Free One Voice 02 - Here Without You by Mia Kerick Page B

there we sat. The two of us staring at our beaten boyfriend, knowing in our hearts how much worse it must have been on Wednesday night when it first happened. Because almost four days later, he looked horrible. His nose was swollen, as were both of his eyes, which were also blackened. There were what looked like scabbed-over scratch marks on his cheeks and his forehead. And this was just his face. God knew if his body was covered in more of the same.
    “I’m sorry.” He said it again and breathed very loud. My arms started aching to hold him. “I really do trust you guys.”
    Zander was still calm. “What the fuck happened?”
    “He was gonna beat on my sister. I had to stop him.” That pretty much told the whole story. A story we’d heard many times before.
    “Did he beat up Cindy too?” Zander was getting the facts.
    “Nah. He took it out on me instead.”
    Despite the fact that I knew how protective Nate was of Cindy, I asked, “Why does she persist on doing this to you? She knows how it’s going to end. It’s like she is trying to set you up for a beating.”
    Nate shrugged. “Uncle Rich did this to me, not Cindy.”
    To Nate’s response, I said, “Well, you have got to get yourself and Cindy out of that situation. If you don’t do it for yourself, Nate, understand that Rich is eventually going to get your sister alone, and God only knows what he’ll do to her then.”
    “I just need a bit of time to figure this thing out, that’s all,” Nate mumbled.
    “The next time he loses his cool could be too late.” Zander was calm, but he was pushing the issue. “You and Cindy gotta talk about this whole living-situation thing sooner rather than later.”
    “But you guys know I don’t never leave Cindy alone with him.”
    “You gotta take care of yourself too, man.” Zander was insistent.
    After another brief silence, Nate said, “I’ll talk to her about it as soon as the time’s right, ’kay?”
    “Needs to be soon, dude.” My partners were going back and forth on the subject.
    So that’s when I took over. “When we couldn’t get in touch with you, I thought you wanted to leave us, Nate.”
    He chuckled, and it sounded much more like the Nate we knew. “That ain’t never gonna happen, babe.”
    “I wish we were with you right now, so much.” Intense relief washed over me.
    “Far as I’m concerned, you guys are with me right now. Felt real alone before you called, but not no more.”
    “Nate, I just feel so dizzy, and my thoughts are a little jumbled up right now.”
    Again, the chuckle. “That’s called drunk , Casey.”
    “I’ll have Advil ready for him in the morning,” Zander assured him.
    “I’d say the kid’s gonna need it.”
    And then I had to confess. “I tried to fool around with Zander tonight after we got back from the party. Nate, I was so mad, and I don’t know just what came over me.” I started to cry again, knowing that he was going to be hurt and angry, and it would probably be over for real between us because I’d acted so rashly.
    But Nate just smiled. “We all do shit we aren’t totally cool with when we’re drinkin’ and when we’re freakin’ out. No worries, Casey.”
    And what happened next was almost like a miracle. We just started talking. Zander always called this kind of chatting “shootin’ the shit.” I called it sharing our lives. We just talked about what had happened over the past few days when we’d been apart. The three of us talked until the sun came up.
    Once again, we’d managed to work our way through a rough patch.

9
    N ATE ’ S D IARY
     
     
    September 12
     
    T HEM TWO are good. But at being fuckin’ sneaky—well, I’m better.
    Put ’em off from Skypin’ me ’til middle of the night, Saturday. By then my face was a whole fuck of a lot better than it had been earlier in the week, so them two didn’t have to go through the fuckin’ horror of seein’ me bloody and totally mangled.
    Thing is, they didn’t know how