Page 20 of Someone Like You

She sighed. “Yeah.”

I waited, again, for more information, but she didn’t elaborate. “Well where is he?”

“Do you really care?” she huffed.

What? What the hell was going on? “I mean…” I said, confused. “What? What are you talking about? I’m just trying to find him so we can do his schoolwork, but he’s not answering my texts.”

“That’s because he doesn’t have his phone,” she said.

“And…why doesn’t he have his phone?” What in the ever-lovingfuckwas going on and why couldn’t Bri just tell me where he was? Was he in jail or something?

“Because he left it here.”

“Oh my fucking god Bri can you just tell me where he is?” I cried. Worry and anger were beating at me now, and I just wanted her to spit it out.

“Only if you tell me if you care about him or not,” she said.

I wanted to strangle her. “Fine! I fucking care about him! Where is he,” I yelled.

Finally, she smirked, and I was relieved to see her weirdly blunt and aggressive personality show through. “Gotcha,” she said. At first, I thought she’d been fucking with me this whole time just to get me to admit that I cared about Brody and that he’d been in the back fixing cars all along, but her next words threw that theory in a ditch. “He’s in the hospital. Room 402.”

My stomach dropped, my mouth gaped open, and all that uneasiness from before multiplied and morphed into a gut-wrenching panic that had me gripping the counter. “What?” I breathed. “What happened? Is he okay? Oh my god, why didn’t you justtellme that? Bri, is he okay?”

Her eyes pinged back and forth between mine, and she said, “Yeah. You totally care.” Then she leaned back in her chair and said, “Go see him. He’ll be okay.”

For a moment, we just looked at each other. Then I muttered, “Thanks,” and left.

“Bring him some flowers!” Bri called after me.

I was not bringing Brody fucking flowers.

With the stupidpotted cactus clutched in my hands, I sped down the hallway, reading numbers on doors until I got to room 402. The door was cracked and, without bothering to knock, I nudged it all the way open with my foot and walked into the room.

Brody was lying on the bed, awake, with an IV hooked to his arm and one of those heart monitor things they clip to your finger. There was a small bandage on his forehead, right at his hairline. He was staring at the wall in front of him, a hopeless expression on his beautiful face, his shoulders sagging under the white hospital gown, and I wanted to go to him, hold him, tell him that everything would be okay even though I had no idea what was wrong. The sight of him like that, broken and beat down, unraveled something in me, and my heart was thundering in my chest as I took another step toward him.

When he saw me, his eyes wide and his lips parted, his hands clutching the sheets, he whispered, “Isaac.” There was hope tangled with shock and torment in the way he said my name, and it had me moving swiftly to his side.

My eyes wandered down the bed, where his legs stretched out under the thin white sheet and his feet were practically hanging over the edge. When I looked back up at Brody, he was smiling gently. He looked exhausted. Fatigue was written in the dark circles under his eyes, in the drawn lines of his face, in the pallor of his usually tan complexion.

“Brody,” I said quietly. “What…what happened?”

He huffed a self-deprecating laugh, then said, “Oh, you know. Just my usual cry for attention.”

I didn’t understand what he meant by that, and I didn’t like the way he seemed to be denigrating himself for some reason. “What are you talking about? You are like, the least attention-seeking person I’ve ever met.”

He looked me over, his eyes landing on the cactus I’d forgotten I was holding. “So are you,” he murmured.

“Brody, what happened?”

He looked away. “I fainted and hit my head while I was working in the shop yesterday, got a concussion so they kept me overnight for monitoring.”

What? “You fainted?”

His gaze collided with mine again, and the depth of pain I saw churning in those gray eyes made me want to hold him. To protect him from that pain and whatever was causing it. “I have a heart condition,” he told me, and I stopped breathing. “My mitral valve is fucked up. Has been since I was born, but I didn’t know. It doesn’t close all the way, which makes blood flow backwards sometimes. And sometimes my heart gets overloaded, like yesterday, and can’t pump enough blood if I’m doing something strenuous. It was never an issue until a few years ago, when I first fainted because of it. It’s been happening more and more, and the doctors have told me I’ll probably need surgery to fix it. Don’t look at me like that,” he said.

I tried to swallow around the sizable lump in my throat, and speaking around it was even harder. “Like what?”

“Like I just killed your cat,” he said.

---