Page 72 of PS: I Hate You
What must it have been like to watch his best friend die slowly and not be able to do a thing to stop it?
For the man who controls everything, to have none.
The truth smashes into me, more solid than I’ve allowed it to be up until this point.
Dom lost his best friend.
More like he lost his brother.
Whenever I think about Josh passing and leaving us all behind, my grief outweighs my concern for anyone else’s.
Josh wasmybrother.Iloved him most. Therefore, surely, I hurt the most.
But with that folder in my mind, I’m finally able to untangle the idea of Dom’s grief from mine, until his pain sits on its own, a gaping wound the man beside me is probably trying to hold shut with the mere force of his will.
I can imagine Dom talking to himself, growling in an unrelenting voice.Stop hurting, he’d say, as if it were that simple. There mayhave even been a moment when he looked Josh straight in the face and demanded,Stop having cancer.
He would do that. The arrogant asshole.
The idea has me choking on a horrified bubble of laughter.
“Maddie?” I face the man filling my thoughts to find him eyeing me with a concerned crease between his brows.
Damn. I want to hug him.
But I can’t do that for a whole load of reasons, so I do the next best thing.
“Could you flag down a flight attendant when you see one? I want a gin and tonic.”
A strain of tension eases from his face and he nods, a stern, determined movement. “Of course.”
Stop it, I want to beg him.Stop before you make me fall again.
When he hands me my drink a minute later, I down half of it in a single gulp. But the dose of alcohol does nothing to ease the temptation to lean closer and ask him to take control of more arbitrary things if the responsibility soothes his pain.
To impose his stifling, infuriating, loving will upon me.
Don’t do it, I remind myself.
Dom might think he needs to be in charge, be in control. That he needs to take care of everything and everyone around him.
But I think what he really needs is someone who reminds him to take care of himself.
Chapter
Twenty-One
“Crap. I didn’t want to spend the night here.”
As our plane sits so close to the building, but not there yet, I watch the minutes on my phone tick away. Unlike with Dom’s connection, there aren’t any more flights to Seattle today.
Having to wait until tomorrow normally wouldn’t be a problem, but there’s an in-person staff meeting first thing in the morning. Pamela will go into panic mode if I’m not there, and I hate screwing up at work.
“You won’t miss your flight.” Dom has his phone out, and I see a map of the airport on his screen.
“It’s on the other side of the airport. And boarding stops in”—I lean closer to see the time on his screen—“twenty minutes. They haven’t even opened the doors yet.”
Some people might be able to sprint the distance in time, but those people don’t have chronic asthma, a heavy carry-on full of ghost town souvenirs for their needy friends, and two gin and tonics sloshing around in their stomachs.