She never wanted to leave the house. She never wanted to do anything with me and dad. She said it was because she hurt all the time, and I don’t doubt that was part of it, but the painkillers,” she shook her head. “They helped at first, then they hurt. Soon, she needed more than she was prescribed. She started doing crazy stuff and jumping from doctor to doctor to get more.” She laughed, but it was jagged and sharp. The edges of it cut against me and sliced across my soul. “When the doctors wouldn’t prescribe them to her anymore, she started begging my dad to go for her. She wanted him to lie for her. That’s when I really started to realize things in my family were falling apart.” She lifted a shaking hand to her mouth and blinked away tears. “When my dad wouldn’t do it, she burned my arm with an iron so that she could rush me to the ER.”
“Jesus.” I’d noticed she had a patch of pale skin on her upper arm that never tanned and was slippery smooth to the touch, but I never asked about it . . . because I was an asshole and she deserved so much better than me.
“When my dad found out what she did, he took me and moved out. He told my mom if she didn’t get help immediately, he was going to file for divorce and get full custody of me. She went.”
Affton crossed her arms over herself so that she was giving herself a hug. “She stayed in a program for thirty days and came out with all kinds of lies about appreciating what she had and wanting to save her family. What she didn’t tell us was that she met a woman in rehab who educated her on how much easier and cheaper it was to get high on heroin than Oxy. She moved from pills to street drugs in the blink of an eye.”
“Things went downhill fast from there. She left me alone. She forgot to feed me. She didn’t care if I made it to school on time or not. She stopped being a mom, and she stopped being a wife. All she wanted to be was an addict. My dad tried to help her, but she made it clear she didn’t want anything to do with getting better. She wanted to be high more than she wanted to be a family.”
She sniffed and rubbed her arms with her hands. I wanted to hug her, but I had a feeling that if I got too close, she might break . . . exactly how her girl, Jordan, warned me she would. I didn’t just bump into her, I crashed, and she shattered.
“She got arrested. The judge offered her a plea deal if she agreed to go back to rehab. She went, but unwillingly. Dad filed for divorce and was in the process of taking full custody of me when she got out. I was just a kid, but I knew she didn’t have much time left living the way she did. She was a walking, talking corpse the deeper into her addiction she fell. She scared me.”
She rubbed her fingers over her cheeks as the tears she was keeping in check broke free. “I was the one who found her. She hadn’t returned any of my calls, and she missed a big dance recital, nothing new, but by that time I was pissed. I wanted to tell her I was done, that she wasn’t my mom anymore. I wanted to tell her Dad and I deserved better, and she was gross and sad. I wanted to hurt her the way she hurt me. I skipped out of school early and walked to her apartment. When I opened the door, I found her lying on the floor. She was blue.” She stopped breathing for a second, and when she started speaking again, her words held barely any sound. “I didn’t know what was wrong, so I touched her, and she was so cold. I sat on the floor and cried, calling her name over and over until a neighbor came to see what was going on. My dad was so mad. He was mad at her. Mad at himself for letting me still see her. Mad at me for being so upset over a woman who hadn’t bothered to be my mother in a long time. It was the only time I’ve ever seen him cry.”
She was shaking so hard I was sure she was going to fall over. Groaning with effort and pain, I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and reached out my good arm so I could snag her around the waist. She didn’t struggle because of the tubes and wires attached to all the different places on my body, but she didn’t make pulling her between my legs and into my chest easy, either.
“I can’t love another addict, Cable. I won’t.” She sobbed against my neck, and I brushed my lips against her forehead. “I hate Cable the addict, but I love Cable the recovering addict, even if he’s not always who you choose to be. You need to learn to love him, too.”
“I can make good choices for you, Reed. Can’t seem to get a handle on making them for myself.”
She put her arms around me loosely and gave me a squeeze. She sniffed loudly and pulled out of my embrace. My neck was wet from her tears, and my pulse was erratic from having her so close and hearing her history.
“Try.”
I chuckled and gave her a nod. “I’ll try.”
She gave me a weak smile and pushed her hair out of her face. She loved me and hated me. I loved and hated her for that. “I’m pretty sure when I get the hang of all these feelings, when I learn what to do with them, I could learn to love you, Affton Reed.”
Her eyes widened, and she put her hands over her heart. She flushed again, but this time it was a pretty pink. She stuck her tongue out and licked her lower lip, eyes glowing with promise and challenge. “Prove it, Cable James McCaffrey.”
With those final words, she disappeared out the door and out of my life, leaving me alone to make the right choice for myself . . . to at least try and be worthy of loving her and being loved by her.
