Happenstance 2 (Happenstance #2)(25)
Author: Jamie McGuire

“You were hurt by what you read in those journals. On top of the years of hurt you’ve already endured. No one blames you. Not even Weston. It’s obvious by his behavior. Did he say why he agreed to help Alder?”

“Just that she offered him a way to do something he already wanted.”

“Oh,” she said, but it was more of an aw. She placed her palm gently on my forehead.

“He makes me feel too much. I’ve spent my entire life not letting people get to me. The way I feel about him scares me.”

“Rest, my love. It will all be different in the morning.”

I lay there, trying to relax, but as tired as my body felt, I couldn’t close my eyes, afraid of waking up to bad news. Hours went by, and I felt Julianne’s hand relax, and her breathing leveled off.

Footsteps shuffled from the tiled hallway to the carpeted waiting room, and I looked up to see Veronica standing in the doorway.

“Guess who’s awake,” she whispered with a smile.

I sat up, waking Julianne.

“Is he better?” I asked.

“He’s asking for you. He won’t go back to sleep. I was hoping you were still here.”

“Can I see him?” I asked, leaning forward.

Veronica stepped to the side. “He’s in two ten.”

I shot up from my seat and tried not to run down the hall, searching every plaque on the wall with numbers until I reached Weston’s room. It was dark, and I walked in slowly.

He was sitting up, his dark form stiffening when he recognized me.

“Erin,” he said, his voice weak. He patted the thin blue blanket, wanting me to sit in the empty spot next to him.

His hand was taped, with IV tubing leading to a bag of saline. A cannula was in his nose and hooked over the back of his ears, the oxygen flowing from an apparatus on the wall.

He was still pale and seemed frail in the baby-blue hospital gown he wore. His feet reached all the way to the end of the bed.

I sat next to him, just like I’d wanted to since we’d arrived, but now that I was there, the words didn’t come.

He kept his head back, resting against several pillows that were used to prop him up.

“Did we win?” he asked.

I laughed once. “Who cares?”

“I do. I really don’t want to miss taking you to prom.”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll go with you if you still want me to.”

He frowned. “Well, hell. If I’d known all I had to do was have an asthma attack to get you to go with me, I would have had one weeks ago.” He winked.

“That’s not funny.”

His face crumpled. “I would have never let them embarrass you at prom, Erin. I agreed to try to get you to like me and to try to get you to prom. I never agreed to let them humiliate you.”

“Not now,” I said. “Wait until you’re feeling better.”

“I need to know that you understand. No, more than that. I need you to believe me. I agreed to get closer to you, but it was just an excuse, Erin. Alder was willing to hand me something I’d wanted for a long time…without harassing you about it. She wanted to get you to prom, so she was going to back off. They all were.”

“What about what happened on the corner that day with the Erins and Brady? What about her stopping by my work?”

“If she completely backed off, she was afraid you’d figure out what they were up to.”

“What you were up to. You keep talking like you weren’t in on it.”

“It was the only way to be with you without making you even more of a target. What kind of chance would I have then?”

“It wasn’t just to keep me from catching hell.”

“Okay, I admit it. I wanted to be with you and just enjoy it. I knew they wouldn’t leave us alone. At the time I thought it was the perfect solution. If you want to get home, sometimes you gotta steal a base once in a while.”

“It’s not a game, Weston. If it hadn’t gone the way you wanted—”

“If I really thought there was no way to avoid what they were going to try to pull at prom, we would have had our own, at our overpass, just you and me. I wouldn’t have risked it. You’re right, I was sneaky about it, and it’s not a game. But at the end of the day, there was no way to break up with Alder to be with you and make that work. It would have been miserable. I would have lost you. You would decide it wasn’t worth it. You would have avoided me like the plague until you left for college, and that would be it.”

I looked up at him. He looked as if he were physically in pain at the thought.

“But everything’s changed. You should have told me.”

“I couldn’t risk it, Erin. I thought I was crazy about you before, planning all that out just for a chance with you. I didn’t think it was possible to love you more, but it’s happened. I panicked. I didn’t know what to do.”

“Tell the truth. Even when it sucks. Even when it’s not about me anymore. Like the Erins being half sisters.”

His chin nearly touched his chest when he looked down at me. “You know about that too?”

“I read all of them. I know everything.”

He thought about that for a moment, shaking his head in awe. “Crazy to think how different things would have been if they had somehow found out without the accident.”

“I don’t want to. It would make me crazy thinking about the what-ifs when there are already so many what-happeneds to deal with. I just want to know the whole truth about what happened, Weston. If I know, I feel like then we can all move forward.”

“Even us?” he asked.

I shrugged against his chest with a small smile. My eyes had adjusted to the dark, and I could see his thoughts spinning behind his eyes.

“Okay, here’s the whole truth: I’ve thought about how to be with you since middle school,” he said. “It was our senior year. I didn’t have much time left, and I was getting desperate. You think Sonny was smart enough to come up with that plan on her own? Who do you think planted the seed in that warped brain of hers?”

“So humiliating me at prom was your idea?” I said, trying to keep my voice calm.

He frowned, disappointed that I’d come to that conclusion. “No, of course not. I played into their jealousy. I antagonized Alder sometimes about it. I made sure she saw me steal glances at you. We got into a big fight one night. She said I’d never have a chance with you because you wouldn’t cross her. That’s when it hit me. So the next time you came up in conversation—which was often—I teased them. I said I could totally get you to date me.”