Page 2 of Chasing You

He still wasn’t sure if there was a line he wasn’t supposed to cross, but hedidknow he shouldn’t send his best friend to jail for being a jackass.

“I think we’ve got this all cleared up,” the cop said, “so long as you’re willing to corroborate his statement that this was all a prank.”

Kash rolled his eyes. “Yeah. Unfortunately, I’ve known him for over twenty years, and this was definitely something I should have expected.”

Adele sighed and looked very contrite. “I really am sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I was just excited to see you, and I thought it would be funny?—”

“You thought kidnapping a disabled man in an airport would befunny?” the cop demanded.

“What? He’s not—” Adele stopped as his gaze found Kash’s cane.

He almost forgot he was carrying it, but he’d needed it to walk the length of the airport. Adele was well aware Kash had been keeping something from him, and he’d been up his ass about confessing.

He hadn’t planned on Adele figuring it out like this. He’d wanted to sit him down and explain—not that hehad a lot of answers. His doctors were completely stumped, and all he had were more questions and a collapsable cane he found for cheap on Amazon to keep him from falling over when he tried to get from one end of the airport to the other.

Adele swallowed thickly. “Since when?”

“Let’s talk in the car,” Kash said. He turned his attention to the cop. “Are you filing a report?”

“No,” the cop said. “Just use better judgment next time.” He gave Adele one last stern look, then walked away.

“Bowen said you’re friends with Tom now,” Kash said as he reached behind him for the handle on his suitcase. “Did you call him?”

Adele beat him to it, and Kash didn’t put up a fight. “That fuck-face? Fat chance. He’s not as awful as he used to be, but we will never be friends, and he’d probably laugh his ass off as they carted me off to jail.”

Kash knew that in spite of not being completely absent from Adele’s life over the last decade and a half, there was still so much he’d missed. He took a breath, then leaned heavily on his cane and started forward toward the crosswalk.

“Is this from the incident last year?” Adele asked. “You said you’d recovered from that. Wasn’t it a concussion?”

Kash could feel his friend’s eyes on his gait. His legs moved stiffly. What Adele couldn’t see were his toes curled painfully in his boots or the orthotics he had on under his jeans because his ankles didn’t cooperate anymore. At least, not all the time.

“It was a concussion,” he told him quickly. The incident had been getting hit by a falling beam, then pinned beneath it. He’d been carted off with a grade 2 concussion andseveral second-degree burns that eventually healed without too much scarring.

But a few weeks after he’d been cleared to return to work, shit hit the fan. So to speak. His legs started getting stiff, his feet refusing to move. It was almost like he was paralyzed but without the numbness. It began to spread to his arms and hands after that, and that’s when he panicked.

And that’s when all of his specialists began to shake their heads and tell him they had no idea what was going on.

“Things got weird after I was cleared to go back to work. We’ve been trying to figure it out since then, and they don’t know if it’s from the head injury or not.”

“Okay, but what is it?” Adele pressed.

He didn’t know. He needed more testing. And a couple of his doctors had suspicions that it could be something that led to a drastically shortened lifespan. That was what had him panicking. That was the news that sent him back across the country and into Adele’s arms. So to speak.

He needed the diagnosis to confirm it before he said anything though. He had no plans to freak everyone out without being absolutely sure that his life was not only about to change but that it was almost over.

“Can we not talk about it right now?” Kash asked him.

“But—”

“You owe me after what you did.”

Adele’s jaw snapped shut so loudly Kash could hear it. He took a few more steps to catch up with him, then slowed his pace so they were elbow-to-elbow. “I’m sorry about that. I…I don’t know what I was thinking. I thought it would be funny,” he repeated weakly.

“Maybe if I wasn’t running on forty-eight hours of nosleep, I could have chuckled, but I legit thought I was about to die.”

“Fuck. I’m so sorry. How can I make it up to you?” Adele grabbed him and halted his step, looking into Kash’s eyes. “Seriously. Let me fix it.”

“A back rub,” Kash told him honestly, softening because he could never be mad at him, no matter how hard he tried. “Deep tissue with a fuckload of Tiger Balm. And definitely a Studio Ghibli marathon.”

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