need you. I don’t know why being around you helps me, but it does. I told myself a thousand times how unfair I was being to you. I had no right to come see you again, no right whatsoever. If you want to kick me out of here, I wouldn’t blame you. All I ask is that you hear me out.”
“You’re asking too much of me.”
He set the untouched coffee aside and splayed his fingers through his hair. “I know. I had an awful weekend. I holed up in the house and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Everything closes in around me and I’m paralyzed, completely paralyzed. I’m not sure how much you know about…”
“Enough.”
He raised his gaze to meet mine as though my answer surprised him again. I’d gone online and done a bit of reading on the subject. Although I wasn’t completely sure of the details of the car accident that had killed Nick’s brother, I realized Nick blamed himself.
“Basically, you suffered a traumatic event and the brain won’t allow you to move past it so that you relive that moment again and again each time with the same terror and shock.”
“Yes.” Nick’s voice was little more than a husky whisper. “It’s like sinking into a black hole and I can’t pull myself out of it. Each and every time I relive that night, those last few minutes we were together keep going through my head. I’m drunk and singing and Brad was driving because I was too smashed to get behind the wheel. He was telling me it’s time I grew up. I laughed at him. I actually laughed and called him a Jesus freak. Brad shook his head and wanted to know when I was going to settle down and be the man he knew me to be.
“I took offense at the question. I was older and more of a man than he’d ever be. I worked hard, played harder, and liked my life exactly the way it was.”
Nick seemed lost in the memory, lost in the pain.
“Brad was the responsible kid, the one who made my parents proud. I was the exact opposite. I got kicked off the football team for a bad attitude, while Brad was the star basketball player. I barely graduated from high school; Brad was valedictorian of his class.”
The guilt was eating him up.
“I had called him, woke him from a sound sleep in the wee hours of the morning, demanding he come get me. And being the kind of brother he was, Brad came to pick me up from the bar where I’d been partying with my buddies. My friends were in just as bad a shape as me and they needed to call for rides home themselves. I didn’t want to listen to his lecture and told him so and that’s when it happened. A car plowed into us…The irony of the situation is almost more than I can take.”
Nick needed to sit down. He went pale and his entire body had started to shake. Taking hold of his arm, I led him to the table and sat him down, then scooted a chair so that I was facing him so close our knees touched. He reached out and took hold of both my hands, his grip so tight that I nearly cried out. He lessened the pressure and looked beyond me, recounting the details of that night.
“The man who hit us was driving drunk,” Nick said, his voice a husky whisper. “He was driving the wrong way on the freeway. Brad swerved in order to miss him, swerved so that the impact was on his side instead of my own.”
Nick’s knees started to bounce then and his entire body trembled. Not knowing how best to help, I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around his torso. Nick grabbed me as if I were a life preserver in a storm-tossed sea, his breathing erratic and uneven.
“He died, Em, he died in my arms. I can’t forget the look in his eyes. That’s all I see, it haunts me, knowing I should have been the one who died. My brother was a good man; he had such a big heart. He worked with kids in the foster-care program and he loved them. He took the worst cases, the teens who struck out at the unfairness of life, and he loved them. He made a difference in their lives.”
I could tell Nick was struggling to breathe and that another panic