All I could do was try. Even if I failed, at least I was trying . . . her words haunted me long after the door closed behind her.
Affton
Berkeley ~ Close to Thanksgiving break
“I WAS WONDERING if you wanted to get some pizza or a cup of coffee sometime before break starts?”
I was looking down at my phone, barely listening to the guy walking next to me. I wasn’t even sure what his name was, but he’d been persistent in his efforts to get me to go out with him over the course of the semester. We were in the same intro to psychology class, and he’d been moving steadily across the giant auditorium the last few months until he worked up the courage to sit next to me. At first, he asked me if I wanted to study together, and when I turned him down, he switched to subtly asking me if I wanted to hang out during a bunch of group events. I always said no.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t cute; he was. He was tall, lean, and looked very academic. He wore glasses that were trendy with their thick, black frames, and sweaters over button-up shirts. He also wore tightly fitted jeans and ankle boots. He was pretty much a walking advertisement for hot college guy who took himself and his education seriously. There were plenty of other girls who gave him the eye day in and day out, but he didn’t seem to notice. He had his sights set firmly on me, even though I barely spared him a glance. I could hear Jordan telling me it was time to move on. I could hear her telling me to live a little, to embrace everything college had to offer, including very cute boys who were the opposite of Cable in every way imaginable. There were no scruffy, surfer boys in my psychology program. There were no boys who were lost and desperately trying to find their way. These guys had all worked just as hard as I had for their place in that classroom, and they weren’t about to blow it by living recklessly. It should have appealed to me, they should have appealed to me . . . but they didn’t.
I looked up from my phone and blinked at the guy trying to piece together what he’d just asked me. Since he was staring at me expectantly, I figured he had asked me out again. I had to say no, hated that I couldn’t even imagine saying yes to someone who wasn’t Cable, but there was no other choice. I wasn’t about to lead anyone on. Even though I was single, technically unattached, and free to do whatever and whomever I wanted . . . I couldn’t. As always, my stupid heart was still tangled around and caught up in all things Cable James McCaffrey.
I hadn’t heard from him since I walked out of the hospital.
I had no clue if he turned down the painkillers and pulled himself back on the right path.
I didn’t know if he had gone back to his old ways or if he thought about me every minute of every day, the way I thought about him. I wondered if he missed me so much that it was all-consuming. In the dark, I wondered if he imagined me when he woke up alone and lonely . . . the way I imagined him.
I didn’t know anything, but my heart didn’t care. It refused to let me let go completely. It refused to let me consider this cute boy’s invitation or any of the others that came my way. It wouldn’t let me move on.
“I . . . uhhh . . . well, I can’t really get away before break. I have a project due, and my dad is coming to town so we can spend Thanksgiving together. I don’t really have any free time.” I tucked a piece of hair behind my ear and noticed we had almost made it all the way to the building where my apartment was located. Thank God Melanie McCaffrey came through with the money she promised me. Otherwise, I would have been stuck in one of the open dorm rooms, sharing my space with a stranger, and living with no walls. The idea of using a communal bathroom made me gag. As it was, I still had to share the apartment, but at least there was a living room and several closed doors separating us. It was totally worth the extra money.
And my dad really was coming to visit. When I left Port Aransas, I went back home and immediately spilled my guts about everything. I think it was seeing Cable in the hospital, all those tubes attached to him, that pushed me over the edge. It reminded me too much of all the times my mom had faked an injury or illness to get herself committed so she could score. I told him about Melanie and her threat. I told him about the money, and my summer spent trying to help Cable stay clean. I told him about the accident, the truth, not the garbage that was in the papers, and I told him all about falling for the absolute wrong person and how hard it was to walk away. I apologized for lying and waited for him to fix it all like he always had.
My dad shocked me by calling his boss at the brewery and quitting on the spot. He had some choice words for Melanie McCaffrey, but I begged him to let it go. She loved her son and refused to let him ruin his life. I reminded him we’d both been there with my mom. He said he refused to work for a woman who would manipulate his daughter that way. He agreed that Cable wasn’t someone he would ever pick out for me, considering his history and his issues, but he didn’t judge me for falling so far, so fast. He held me while I cried and told me to believe in the good parts Cable showed me, but to stay aware of the bad ones. He was the best dad ever, and he handled my first broken heart like a pro. But he couldn’t fix what was broken. He couldn’t console me when I fell apart after calling the hospital to check on Cable, only to be told he’d checked out against doctor’s orders. The only person who could help the heartache had disappeared like a puff of smoke, drifting away in the darkness just like he always warned me he would.