“Change can be great.” I nodded, trying to encourage her.
She reached to hold my hand.
“Thank you for being my friend. I was afraid I’d lose you guys because…”
“Nah, I’ll always be here for ya,” I smiled.
And that was the truth. I’d never stop being her friend. No matter what.
______
Later that night, or maybe it was the next morning, Nick threw his water bottle at my gut, waking me up.
“Dude, what the hell?” I asked him, throwing it back over at his face.
He ducked out of the way. “Sorry, wanted to see if you were up.”
“Do you usually throw shit at me when I’m sleeping to check?” I asked him incredulously. I wouldn’t put it past him.
He hopped out of bed then, and I realized he was fully dressed. “Let’s go.”
“What?” I questioned him, rubbing my eyes.
“Yeah, let’s go.”
“Uh… where? It’s the middle of the fucking night, bud.”
“Yupp. It is, Benny,” he confirmed. Shit. He only used Benny when he was serious.
“We need to set some new goals. Get us out of this slump. See a sunrise and all the bullshit. C’mon, you only live once,” he told me, and then started moving towards the door.
I quickly popped to my feet and threw on a shirt and pants, wondering where the fuck he was gonna go. I mean, I was the only one who had a truck, so he needed me.
He was waiting outside our apartment for me when I wandered out, and I wordlessly followed him, still practically sleeping.
He directed me to drive to the Callahans and I had no clue why I was doing it.
As soon as we pulled up to her curb, he dipped out and I watched as he climbed up the veranda on her back porch’s patio and scaled his way to the roof. On the roof, he inched close to her window and started tapping on it.
I watched him, half wishing I could be the one climbing into her window to see what her room looked like. Her room felt off-limits to me; I’d never been in it… Hell, I’d never been in any girl’s room… and I was damn curious what it looked like. Did it feel like her in there? Were there pictures of her and Duke, the four of us too, maybe? I hoped.
I wondered how the hell Nick was going to manage breaking her out of her room… If she were fully healed, she could probably manage to beat Nick back to my car even. She was super athletic. But with a bum foot… I wasn’t sure…
I waited for Nick to give me a sign.
He was in there for about two full minutes before he motioned for me to drive to the front of her house.
About a minute later, I watched Nick giving her a piggy-back ride out the front door.
“Where to?” I asked Nick as soon as they were in the car.
“Just drive, bud,” he said with a smile on his face.
I turned on a good playlist, rolled down my truck windows, and eased away from the curb.
I ended up driving all the way to Timberland Lake, stopping at a spot that I knew had park benches in the sand.
We sat there on the bench, just enjoying each other’s company and listening to the lake waves roll onto the shore while watching the sun rise.
