I lean onto my arm over the bathroom counter, trying to put as much pressure on the area above my wrist as possible. Trey finally knocks on the door. It seems like he took forever, but I’m pretty sure I’m unable to accurately measure time in the panicked state I’m in.

“Come in!” I yell loudly, having left the door slightly open after I called him. I wipe my cheeks on my shoulders, trying to remove any evidence of tears. “Hope I wasn’t interrupting anything,” I say to him, hearing my voice shake as I focus on the blood blossoming out onto the towel I’ve loosely draped over my hand.

“No, not at all… uh…. Max? What happened, man?”

“What?”

“Did you throw a bottle through the window? What the… there’s blood on the floor. Max?”

I sniffle and meet his eyes in the mirror as he walks toward me.

“What’s wrong?”

“I cut up my hand.” I turn around to show him the bloody towel and feel the flow of blood increase when I stand up fully.

“Oh, shit.” He stops abruptly and takes a few breaths. “How bad is it?”

“There’s glass in it. Blood. Lots of it.”

“Did you two get into a fight?” He diverts his attention, moving quickly to the dresser until he finds one of Callen’s soccer socks.

“He cheated on me,” I barely manage to choke out. “I saw him. In the men’s locker room.” I cry fully and easily with my best friend, my chest hurting where my heart used to beat strongly for Callen.

He stares, mouth agape, and shakes his head. Seconds later, he snaps out of it. “Here.” He ties the sock tightly around my arm just above my wrist and tosses Callen’s now-bloody swim shorts on the floor. He looks under the towel. “Ohhhh, shit. We need to get you to a hospital.”

I nod, beginning to feel lightheaded as I let him take control of the situation.

“It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” He directs me to the bed, sensing my weakness. “Just a sec.” He calls Zaina and asks her to come to my room. She’s here almost immediately, acting only on the urgency in his voice because he didn’t tell her anything.

“Oh, my God! What happened?”

“Zai, I’m taking him to the ER. I need you to stay here and wait for Callen.”

“What’s going on?” She looks at me with sympathetic tears.

“He was with another guy, Zany,” I whisper weakly, putting my arm around Trey’s shoulder as he helps me up. “He doesn’t know I saw him… but I did.”

“That son of a… Max… where?”

“Zai, we don’t have time. We’ll figure this out later,” Trey says. “I’ll call you once we find an ER or something.”

“Right,” she says.

“Just let Callen know where we are… that he’ll be okay. If he walks into this bloody mess, I’m afraid he’ll think something much worse happened.”

“Okay.”

“Tell him…” I start. “Tell him…” Trey drags me out of the room before I can finish my thought. My thought didn’t have an ending, though. I have so much to say to him, and yet nothing to say to him at all.

“He’s pallid,” a nurse comments when we reach the hospital 40 minutes later. She begins to take my blood pressure on my good wrist. “BP’s low,” she calls back to another awaiting staff member. “Let’s take him back.”

“Can I come?” Trey asks.

“Are you family?”

“His brother-in-law,” he responds. Close enough.

They settle me in a wheelchair and Trey walks down the long hallway with us to a big room with about twenty beds, separated by curtains. The nurse and my friend both help me up onto one of the beds, and the woman removes the towel that I’d used to hide the grotesque wounds.

“Ouch,” she says. “How did this happen?”

“I fell into a window… fist-first.”

She smiles at me while another nurse puts on gloves and takes a pair of tweezers from a sanitary package. “American?” I nod. “Too much to drink?”

“Not a drop.”

“I need you to tell me the truth so I know what medicine I can give you.”

“He’s not your stereotypical 18-year-old American guy,” Trey asserts. “If he says he hasn’t had anything to drink, trust me. He hasn’t.”

“I had one drink yesterday,” I admit, watching as one of the larger pieces of glass is removed from the muscle between my pointer finger and thumb. “Shit…” I say under my breath, feeling the pain every millimeter of the way as it exits my skin.

“Okay, then,” she says to me. I glance back up to make sure she believes me as she turns back to my friend. “Are you Trey Holland?”

“Yeah.” His cheeks flush bright red.

