Finally, Jason spoke up. “Was his cell phone in his pocket when they brought him in? If it was, I’d like to see if I can call his parents. That way they don’t flip out by getting a call from the hospital in the middle of the night.”
“I believe it was with his personal belongings, yes.” Devon’s phone rang and he pulled it out to look at the display. “I have to take this. I’ll come back when I have more information.”
“Thanks, Devon.” I was surprised he’d given us so much information when he didn’t have to. After he walked away, I slumped against the wall feeling completely wrung out. Without the adrenaline coursing through my body, I was left running on fumes.
Jason wrapped his arm around the back of my neck and pulled me in for a hug. My body went rigid at his touch. He was one of my closest friends, but I’d never known him to be openly affectionate. “Come on, let’s go tell the guys, and see if we can get some of them to clear out.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, unable to form a complete thought. This wasn’t the way our night was supposed to go, but I was grateful to Jason for understanding what I needed.
I couldn’t explain why, but something inside me refused to set foot outside the hospital before I had a chance to talk to Drew and know he was okay.
3
Drew
All I wantedto do was sleep. You’d think that’d be easy to do in a hospital. Not so much. Between the nurses coming in to make sure I woke up normally, the doctors checking to confirm they hadn’t overlooked something, and my over-vigilant family, it felt as though it had been a week since I’d last slept.
This time, it was the scent of coffee filling the room that pulled me out of my haze. I turned my head and scowled as Jason took the seat next to my bed and sipped his morning brew. On top of being exhausted and every inch of my body hurting, I had yet to convince anyone in this place to give me anything beyond water and ice. No one can be expected to be satisfied by that, especially someone who’d played the game of his life the night before and lost.
“You’re up awfully early.” My voice was hoarse and my head throbbed as I tried to sit up. Jason reached for the remote and handed it to me so I could raise the head of the bed rather than continue trying to make the pillows support me.
“Can’t be up early if you haven’t gone to bed,” Jason admitted.
That made me feel like an ass. He shouldn’t have to be up here waiting around to see if I was going to live or die. And from what they’d told me, I was definitely going to live. With the amount of pain I was in, I wasn’t sure yet if that was a good or bad thing.
“Sorry if I freaked you out last night,” I apologized. Jason waved me off before I could say anything else. As comforting as it was to have him by my side, he wasn’t the one I wanted to see sitting in that chair. Perhaps Cam’s absence also had something to do with Jason not sleeping. “Have you heard from him?”
Even though I still didn’t love the idea of Jason and Cam being stupidly in love with one another, I had to admit Jason was better for my best friend than I ever could have been. He’d forced Cam outside of his comfort zone and into the opportunity of a lifetime. Cam would be here now, likely losing his fucking mind, if Jason hadn’t pushed him to go to an audition forA Cut Aboveyesterday.
Jason frowned, and he swallowed hard. “Shit, brother…you don’t remember talking to him?”
My head felt like it was going to explode when I shook my head. Jason put a hand on my arm. “Sorry, parts of last night are a bit fuzzy.”
“He called you last night before we left the clubhouse,” he reminded me. By the wide smile on Jason’s face, I knew it had to be good news. “By now, he’s probably asleep in a hotel in New York, waiting to begin filming.”
A pit formed in my stomach. I was elated for Cam, but I wished he could be here. Maybe it made me a dick, but Cam was the only person I could really talk to about everything that was going on. I needed my other half with me, if for no other reason than to serve as a buffer between me and everyone who tried coddling me as I healed.
“You didn’t tell him about this, did you?” I figured he hadn’t since I knew Cam well enough to know that he would have thrown away whatever they were offering him if he knew I’d been beat up. Still, I needed Jason to confirm my assumptions.
“No, the last time I talked to him was shortly before Eric called me,” Jason assured me. Wait, what did Eric have to do with this? Jason must have read the confusion across my knitted brow. “He’s the one who stopped that asshole from killing you.”
Bile rose in my throat and I seriously thought for a moment that I was going to hurl all over myself and Jason. I remember bits of the beginning of the attack, but somewhere along the way, I must have passed out. The next thing I knew, I was in the emergency room.
Hearing Jason speak so bluntly freaked me the hell out. I knew him well enough to know that he wasn’t the overly dramatic type. If he said there was a chance I could’ve been killed, he meant it.
Jason reached for my hand, squeezing gently as I started to hyperventilate. “Hey, I shouldn’t have been so crass. Yeah, it was that bad, but you don’t need to be thinking about that shit right now. You’ve gotta calm down, man. Otherwise, the nurses are going to come running back in here and before you know it, they’ll be running all sorts of tests again. You don’t want that, do you?”
I shook my head. The only thing I wanted was to get the hell out of here. Well, and I wanted to talk to Eric. He might be able to fill in the huge blanks in my mind. “Sorry, you probably think I’m a colossal wuss right about now.”
Jason snorted in disbelief. “Are you fucking kidding me? I’m shocked as hell you’re doing this well with everything. You might not remember it, but from what I hear, it wasn’t pretty when Eric found you. It takes a hell of a man to bounce back from that.”
I looked all around the room, as if trying to show Jason just how much I hadn’t ”bounced back.” I was lying in a hospital bed, nearly desperate enough to offer him a blowjob if only he’d bring me something to fucking eat and give me a sip of his coffee.
“Thanks.” Jason sat back in his chair once my breathing returned to normal. “Were you the one who called my dad in the middle of the night?”
Jason had the decency to look a bit nervous at the curt tone in my voice.
“Yeah, and I’d do it again if I had to,” he admitted. “Your dad wasn’t too happy about being woken up at one in the morning, but I figured he’d be even more pissed off if I hadn’t called him at all.”
