The nurse popped back in, holding a clipboard and a handful of pill bottles. “Ibuprofen. You’ll want to start with four, every six hours. If you get worse—headache, dizziness, loss of vision—you come back. Understand?”
“Sure,” I said, and took the pills from her. The prescription bottle was sticky from the price sticker, the label already peeling at the edges.
She eyed the bandages on my face. “You got someone to drive you?”
“Friend picking me up.” Another lie, or maybe just wishful thinking.
She squinted, then nodded and left me to it. The automatic door hissed open, letting in a fresh blast of fluorescent glarefrom the lobby, and I squinted after her, wondering what she’d say about me once the door shut. Probably nothing. I’d seen enough of the ER in my life to know that most people left less interesting stories behind.
My phone vibrated in the pocket of my shredded jeans. I fished it out, thumbs sticky with dried blood, and squinted at the screen. Three missed calls from a number I didn’t recognize, and one text from Knox that just read:“When you sober up, call. We need to talk.”
I stared at the message, my pulse thumping loud in my ears. I’d sooner drive a nail through my other hand than call Knox when I was this fucked up, but the thought of ignoring him made my stomach lurch even harder.
I typed out a reply—“I’m fine. Bike’s not. Don’t need a ride.”I added a thumbs-up emoji, just to piss him off, then powered off the phone before I could second-guess myself.
For a while, I just sat and listened to the muted ER noise—the shuffle of nurses’ shoes, the low beep of machines, the constant, inescapable hum of bad lighting. My head hurt, my ribs ached, and somewhere under all of it was a bruised, stupid hope that maybe this time, I’d finally outrun my past.
When the nurse came back to release me, I was already halfway out of the chair. She handed me a packet of paperwork and a wet-wipe to clean the blood off my hands. “Take care of yourself, Mr. McKenzie.”
I nodded, then limped out into the sharp antiseptic cold of the parking lot, the taste of copper still thick in my mouth.
Maybe tomorrow, I’d go home.
Maybe this time, I’d stay gone.
I hadn’t even gotten the hospital stench out of my nose when I realized I had nowhere left to run. The sun was just starting to creep up behind the strip mall across the street, paintingthe parking lot in that queasy early-morning light that makes everything look vaguely radioactive.
I slumped on the curb, feet planted in a puddle of old engine oil, and tried to stretch out the kink in my back. I’m not a small guy—nearly six feet, and my arms still held enough muscle to lift a half-dead motorcycle—but after a night of being used as a punching bag, I felt like I’d shrunk six inches and aged a decade.
I checked my phone again, not because I expected anything but because I needed an excuse to avoid dialing the one number that mattered. Knox had texted twice more, the first a simple“Update?”and the second a threat only an older brother could deliver without an ounce of irony:“You got one hour before I call the fucking police.”
If there was a God, he had a sick sense of humor, giving me brothers like mine.
I thumbed a menthol out of the crumpled pack in my pocket, cupping the lighter against the damp breeze. The first drag tasted like burning trash and metal, but it woke me up enough to face the music.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about being the baby of the family: every mistake, every disaster, every fuck-up gets broadcast through the sibling grapevine at the speed of sound. Add a mother who prays over her Crock-Pot and a father who still considers a belt a parenting tool, and you get a childhood where even breathing wrong could spark a McKenzie Summit.
I could already hear the conversation Knox and Ransom would have about me before I even hit “call.” Reckless. Selfish. Ruining the family name. It never seemed to occur to them that maybe I liked the drama, maybe I craved the attention. Or maybe I just wanted to see if anyone would actually show up when it mattered.
The real secret—the one I’d never admit out loud—was that I’d built my whole adult life around the fear they’d find outexactly what kind of trouble I liked to get into. The kind that left you bruised on the inside, not just the out.
How do you tell your domineering, tattooed, take-no-shit brothers that all you ever wanted was to be dominated yourself? That under the sarcasm and smart mouth, you’d rather kneel than fight?
You don’t.
You just keep running, until one day your legs give out.
I ground the cigarette into the curb, stared at the cracked screen of my phone, and finally did what I’d been dreading since the moment I woke up in the ER. I called home. It rang twice. No more. Knox must’ve had the phone holstered to his chest like a cop on a stakeout.
“Where the hell are you?” he said, and it wasn’t a question.
“Not dead, thanks for asking,” I said, my voice steady in a way that surprised even me.
“Don’t get smart. Mom’s already lighting candles, and Gramps is pacing the porch like he’s about to shoot the next person up the drive.”
“Tell him to save the ammo for the real criminals.”
There was a silence, the kind that meant Knox was deciding whether to chew me out now or wait until I was in spitting distance. “What happened.”
