Page 60 of How to Blow It with a Billionaire

Once my passport had been checked, luggage retrieved, and I’d been welcomed to the USA, I was whisked along gleaming concourses, past travelers and lingerers and an honest-to-goodness Dunkin’ Donuts stand, and finally bundled into a limo. It was a bit like being a rockstar and a bit like being kidnapped.

Although I would make a terrible subject for a kidnapping. I wasn’t famous and my family wasn’t wealthy. What were the perpetrators going to demand? Bring us one million units of your best walnut bread and your copy of Twilight Imperium? Or maybe Caspian would have to step in. Which sounded like the plot of a five-episode, post-watershed BBC drama series. And viewers would write in and complain about the unnecessary homosexual content. Because being part of a clearly implausible kidnapping plotline was necessary. Whereas kissing a man was totally gratuitous.

Oh God. Brain. Stop. Just stop.

My head was a ceaseless whirl, disconnected frivolities flying about as chaotically as socks in the washing machine. It was probably a slightly unhinged defense mechanism. So I didn’t have to think the only thought that mattered: Nik’s in hospital. Nik’s in hospital. Nik’s in hospital.

Also, the whole limo deal was extra awkward when there was only you. Maybe I should have felt like Mr. Big—sweeping between skyscrapers in my long, black penis car—but I was small. So small. The corridor of the limo rolling away from me.

I tried to distract myself by looking out the window. Except it was hard to get a sense of the city beyond its difference. An alien glitterscape, languidly sprawling, up, across, around, careless of its own space. Disconcertingly uniform, too, with its neat redbrick parcels and tall silver towers. This smooth curve of history, so unlike the haphazard patchwork of London.

Ugh. I’d been in America less than an hour and I was homesick?

The drive was quicker than I was ready for it to be. Airport, tunnel, streets. And we arrived. The hospital was this vast campus, multi-building thing, bright, shiny, and monstrous, the way that only public institutions could be.

I de-limoed near the big red EMERGENCY sign and hurled myself into the building. Everything that followed was little more than a blur of…happening. I checked in—my squeaky questions gently put aside for the surgeon—and was redirected. A horrible hell-journey of slick gray tunnels and silver elevators, my nose full of hospital smell. I had to go through another round of identification at the ICU, while I scoured my hands with sanitizer gel. Then another corridor. Past the misted glass of waiting area: huddled shadows within. My footfalls silenced by vinyl, as if I was already half ghost.

And finally I was there.

Standing in the doorway of a room.

It was a nice room. It was. If you could look past the tangle of screens and equipment and mad scientist tubing. The white walls. The white sheets.

And Nik was—oh God.

The last time I’d seen him…so banal, really. A stilted airport parting that we’d both believed and not believed was a proper goodbye. Shit, I’d better go, he’d said. Travel safely, I’d answered. And that was it. I could vaguely remember him walking away, laptop bag swung across one shoulder, lacrosse stick over the other, his shadow cast long against the epoxy-shining floor like a sundial marking the hour.

Now he was just a flop of blondish hair, cocooned in a hospital gown.

I put a hand over my mouth because I wasn’t sure I could even be trusted to breathe properly right then.

After a moment or two, the doctor came. Introduced herself—Dr. Sharma, she said—and talked to me softly. There was good news. He was breathing by himself. No traumatic brain injuries. But there was other stuff. Broken legs. Broken sternum. Multiple rib and spine fractures. Bone shards embedded in the spinal cord—

“Is he going to die?” I asked.

“He’s stable for now.”

She said it so warily I realized I was asking the wrong thing. “Will he…he’s going to get better, right?”

Except that just made her repeat everything she’d previously said. With some extra stuff about titanium plates and potential compromise to the spinal cord.

And that was when I knew I had to stop with the questions. It was too early for them. And the answers wouldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already guess. What mattered was the fact Nik was alive. “Can I go in?”

She nodded and stepped away.

And I…I hesitated. Like a fucking worthless coward, I stood there. Because crossing that threshold would mean this was really happening. And I didn’t know how to bear it. I didn’t want the future of that golden, laughing, ridiculously talented boy to be a shattered body in a hospital bed.

Except it was. And that was that.

And it didn’t make him any less Nik.

Step by step, then. Step by fucking step. A far longer journey than the one across the ocean. From the door to Nik.

I slumped into the nearest chair. His hand was lying on top of the covers, looking so neat that it could only have been placed there. People were naturally messy. His symmetry was as terrifying as his stillness. I didn’t dare actually move the hand. There were so many tubes sticking out of it I’d probably have ended up killing him. But I covered it gently with my own. He felt strange. Not warm or cold. And very smooth. Like plastic.

“Jesus, Nik.” My voice came out way too loud for where I was and I had to try again. “What the fuck? I told you to travel safely. This doesn’t look anything like travelling safely. In fact, some people might call getting smashed up by a car the exact opposite of travelling safely.”

I don’t know. It had to be wishful thinking but I was sure I felt the slightest change in the pattern of his breathing. Like maybe whatever he was dreaming had made him smile.

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