The Friend Zone

by Abby Jimenez

  I’d stayed up, waiting for her in her living room. Calling her cell phone, sending her text messages, begging her to come home and talk to me.

  She sent me a text around midnight saying only that she was okay, she wasn’t coming back, and to please walk the dog.

  Everything was finally clear. It all made sense. It was so obvious to me now I wondered how I couldn’t have known. The severe cramps, the spotting. Her history of anemia. The long periods.

  The walls she put between us.

  And all the fucked-up things I’ve said to her.

  That I wouldn’t adopt. That I wanted a huge family. That I’d left Celeste because she didn’t want children.

  Karaoke night suddenly looked totally different to me, the weeks after it where she’d gone cold—I’d told her that if Tyler didn’t want kids, she shouldn’t be with him. That the kid thing was too important.

  I’d actually told her that shit.

  I’d been talking Kristen out of dating me almost daily since the day I met her.

  Fuck, if only I’d known.

  I’d had all night to think about what it meant, and it didn’t change anything. I loved her. I couldn’t not be with her. That’s what it kept coming back to. I couldn’t walk away from her—I wasn’t even capable of it. The situation was fucked up and star-crossed, and I didn’t give a shit. She was the woman I loved, so we’d just have to deal with it.

  I stood in the kitchen making my second pot of coffee. The guys were napping. The wedding was in eight days, and Brandon was off for three weeks. We had a new guy named Luke we’d borrowed from another station. I was spooning grounds into the machine when I heard her voice.

  “Joshua…”

  I spun around and had her in my arms in a heartbeat. “Kristen, oh God, thank you,” I breathed, kissing the side of her neck.

  It was like a reprieve from a prison sentence, seeing her. I was stuck here for two days, two days that I wouldn’t be able to get to her, and she’d come to me.

  But she didn’t hug me back. She put her hands to my chest and tried to make space between us. “Josh, I just came to talk to you, okay?”

  I didn’t take my hands from her waist. Her face was puffy, like she’d been up all night crying. Deep circles under her eyes. I leaned in to kiss her and she turned from me.

  “I need you to stand over there.” She nodded to the kitchen counter. “Please.”

  If she left, I wouldn’t be able to go after her. I was on shift and couldn’t leave the station. I didn’t want to let her go, but I didn’t want her to run off again, so I stepped back.

  She wore leggings and one of her off-the-shoulder shirts that I loved, and even though she looked tired, she was the most beautiful woman I’d even seen.

  And she loves me.

  I didn’t even know what I did to deserve her, but I knew I’d do anything to make up for the way I’d made her feel.

  She took a deep breath. “I’m having a partial hysterectomy the week after the wedding,” she said flatly. “I have uterine fibroids. They’re tumors that grow on the walls of my uterus. Mine are imbedded. They can’t be surgically removed, and they didn’t respond to treatment. They cause heavy bleeding and cramping. And…and infertility.” She said the last word like she had to force it out.

  She tucked her hair behind her ear and looked away from me, tears welling in her beautiful eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. It was embarrassing for me. And I don’t need you to say anything. I just needed you to know why. Because it was never my intention to make you feel unwanted.” Her chin quivered and my heart broke. “I did want you, Josh.” She looked back at me. “I always have. You didn’t imagine anything.”

  The admission that she’d wanted me made my heart reach for her. I took a step toward her, and she took a step back.

  I put my hands up. “Kristen, nothing has changed. My feelings for you haven’t changed. I want you, no matter what. I’m so sorry—I didn’t know. When I said—”

  She shook her head. “Josh, this isn’t open for discussion. I didn’t come here to tell you so you could decide whether you want to date me. That’s not even on the table. I just realized that for the last few weeks, I made you feel unloved. And I’m really sorry. I thought you…well, I didn’t know you had feelings for me. I thought only I…Anyway, that’s my fault. I should have never let that happen.”

  I scoffed. “There was nothing you could have done to keep me from falling in love with you. Even if I’d known this from the very beginning, it wouldn’t have kept me away. You should have told me.”

