Washed Up (Bayside Heroes)

“And friends?” She laughs. “I pushed all my friends away over the years, especially when they started questioning why I stayed with Josh. I let him convince me it was them tearing us apart, that we needed to keep what happened in our relationship between us because they just didn’t understand. I stopped talking to all my friends, to my family…” She shakes her head. “To everyone who wasn’t him.”

I reach out for her, folding my hand over hers and squeezing tight.

She sucks in a breath, eyes skirting to the touch before they find my gaze once more. I can feel how erratic her heartbeat is where I hold her, my thumb hovering over that artery in her wrist that gives her away.

This is crossing a line, I try to warn myself.

But it feels too good holding her to stop now.

“He isolated you,” I whisper.

She chews the inside of her cheek, shrugging.

“I let him.”

I close my eyes, the urge to hold her, to pull her into me and take away her pain overwhelming. I’m just about to act on it when she tugs her hand from mine and wipes her face, letting out something between a laugh and a growl.

“Ugh,” she says, letting her hands slap against her thighs as I straighten in my seat again. My palm aches for her warmth now that it’s gone. “This is not what you signed up for when you asked me to help you get house plants, is it?”

She laughs then, but before I can tell her I’m willing to sign up for anything she needs, she shakes her head again.

“Can we change the subject, please?”

I don’t want to, but I nod regardless, putting the car in reverse.

“So, you promise I won’t kill these plants?” I ask as I back out.

That earns me a chuckle, weak as it is. “I can’t promise that, but I can tell you it’ll be a lot harder with these ones.”

“Poor suckers,” I muse as we pull out of the parking lot. “They don’t even know they’re on the way to their death.”

Amanda laughs. “Just read their little tags about how much sunlight they need, and set a day of the week to check on their water levels. You can always get an automated watering system if you really can’t keep up with it.”

“They make those?!”

Another laugh, and then as we pull onto the highway, Amanda falls silent, turning up the music on her phone now attached to the stereo, instead.

I don’t mind it, the silence, not when I’m getting a glimpse of who she is, of how she’s feeling, based on the music she listens to. I hear the way she gets into “Dancing with Myself” by Billy Idol, how she grooves a little in her seat when Whitney Houston comes on, and how she quiets when Bonnie Raitt’s voice fills the car, singing, “I can’t make you love me.”

It kills me, seeing her like this, knowing that she’s finally found the strength to leave that piece of shit, only to have him make her feel inadequate without him. He didn’t deserve her — and he sure as hell doesn’t deserve to hold power over her still.

When we pull up to my building, I find street parking and turn down the music, staring at the steering wheel for a long moment.

“Did you mean what you said in the hospital?” I ask after a moment, not ready to get out of the car, not ready to say goodbye.

“What do you mean?”

“When I was putting you under,” I remind her with a smirk, but she just looks at me like I have a cucumber for a nose.

“Huh?”

I laugh, turning to face her in my seat. “You don’t remember, do you?”

“Remember what?” she asks, and her eyes narrow before they grow wide. “Oh God, what did I say?”

My face splits with a shit-eating grin. “You said I’m even hotter now than I was at eighteen.”

Her jaw drops, eyes the size of baseballs. “No…”

“Oh, yes,” I confirm. “The nurses have been hounding me for details ever since.”

Amanda blinks twice, and then groans, covering her face with her hands and shaking her head.

I laugh, reaching over to grab her wrists and pull them away. “Hey, it’s fine. It was funny. And people say a lot of crazy stuff when they’re being put under like that.”

Amanda grimaces. “I’m so mortified, I wish you’d put me under right now.”

I bark out a laugh. “Come on, it isn’t that bad.”

She gives me a look, and then we both smile, falling silent.

Her eyes float to where my hand still hovers over hers, where I didn’t realize my thumb was smoothing the inside of her wrist. She swallows, chills breaking over her arms as her gaze slides to mine.

“So,” I repeat, swallowing down the nerves straining my words. “Did you?”