“My daughter thinks you hung the moon.” I chuckle, alternating my attention between him and my hand.

He shakes his head, still blushing. “That’s sweet, but I did not.”

“How bad is it?” I interrupt.

“You’ve got some big pieces here… one or two smaller ones. We’ll want to do a CT scan when we’ve got everything out to look for damage to any tendons or nerves. You’re going to have quite a few stitches, though. I hope you weren’t planning on any more watersports while you were here.”

“I hope to go home, honestly,” I tell them. Trey puts his hand on my shoulder.

“There aren’t any commercial flights this late in the day,” he says to me.

“Can’t your dad do anything? I have to get off this island.”

“Let me go make some calls.”

I don’t see Trey again until I’m released by the doctors.

“Well?” he says, rising from the chair closest to the exit.

“Twenty-seven stitches. Nerve damage–the median one? And I fucked up two common digital arteries or something like that. I learned way more about the hand than I ever wanted to. Apparently, I’m going to need therapy, and I swear to God, if this hinders me from a surfing career, I will feed that motherfucker to the sharks.”

“Huh…” he chuckles.

“I may do that last part anyway.” I start to go up to the check-out station.

“You’re ready to go.”

“I have to pay or something.”

“I’ve got it covered. I talked to Jon. We worked it all out.”

“What about going home?” I ask.

“We can swing by the hotel, get your suitcase, and then there’s a jet waiting for you. You should be home by about two in the morning,” he says, putting his arm across my shoulders.

“Can we get my prescriptions first?”

“They filled them here,” he says, lifting a paper sack.

“My hero.” I pull him into a hug. “Thanks, Trey.”

“Anything for you.”

After getting into a cab, I close my eyes, feeling the effects of the pain killers they were pumping into my bloodstream.

“So, do you want to tell me what happened?”

I shrug my shoulders and sigh, keeping my eyelids shut. “I went looking for him… the last place I could think of was the gym. He wasn’t there, so I went in the locker room… and I heard him. Heard him laughing. I followed the sound… and then I heard them fucking.”

“You’re sure it’s what you heard?”

“I went back to the shower stall… their clothes were on the floor. Callen’s shorts were there, his phone… and then I’m pretty sure the other shorts were the ones the cabana bartenders wear. Same turquoise color with the white and blue edges.”

“Maybe they were, uh…”

“Checking each other’s moles? What?” I ask as I look over at him, angry. “What would two naked guys be doing alone in a shower stall… two presumably naked gay guys?” I remember the other item on the ground. “I forgot to mention the condom wrapper. That might provide the missing link for you. He was cheating on me, Trey.”

“Yeah,” he says, resigned. “Okay. Max, I am so sorry. I don’t know why he would do this to you. Maybe he was drunk–”

“I don’t give a shit. It’s not an excuse.”

“It’s not, no. But he loves you, Max.”

“Don’t even fucking say that, Trey. People who love you don’t take fucking cleats to your heart, okay?”

“I’ll talk to him,” he pleads.

“I won’t,” I counter. “This will never be okay with me. All right?”

“Yeah.”

“If Zaina cheated, it would never be okay with you, would it?”

“No. It wouldn’t.”

“Then don’t waste your time on him. It’s over.”

“Oh, Max… shit. I’m just… I’m sorry. I wish I had been a better friend to both of you this trip. If I had realized I was being a jerk, I could have told him the same and we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

“This isn’t your fault. You’d never do this.” I pull my sunglasses down and shut my eyes again. “You and Callen McNare are not cut from the same cloth. I should have seen this coming. He cheated on Brinlee with me.”

“That’s different, and you know it, Max.”

“Is it?”

“It is.”

“It’s not.”

“It is, Max. You always told me he was able to be his true self with you, and that’s why it was different. He was living a lie with her. I bought into that idea, and I believe it to this day. You saved him.”

“And this is how he repays me? I save him.” I can’t hide the emotion in my voice when I say it. “He destroys me.”

My best friend’s arms are around me, and I cry on his shoulder until we reach the hotel.

Trey runs in to retrieve my bag from the front desk, and after one more hug, I’m off to the small airstrip to catch a plane back home.