Page 71 of Turning Tides
Not that I’d say I liked having my livelihood ruined and being forced to move in with Cyrus was a particularly good thing, but it had given me Shane. He was my rock in all of this. In all things. Sometimes I thought he was superhuman. But that was just who he was. Shane’s love language was doing things for people. Big things or small things. The same way that I created art to show people I loved them, that was Shane with everyday deeds. And then not-so-everyday deeds like driving four hours to take your boyfriend to see his ex-best friend in the hospital.
Shane tracked him down to a room on the third floor and I followed along, shaking and unable to speak. I clung to Shane like he was a life raft and he navigated the hallways, taking us up to a room with two people inside. The curtain between them was drawn and we couldn’t see who was on the far side of it, but closest to the door was Clayton.
My hand tightened on Shane’s. The last time I saw Clayton he had been smiling and happy. Hadn’t he? Maybe it had all been a facade. Maybe the man lying in the bed with the shaggy brown hair, overdue for a cut and caked with blood, had been the real Clayton all along.
He looked like he was sleeping, or maybe he was just drugged out of his head.
“Do you need me to go in with you?” Shane asked.
“I can’t do any of this without you,” I told him. “Come on.”
Using a strength I wasn’t aware I had, I walked into the room. The closer I got, the worse Clayton looked. Not ready to look at his face again, I looked at the rest of him. His right leg was elevated and covered in a cast from the knee down.
The contents of my stomach rolled like an angry sea and then I saw his right arm. It was covered in a cast the same way his leg was. His left arm appeared to be uninjured, but it had an IV going into it.
Up close, his face hadn’t fared too well. He had two black eyes, a split lip, and a small gash in the side of his head, near his hairline. That was the source for all the blood that was still caked in his hair.
“Clayton?” My voice cracked and I cleared my throat. “What the hell happened to you?”
Clayton’s eyelids fluttered and it looked like it took all his energy to drag them open. “Archer?”
“Yeah, it’s me. What the hell happened to you. You look like you got hit by a bus.”
Clayton’s small huff of laughter was cut off abruptly when he winced. He panted a few times, screwing his eyes shut. “Hurts. Sorry.”
I didn’t want to be here looking at him like this. I didn’t want to be looking at him at all.
“What happened?” My voice was harder than I’d intended, but I felt like I was barely hanging on. Clayton was supposed to have beenin the past. My ex-best friend. He’d once known everything about me—which was how he’d known exactly how to rip me off.
“That guy I owed.” Clayton sighed. “Doesn’t like being owed.”
“What the fuck?”
“Yeah. They said they didn’t kill me cuz they can’t collect from a corpse. But he wanted me to know he was serious.”
“What did the cops say?”
Clayton looked at me with his swollen eyes and his half-doped expression. “Nothing. I didn’t tell them what happened.”
“Clayton…” My fingers tightened on Shane’s. “You have to tell them.”
“I have to do nothing but find ten grand to pay him before he breaks my other leg, or decides to make a real example of me and dump me in a river somewhere.”
“Call him.”
My head whipped to the side so fast I swear I gave myself whiplash. “Shane, no.”
Shane looked at me, his face etched with sympathy and determination. Already I knew I wasn’t going to win this battle. Fuck, did I even want to win it? I didn’t know anymore. I didn’t find it hard to still be angry with Clayton, even though he’d been worked over and probably left for dead. He’d been through his own kind of hell, but he’d brought it for himself.
“Archer, yes. I have it; he needs it.”
“It won’t stop here, Shane. He’ll want more and more.” Panic clawed at my chest when I thought about Clayton inserting himself in my new life, taking everything good about it away from me. Again. Leaving me with nothing. Again. I didn’t want Shane to hate me and he would if Clayton ruined his life too.
“It will stop here.” Shane let go of my hand and cradled my face. He looked me in the eyes. “Listen to me. It will stop here. All of it. The gambling and the bookies and the fucking you over and dragging you hours away because he got the shit kicked out of him.”
“How? You can’t just give him ten grand to give some shady asshole.”
“He’s right.” Clayton interjected from his bed. “You can’t fix this for me. No one can.”