  “No, I should have stayed away from you,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t.”

  The call bell went off, and the red lights started blinking. Three beeps and then, “Traffic collision, motorcycle down on the intersection of Verdugo and San Fernando Boulevard.”

  Fuck.

  “You have to go.” She turned toward the door.

  I lunged after her, grabbing her hand. “Wait…just wait.”

  She looked up at me, her eyes sad. “There’s nothing else to talk about, Josh.”

  “There is. Will you wait for me to get back? Please? Just wait here. Twenty minutes, so we can talk.”

  She pressed her lips into a line.

  “Please, Kristen.”

  We stared at each other for what seemed like an eternity. She nodded. “Okay.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief and before she could object, I pulled her into me and kissed her. “I love you,” I whispered. “Wait for me.” Then I turned and jogged down the hall as the rest of the crew streamed out of the bedrooms.

  Leaving her felt wrong. Everything between us was fragile and I knew how easily she could shut down on me. The timing of this call couldn’t have been worse. I practically dove into the driver’s seat, determined to get this over with as quickly as humanly possible.

  The guys got in and Shawn put on his headset. “Kristen’s here, huh?”

  “Not now, Shawn.” I turned on the lights and pulled out into the street. The accident was only a block over, thank God.

  Javier opened the laptop. “Might be a DUI,” he said, reading the notes from Dispatch.

  Luke scoffed from the seat behind me. “Not even nine in the morning.”

  “Hey, it’s five o’clock somewhere.” Shawn snickered. “So, what’s got her panties in a bunch now?”

  I turned onto Verdugo and gave Shawn the finger over my shoulder.

  I pulled up to the accident. The police were already on the scene, blocking traffic at the intersection, so I parked the engine behind a cop car with its lights on, and Shawn, Javier, and Luke hopped out to get the trauma kit.

  A Hilton Garden Inn, newer-looking apartments, and an artists’ senior living complex flanked the four-lane, tree-lined road. The brown, tired Verdugo Mountains loomed in the distance.

  I checked my watch as I climbed out of the engine. If she was gone when I got back, I’d lose my fucking mind.

  She’d said she’d stay, and she usually did what she said she would. But this thing had her shaken, and I couldn’t wait forty-eight hours to run after her if she took off on me again. I’d go insane.

  My mind was exhausted. I hadn’t slept last night. I didn’t fully absorb everything she’d said in the kitchen and some of it began to catch up to me now.

  I didn’t come here to tell you so you could decide whether you want to date me. That’s not even on the table.

  If Kristen thought I was going to let her go, she was fucking nuts. Not now that I knew she loved me. Not ever.

  I finally understood the kind of love that made men give up everything. The kind that made someone change religions or go vegan or move to the other side of the world to be with the woman they loved. If someone had told me six months ago that I’d choose a woman who couldn’t have kids, I’d have called him crazy. But being with her wasn’t even something I had to think about. I did want kids. But I wanted her first. Everything else was just everything else.

&n
bsp; Sure, a part of me grieved a life I knew I wouldn’t have now. Kids that I’d never meet, a future different from the one I’d spent the last few years wanting. But I processed it like I’d been the one who just got a diagnosis. Because in a way, I had. This thing didn’t feel like her problem. It felt like our problem, to figure out together. It was as much mine as it was hers.

  I fell in next to the guys and we made our way onto the scene, our feet crunching over broken glass.

  I stepped over a side-view mirror and nodded to a cop talking to a sobbing woman by the open door of her blue Kia. I assumed it was the other vehicle involved in the accident. The bumper had damage.

  No skid marks. The lady blew right through a red light.

  “Probably prescription pain pills,” Luke mumbled.

  Shawn scoffed. “She looks like vodka to me.”

  I shook my head. “I hope the accident didn’t ruin her buzz. She’ll need it where she’s going.”

  We saw too much of this bullshit. And now I had to be here cleaning up this lady’s mess instead of talking to Kristen.

  Javier nudged Luke, and he veered off to check on the lady.

  I tried to put myself into work mode, though most of it was autopilot at this point.

