My hand trembled as I pulled on the handle of the door. Shit, why was I nervous? It was only Eli.
I entered the room to find him sitting on the bed with his knees pulled to his chest. He had an IV in his arm just like in the ambulance and there were some other machines beeping around him. Standard hospital stuff.
When the door creaked open he turned my way, a weak smile painting his face. God, his face. He had dark circles under his eyes that accompanied the foggy look in them. His hair was messily pressed against his head and his body sagged with exhaustion.
I walked over to him slowly, like walking too fast would make the ground shake and harm him. I took his hand into mine gently.
"Hey," he whispered.
"Hi," I said hoarsely. "How do you feel?"
"No doubt the worst hangover of my life."
I sat on the edge of the bed carefully. I was treating him like he was a fragile piece of glass that could break at any moment, though I wasn’t trying to. "So you remember what happened?"
He rested his chin on his knees. "The nurses told me."
I rubbed the back of his hand with my thumb as Eli rubbed his temple. He was embarrassed by it all, I could tell. His eyes weren’t meeting mine and was chewing on the inside of his cheek.
"Why did you do that, Eli?" I forced myself to ask. It was a difficult question, one that I knew he had no desire to answer. I was hesitant to ask out of fear of the truth, but I couldn’t carry on without getting it off my chest.
His jaw clenched as he stared into the white sheets of the hospital bed, giving me a meaningless shrug for an answer.
"You could have died! I thought that you..." I squeezed his hand and swallowed the lump in my throat. “What if we hadn’t found you and you kept going? We could be in a completely different situation right now.”
"I didn't mean to,” his voice cracked as he spoke.
"Is that the truth? This was all just one huge accident, one moment of weakness?"
Eli parted his lips to speak but his words got caught in his throat. It made my heart sink, was it not an accident? Did I not do a good enough job at proving to Eli that he meant the world to me?
He saw fear in my eyes and gave my hand a tight squeeze. "I did not do it on purpose."
I felt a 'but' coming.
"But I was also curious," he whispered. “About what they would do, how they would react.”
“‘What they would do?’” I muttered to myself as I tried to decipher the meaning in his words. "Macy or the twins?"
Eli scoffed. "I don't care about Macy. It was a long time ago when I came to terms that she will always hate me because she thinks that I am the reason for her sister's death. Nothing will change that. When she kicked me out, I was hurt, but it wasn’t really because of her."
"So your siblings," I clarified. "I know they're bad at showing it, but I do think they care. They told me to tell you that they love you."
Eli tried to sit up, but I gently pushed him back. I did not want him to move a muscle when he was this weak. His brows furrowed. "Yeah? So where are they?"
"They were just here."
"But they couldn't be bothered to stay." Eli’s teeth grinded together in a rough motion. "That shows me how much they care. I care about them, but they only care about each other."
I now believed my sister when she told me the situation with the Richardson siblings was not black and white. The twins were blinded by what Macy had taught them all their lives. They were children who lost their parents before they could even talk, of course they would listen to the only parental figure in their life when she tells them who to blame.
But that isn’t fair to Eli.
I wrapped my arms around him and squeezed lightly. He leaned into the hug, wrapping an arm around my side and leaning his head on my shoulder. We existed in comfortable silence, each other's presence being the only thing we needed.
"I have a problem, Javier." he whispered in my ear.
I pulled his head into my chest and kept quiet because nothing felt appropriate to say. I was proud of him for admitting it, but it was not the time to share that. He was reflecting and I needed to be there for him, not risk him feeling bad about it.
