Page 57 of My Best Friend Is Broken
The tears come suddenly, silently, soaking into my pillow as I press my face into the fabric to muffle any sound. I don’t want Nicky to hear me crying. Don’t want to give him another reason to worry, another problem to solve, another burden to carry.
I’ve put him through enough.
The man who knocked Wayne unconscious without hesitation, who had him punished and dealt with like it was nothing, who commands respect and fear from dangerous people… that man almost broke tonight because of me. Because I pushed him past his limits, made him believe he had to hurt me to save me.
Made him think, for just a moment, that he was no better than the people who hurt me in prison.
That’s what haunts me most. Not what almost happened, but the look on his face when he realized what he’d almost done. The way he recoiled from me like I was contaminated, like touching me had infected him with something poisonous.
Maybe it has. Maybe that’s what I do to people. Slowly poison them with my damage until they become twistedversions of themselves, until the love they feel for me turns into something darker and more desperate.
Maybe the kindest thing I could do is leave. Pack what little I have and disappear before I destroy him completely. Let him find someone whole, someone who can love him back without dragging him into the darkness.
But even as I think it, I know I’m too selfish to follow through. Too weak to give up the one person who makes me feel human, even if being human means being broken.
I cry myself to sleep in a bed that smells like nothing, dreaming of sandalwood and safety and all the things I’ve lost through my own inability to be anything other than what prison made me.
Morning comes gray and unwelcome through the bedroom window. I lie in bed longer than I should, listening to Nicky moving around the apartment, putting off the moment when I’ll have to face him and pretend that everything is normal.
But eventually, the need for tea and the basic requirements of being alive force me out of bed and into yesterday’s clothes. My reflection in the mirror looks exactly like what I am. Someone who cried himself to sleep and woke up with no better understanding of how to fix the mess he’s made.
The kitchen smells of coffee, tea and toast, blessedly normal scents that almost mask the underlying tension that seems to permeate every corner of the apartment now. Nicky is standing at the counter with his back to me,shoulders rigid with the kind of careful control that means he’s working hard to appear calm.
“Morning,” I say quietly, testing the waters.
“Morning.” He doesn’t turn around, but his voice is carefully neutral. Polite. The tone you’d use with a stranger whose mental state you weren’t sure about.
There’s a cup of tea waiting for me on the counter, made exactly the way I like it. The small kindness hits me harder than any harsh words could have.
I take my tea and sit at the kitchen table, watching him butter toast with mechanical precision. We’re both pretending this is normal, that we haven’t crossed lines that can’t be uncrossed, that the broken bathroom door hanging askew on its hinges isn’t a constant reminder of how badly things went wrong.
The door is like a wound in the apartment’s carefully maintained perfection. Splintered wood and damaged frame, a violation of the safe space we were trying to build together. Every time I glance toward the hallway, I see it, and every time I see it, I’m reminded of the sound it made when Nicky kicked it down, the crack of wood giving way under desperate force.
He was that desperate to save me. That terrified of losing me.
And I repaid him by trying to manipulate him into something that would have destroyed us both.
“I’m sorry,” I say finally, because the silence is suffocating and someone has to break it.
He stills, butter knife frozen halfway to the toast. “For what?”
The question catches me off guard. For what? Where do I even start?
“For last night. For the pills. For...” I struggle to find words for the thing that’s sitting between us like a live grenade. “For what I asked you to do. For putting you in that position.”
“You were having a breakdown,” he says carefully, still not looking at me. “People don’t think clearly during breakdowns.”
It’s generous of him to frame it that way, but we both know it’s not the whole truth. Yes, I was falling apart, but I also knew exactly what I was asking for. I wanted him to hurt me, to use me, to do all the things that would confirm what Wayne and prison and five years of hell had taught me about what I was worth.
“I thought it would help,” I admit. “I thought if you... if we... it would make everything else stop mattering.”
He finally turns to look at me, and his expression is unreadable. “And now?”
“Now I don’t know anything.” The admission tastes like ash. “I thought I was ready for things I’m clearly not ready for. I thought I understood what I wanted, but I don’t think I understand anything.”
The toast sits forgotten on the counter between us, growing cold while we have this conversation that feels like defusing a bomb. One wrong word and everything explodes.
“Liam,” he says, and his voice is gentler now, more like the man who kissed me two nights ago. “What happened last night... that wasn’t your fault. You were hurting, and you asked for something that seemed like it would make the hurt stop. That’s human. That’s understandable.”