  The motorcycle rider lay facedown twenty feet away. He’d been thrown. I knew walking up the injuries were bad. By the looks of his twisted leg, he’d been pinned between the car and his bike during impact. The mangled bike sat on its side next to a planter full of birds-of-paradise on the sidewalk in front of the hotel.

  I stared at the bike as I walked.

  The bike…a Triumph, but with that new exhaust he just put on.

  I looked back at the patient, everything suddenly slowing.

  The helmet…a blacked-out Bell Qualifier DLX.

  The man’s shirt…from the gift shop at the Wynn in Vegas.

  Shawn and Javier must have noticed it at the same moment, because without speaking, we all began to run the last few feet.

  Brandon.

  It was Brandon.

  I fell to my knees on the asphalt. “Hey! Hey, can you hear me?”

  Oh my God…

  He was unconscious. I put a hand to his back and felt the slight rise and fall.

  Breathing. He’s alive.

  This is Brandon. How is this Brandon?

  I picked up his hand and checked for a radial pulse in his wrist. It was weak and thready. I could barely feel it.

  It meant blood loss.

  I didn’t see him bleeding heavily, so it had to be internal.

  Internal bleeding.

  He could be dying.

  My mind raced. We needed to get him stable and into the ambulance.

  Shawn dove into his trauma bag, kneeling in a rivulet of metallic-smelling blood. “Fuck, fuck, fuck! Come on, fucker, you’re getting married! You gotta be okay!”

  Sloan.

  My heart pounded in my ears. “He’s going to be fine. You’re going to be fine, buddy.”

  I got out my pocket light, opened his visor, and pulled back his eyelids. His pupils shrank to small black dots. They were equal and reactive. Good. That was a good sign. He didn’t have brain damage. Not yet. We needed to get him to the ER before his brain started to swell.

  I gulped air. I had to stay calm. Stay calm!

  The ambulance pulled up, and Javier jogged to meet them.

  “I need a c-spine and a gurney!” I shouted.

  Jesus Christ, his helmet was fucked. Dented from the impact. Covered in skid marks.

  She didn’t stop. The lady didn’t fucking stop. It was a forty-mile-per-hour zone. A forty-mile-per-hour impact if she wasn’t speeding.

  And she probably was.

  I pulled out my trauma shears and started cutting off his clothes. “Sorry, I know you like this shirt, buddy. We’ll go back and get you another one, okay?” My voice shook.

  As I cut away fabric, more injuries bloomed over his body before my eyes.

  I grappled to make sense of it.

  Where the fuck had he been going? Why wasn’t he home with Sloan?

  His tux. He had a final tux fitting today at 9:00 a.m. He told me about it.

  Why couldn’t he have been late? Or early? Why didn’t he take his goddamn truck? Or a different street?

  I cut his pants off. He had a break. Compound fracture, left leg. His femur pushed jagged through his skin.

  I swallowed hard looking over his mangled body, and my brain ticked off injuries.

  Serious.

  Serious.

  Serious.

  I looked up at Shawn’s wide, frightened eyes. “We’ll have to log roll him onto the backboard. We can’t pull traction on this leg. Let’s get his helmet off,” I said quickly.

  Javier ran a backboard over while Shawn kneeled and cradled Brandon’s head. I reached around and unclipped the strap, and we kept his neck stable while we pulled the helmet off. His brown hair was matted with blood.

  Shawn was crying. “The bitch didn’t even fucking stop.”

  “Keep it together,” Javier said calmly. “Look at me, Shawn. He’s a patient. He can be your buddy when this call is over. Right now he’s a patient. Do your job and he’ll be okay.”

  Shawn nodded, trying to collect himself. Javier snapped the cervical collar on Brandon’s neck and we all put our hands on him, ready to flip him.

  “On the count of three,” Javier said, not looking up, sweat beading on his forehead. “One, two, three!” And in one fluid motion we turned him onto the backboard.

