Page 23 of My Best Friend Is Broken
Then he blinks, and his eyes focus. “Nicky?”
The uncertainty in his voice breaks something in my chest. Like he’s not sure I’m real, or maybe not sure he wants me to be.
“Yeah,” I say, my voice rough with exhaustion and something that might be grief. “It’s me.”
“You came back.”
It’s not relief in his voice, it’s surprise. Like he genuinely didn’t expect to see me again. Like maybe part of him hoped he wouldn’t.
“I said I would.”
The words hang between us, heavy with the weight of all the promises I’ve made and broken. I said I’d always come back to him, but I never said what condition I’d be in when I did. Never mentioned the blood under my fingernails or the way violence follows me home like a stray dog.
And part of me is hurt. Liam wanted this for me. He wanted me to join the mafia.
But that was the old Liam. The young Liam. The innocent Liam. And I am man enough to know that nobody is responsible for my life choices apart from me.
We stare at each other across the space of the living room, and it might as well be an ocean. He’s pulled the blanket up to his chin now, using it like armor against whatever he sees when he looks at me. His blue eyes are careful, guarded, like he’s trying to solve a puzzle he’s not sure he wants the answer to.
“Are you hurt?” he asks finally, and the question catches me off guard.
Because he’s still worried about me. Even now, even after everything, his first instinct is to make sure I’m okay. It’s so fundamentally Liam, so much like the boy who used to patch up my scraped knees and worry when I was five minutes late, that I almost start crying right there in my own living room.
“No,” I say, though it’s not entirely true. I’m hurt in ways that won’t show on x-rays, bleeding from wounds that won’t heal with bandages. “I’m fine.”
His gaze travels over me, taking inventory. I know what he’s seeing. My dark clothes, now rumpled and stained, the tension in my shoulders, the careful way I’m holding myself like I’m trying not to fall apart.
And then his eyes land on my hands.
I look down and see what made his breath hitch. There’s blood under my fingernails despite my scrubbing, dark crescents that tell a story I don’t want him to read. On my shirt cuff, barely visible but unmistakably there, a small spatter of red that I missed in my hasty cleanup.
“It’s not mine,” I say quickly, because I can see the question forming on his lips and I need to answer it before he has to ask.
The words hit him like a slap. His face goes white, and he shrinks further into the corner of the sofa. The blanket pulls tighter around him, and I realize with a sick twist in my stomach that he’s not cold, he’s trying to make himself disappear.
He is scared of me. Scared of what I have done. And he is right. He is the one who has been to prison, but the things I have done are far, far worse. Liam never meant to take a life. Unlike me.
“I need to shower,” I say, because suddenly I can’t stand the way he’s looking at me. Can’t stand the space between us or the careful way he’s breathing, like he’s afraid the wrong word might set me off.
He nods without meeting my eyes. “Okay.”
I should leave. Should give him space to process, to breathe, to exist without the weight of my presence pressing down on him. But I can’t seem to make my feet move. Can’t stop looking at him curled up on our sofa likea wounded animal, can’t stop wanting to reach for him even though I know he’ll only flinch away.
“Liam,” I start, but I don’t know how to finish. What do you say to someone whose world you’ve just destroyed? How do you apologize for being exactly what they feared you were?
“Just... go shower, Nicky.” His voice is barely above a whisper, but there’s something in it that wasn’t there before. Not anger exactly, but something sharper than sadness. “Please.”
So I go.
The bathroom feels like a sanctuary and a confessional all at once. I strip off my clothes with mechanical precision, each piece of fabric another layer of the night I’m trying to shed. The shirt goes in the hamper. I’ll have to burn it later, along with the jacket and probably the shoes. Evidence of a life Liam should never have to see.
The water is scalding when I step under the spray, hot enough to turn my skin red, but not hot enough to wash away what I’ve done. I scrub at my hands until they’re raw, digging the soap under my fingernails, trying to erase every trace of violence from my skin.
But it’s not enough. It’s never enough.
I press my forehead against the tile wall and let the water run over me, trying to wash away the memory of Dante’s smile as he worked. The way the Russian had begged in broken English, promising information, money, anything to make it stop. The sound the knife made going in, over and over, until the begging became gurgling and then blessed silence.
I’d stood there and watched it happen. Held the man steady when he tried to run. Driven the car that brought us there and the car that took us away.
