I headed straight for the intake desk and gave the receptionist Trevor’s name. She slowly typed letters into the computer while I tried not to jump through the three-inch hole in the bulletproof glass between us.

“Declan!” someone called.

I turned to see Sam coming toward me. He looked like shit—dark rings under his eyes, pale skin, a terrified look on his face.

I met him halfway. “What the fuck’s going on, Sam? Where is he?”

“I just left him. Come on.” He motioned for me to follow, then asked the guard at the desk to buzz us through the huge metal door that led into the ICU.

I had to show the guard my ID, repeat Trevor’s full name, and watch him write my information down in the visitor’s log. Was it just me, or was everyone in this goddamned place moving in slow motion? Even the fucking door opened as if a snail were pushing it.

That thought disappeared as soon as we walked through it. Suddenly, everything was moving four times faster than normal—nurses power-walking, orderlies narrowly missing each other with their carts or freaky-looking machines.

The smell would’ve made me want to vomit if I didn’t already want to for other reasons.

As we walked through the ICU, I tried to keep my eyes forward and not on the curtained rooms on either side of us, some of them closed and some open. It was like I couldn’t trust Sam to take me to the right one, and there was a chance I’d miss Trevor completely. Sam stopped in front of a room with a nameplate that said 13B next to it. I swear to God, I’d never been as scared as Sam slid open that divider. Like we were on the wrong side of the shower curtain in the movie Psycho or something.

Norman Bates wasn’t there, nor were any other scary creatures. In fact, the body in the bed, kept running by all the beeping machines around it, looked incredibly fragile. As if the stiff white sheets neatly tucked under both sides of him were all that kept him from falling apart.

“Shit, Trev,” I whispered to him. Anything louder was too dangerous—I’d either shatter him or start sobbing. “What the fuck did you do?”

Sam was close enough to hear me. “I thought he was just drunk, but then he collapsed and smacked his head against the floor. It was the scariest fucking thing I’ve ever seen, Dec. I couldn’t catch him.” He lifted up his sweater, exposing a sling on his left arm that had been under it. I’d been too overwhelmed to notice his empty sleeve.

“What happened?”

“I tried to keep his head from hitting the floor. Broke a couple bones in my wrist.” His eyes glossed over. “Once the swelling goes down, they might have to fuse it together, man. What if I can never…play again?”

“Don’t think about that now, Sam. Okay? One step at a time. Did they give you anything for the pain?”

He nodded, his eyes never lifting back to mine. “The good stuff.” Well, that explained why nothing he’d said on the phone made any sense.

“Listen, Sam, worrying won’t help anyone, okay?” Of course, in the history of man, saying that had never helped anyone either.

I glanced at the hard metal chair next to Trevor’s hospital bed. I swear, whoever was in charge of buying those things had a masochistic streak. Why else would they buy something to make a paranoid, sad, and anxious person even more uncomfortable?

“Sit down,” I said to Sam. “I can stand.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know, Dec. I…I feel like I’m going to lose it any minute. The smell…”

I knew exactly what he meant. The air itself smelled ill, a mixture of too many conflicting scents—antiseptic, medication, sweat, and something like rancid baby powder. The heat only strengthened the nausea factor.

“Do what you gotta do, man. You took care of him, got him here. I can take over.” Doing nothing productive. “Go take care of yourself for a while.”

“You sure?”

“Totally. Go. Get some rest. I’ll call you if—” I caught my slip a second too late—“when he wakes up. Come back this afternoon, if you want. We’re not going anywhere.”

“Thanks. Call me if anything happens, okay?”

After I promised him that I would, he thanked me again for a reason I couldn’t fathom, shook my hand with his good one, and then left.

I paced back and forth from Trevor’s side to the main hallway, hoping someone would be here soon to answer all the questions I needed to ask. How much they thought he’d had to drink, did they have to pump his stomach, when did they think he would wake up. I even considered looking up concussions online but knew it would only drive me into more of a panic.

After a few minutes, I sat down, staring at the crooked line of Trevor’s heartbeat. I ignored the numbers next to it—I’d never been able to remember which one was important and what a normal blood pressure was.

The heart rate line was hypnotic, something my eyes could follow even if they couldn’t understand what it meant. Something predictable and human that proved my friend was still alive. It was the only positive thing in the room, the only thing that gave me any hope at all, so I clung to it. An excuse to avoid looking at Trevor’s chalky complexion, the dark rings under his closed eyes, and the tube coming out of his nose.

This whole fucking thing was like a bad flashback. Back when I’d been in a similar ER for a similar reason—because my best friend had given up. But the worst was the feeling of resentment I felt just looking at him. The anger…the hurt…the guilt. Was this my fault? Did my selfishness put him in here?

My father—a great shrink who could empathize with everyone except his own son—would’ve told me that these kinds of feelings were totally natural and normal, but wouldn’t release me until I dealt with the underlying issues. Namely, that I took responsibility for other people’s problems and wanted to control everything around me. Then he’d also unhelpfully toss in the idea that I had a victim complex and really needed to work on it. But these things take time and work, so instead of being a loser musician, I should spend my time doing more self-contemplation and working on my id and superego or some shit like that.

Things only got worse when the nurse showed up to check Trevor out.