  Brandon always wore heavy-duty pants when he rode. But he was in a T-shirt. It was eighty today. His bare left arm was torn to shreds by the asphalt. He looked like he’d been through a lemon zester. Blood oozed from the white streaks of the under layer of his skin. And this was the least of his worries.

  Shawn, Javier, and an EMT lifted him onto the gurney while I felt his chest and stomach. He had rib fractures and rigidity in his abdomen. “A possible liver laceration,” I said, a lump bolting to my throat.

  Javier mumbled a curse word, and Shawn shook his head, his eyes red and glassy.

  We needed to get him to the hospital.

  The ambulance crew took over.

  I rattled off what I knew as we ran him to the open ambulance doors, my voice professional and disembodied, like it came from someone else, someone who wasn’t standing over his critically injured best friend. “Twenty-nine-year-old male, motorcycle rider struck by vehicle, thrown twenty feet from the point of impact. Helmet has significant damage. A weakened, thready radial pulse. Pupils are equal and reactive. Open femur fracture, severe road rash. Unresponsive.”

  I climbed into the ambulance and saw the woman from the blue Kia being slapped into handcuffs as the doors slammed shut behind us.

  We’d gotten him in the ambulance in less than five minutes. I worried it was five minutes too long.

  I leaned over him. “Hey, buddy.” My voice cracked. “Hold on. You’ll be all right. I’m going to get Sloan over here, okay?”

  Tears stung my eyes, but my hands kept working, running on muscle memory. I set up his IV en route. The EMT put him on oxygen while the driver called it in.

  We cycled his blood pressure. Put him on an EKG to monitor his heart. But none of this helped him. It was nothing but reassess. That’s all we could do. Reassess. It was the longest ride of my life.

  Finally the rig turned hard into the hospital parking lot.

  The EKG flatlined.

  “No!” I started chest compressions to the long, static beep of the heart rate monitor as the ambulance pulled up to the ER. “Come on, Brandon, come on!”

  The ambulance doors swung open and I climbed the gurney and straddled him, pumping his chest with the palms of my hands. Javier, Shawn, and Luke were waiting, and I ducked as they lowered us both out of the ambulance and wheeled us into the trauma room.

  “He’s crashing!” I screamed between thrusts. “We’re losing him!”

  The emergency room t
eam descended on the gurney.

  The room was chaos. Shouting and barked orders, beeping machines and the squeaky sound of wheels rolling on a hard floor. I kept doing chest compressions until they ran over the crash cart. I didn’t stop until I saw paddles.

  A doctor in a white coat waited for me to clear the gurney and then he pressed the charge to Brandon’s chest. “Clear!”

  Brandon’s body lurched with the jolt and everyone froze, staring at the lines on the monitor.

  Nothing.

  “Clear!”

  He lurched again.

  We waited.

  The jagged V of a heartbeat launched the room back into action, and I breathed again.

  I was backed out into the hallway by the throng of people working on him. They started a central line. They started X-rays. Neurology was called. And then a curtain yanked closed and it was done. There was nothing else we could do for him. That was it.

  It was out of our hands.

  I stood there panting, in shock, the adrenaline crashing into me now that I’d stopped moving. I looked down at myself, my hands trembling. I was covered in his blood.

  Covered in my best friend’s blood.

  Luke spoke from behind me. “She was drunk.”

  My hands balled into fists, and Shawn started to wheeze.

  Sloan. I needed Kristen to get Sloan. I walked outside, praying to God that Kristen answered my call, that she hadn’t decided to ice me out again in the short time since I’d seen her. If she didn’t answer and I had to text her, I wouldn’t be able to do it. My hands shook so violently now that it was all I could do to unlock my phone and pull up her number.

  It had been twenty minutes since I’d seen her. Twenty minutes that felt like a lifetime.

  I pressed the phone to my ear, my hand shaking.

  I wouldn’t be able to stay with him. My station had mandated staffing. I couldn’t leave until someone relieved me. I had to go back.

  “Hey.” Her voice gave me the first full breath I’d taken in almost half an hour. Just knowing she was on the other end of the line grounded me. Everything that had happened between us felt years away and unimportant.