“When is he going to wake up?” I asked, moving out of her way.

She looked at me warily as if I didn’t have a right to know. So, I took Trevor’s hand in mine, then looked at her again, my eyes pleading with her. A perk of living in San Francisco—people were used to gay couples. Hopefully, the nurse would assume that Trevor was my boyfriend or husband and tell me what she wouldn’t have shared with his best friend, family or not.

She sighed before starting to check all the wires and tubes he was connected to. “I wish I had an answer for you. But any timeline we gave would probably be wrong. We’ll be here for him, monitoring his vitals, and doing all we can, but unfortunately, Mr. Finley has to do all the real work. He has a severe concussion, and his body is dealing with a lot right now. Plus, as I’m sure you know, a lot of damage was done well before last night.” She went to her mobile computer station and looked up something on the screen. “He’s a tough guy, though—I’ll give him that. Although, maybe you’ll be able to answer a question for us. The friend who came in with him didn’t know about it, and the hospital’s records don’t show any follow-up care he’s received after he came in for the initial diagnosis. So, what has he been doing for his pain?”

“What pain?”

“For his pancreatitis.”

Pancreatitis? “Is that like appendicitis?” Painful but no big deal. He goes into surgery, they slice him open, cut out the bad bit, staple him back up, and he’s one hundred percent again a week later. Unless I asked the surgeon to cut off his balls while they were there. His punishment for putting me through this shit again.

The nurse shook her head, pausing as if she were wondering how much she could tell me. “Trevor’s pancreatitis is chronic. For men his age, the most common cause is long-term alcohol abuse. Do you know how long he’s been an alcoholic?”

It would’ve been easier to answer how long he wasn’t an alcoholic. “A while, I guess. He started drinking when we were fourteen or fifteen, but it wasn’t too bad until he was around twenty.” When she raised an eyebrow, I nodded. “It could’ve been worse than I thought, I guess. He’s always been good at holding his liquor.” As teenagers, I could keep up with him. Except that while he could still function well enough to fool my parents, all I could manage was aiming for the toilet.

“We’ll keep watching his vitals and giving him fluids to rehydrate him, and there are some more tests we’ll need to run. But he’s going to have to wake up before we can find out how much neurological damage he suffered. And then we go from there. Thankfully, he’s young.”

“And as stubborn as hell.”

She smiled. “In this case, that will probably help. I’ll ask the doctor to come in to answer any more questions you have. But it’s been a busy night, so I can’t guarantee how soon it will be.”

Once she’d left, I sat back down. It felt even quieter now. Colder, too. I thought about what she’d said. Pancreatitis, a chronic disease that Trevor apparently had but hadn’t mentioned, caused severe pain that he hadn’t mentioned. Why would he have kept something like that from me?

“Wake up, you bastard.” Even my whisper had an edge to it, hinting at the betrayal I felt. “You’re not allowed to die. You understand me? Not after all the shit you put me through. Not after everything we’ve been through together.” I rubbed my hands over my face. “If you make me go through all of this and then die, I will hate you forever. You hear me? Forever. And I won’t feel bad about it.” On a scale of one to a thousand, how bad was it to lie to someone who might be lying on their deathbed? At twenty-fucking-four years old.

Jackass.

I laid my head down on the bed, my arms resting between it and Trevor’s hand, hoping I’d feel him twitch or touch me. Hell, I’d even be happy if he smacked me. Because that would mean he hadn’t given up.

I was a mess, reliving something I’d sworn to myself I’d never have to go through again. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the one who could keep that promise. The only way I could’ve was to have pushed Trevor out of my life, something I refused to do. Because I’d been so worried it would shove him into a depression so deep that it made him think this exact situation was the only way to deal with it.

Losing someone is hard, whether they are ill or in an accident. But when someone is mentally ill and the loss is no accident, being left behind feels like the universe just wants to be cruel.

But the truth was that I hadn’t lost my best friend. Not yet. And there was a chance I wouldn’t.

“Don’t die, you shithead. Because…” Why? The only thing Trevor had ever really cared about was Self Defense. And I’d taken that away from him. I should’ve trusted my gut, known he was full of shit when he’d said he was okay with the band breaking up. If I hadn’t said anything, he wouldn’t have spent the night partying as if it were his last.

It couldn’t be his last. It just couldn’t.

Maybe if he knew things would go back to the way they were, he’d wake up. “Because I changed my mind. I don’t want the band to split up. Yep, I want to give it one more shot.”

I’d never bought into the idea unconscious people could hear the outside world before now. Now, I understood why people did—they needed to. I needed to. Talking to him was the only thing I could do to stop feeling so fucking useless.

“Let’s do it, man. Do it right this time. I’m all in. I’ll fucking post on Instagram, talk to fans, wear as much leather as Doug wants me to. We can do it. Together.” I took a quick breath. “Plus, Sara and I got back together. I want to show her what it’s like to be on tour. I can’t wait to bang her on the bus, actually.” My laugh sounded ill. “But you’re not allowed to watch or listen. In fact, I regret mentioning it to you right now. Thank God you’re in a coma and can’t hear me.”

I flipped from watching his eyes and his hands, looking for any sign he could hear me. “Unless you’re awake now. Are you, man? Are you awake?”