Chapter Text
He hasn’t changed his lock screen since October, after he turned the essay in.
He wasn’t too keen on taking a poetry module; his interests have always lain with novels, something to sink his teeth into and chew on. But his options for online coursework were limited for the fall term, and Charlie figured at the very least, it would easy to pass the class. Poems are short by nature. Economy of language, and all that. How hard could the coursework be?
For weeks, he balanced his laptop on the edge of his open window at the precarious angle necessary to steal WiFi from the café downstairs. Wrapped up against the cold, he slurped instant noodles or beans on toast and watched each asynchronous lecture. Scribbled some half-arsed notes, kept his reflexes in check by rescuing his battered laptop from tumbling to the street below more than once. Assigned Coleridge as a subject for an essay, Charlie produced a serviceable 1500 words about “Work Without Hope.”
He didn’t think much of it after he submitted it. But the poem clung to him, the last two lines nestling like a burr in his thoughts:
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.
The couplet bounced around his brain for days, tangling with his teaspoon as he made a cuppa before dawn and poured it into a travel mug, permeating the bleachy fog of his cleaning cart as he pushed it around the station. Nectar in a sieve. He set the poem as his lock screen and made himself read it, at intervals, through the cracked glass.
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve. Extra shifts, budgeting pounds like a miser, sacrificing sleep to stay on top of his coursework. What does it amount to? He reminds himself—usually when he’s scraping fecal matter from the station floor, or mopping up sick, and God, is there truly no end to how many fluids a body can produce?—that this isn’t what his life is supposed to look like forever. The point of this disappointing chapter is that one day he’ll have the education and money for a better one.
The trouble is, with every paycheck that his tuition and rent eat up, the hope meant to sustain him seems very, very abstract. And very, very far away from being realised.
And Hope without an object cannot live.
So Charlie Spring decided to find an object.
Said object arrives at Bond Street Station between 08:01 and 08:15 every morning, Monday through Friday. Charlie noticed him a week after he set the poem as his lock screen. Auburn hair in one of those expensive, effortless haircuts. Classic brown wool coat, not flashy but good quality—and it doubtless does a better job keeping him warm than the layered jumpers Charlie sports under his safety vest. An incongruous red scarf. Charlie bets his mum made it for him for Christmas.
It’s a harmless crush. A daydream to keep him occupied. Hope with an object. Charlie arrives at Bond Street Station, pulls his knit cap over his curls and shrugs on his vest, and wheels his cart out of the custodial closet. He has his route down to a science so that by the time he’s emptying the rubbish bins on the Jubilee Line, he’ll be there to see him, even if only for a moment.
Most days, he doesn’t do much. Briefcase dangling from one hand, he’ll check his phone with the other until the Tube pulls into the station. He seldom smiles as he does this. Charlie imagines he’s checking his emails or reading notes before a big meeting. He has that corporate look about him. Charlie guesses he works in finance or real estate, pictures a glass-walled office in Canary Wharf.
Some days, he watches a video on his phone or has AirPods in. He’ll smile then, just a corner of his mouth turning up in faint amusement. It steals the breath from Charlie’s lungs. Once, he saw him pick up a toy a squalling baby threw onto the station floor and chase down its mother to return it. He gave the infant a tiny wave before he stepped onto the train, the skin around his eyes crinkling up as he grinned. Charlie’s pulse skipped a few beats that morning.
He made the mistake of telling his friends about him, and he’s never heard the end of it since. Even last movie night, they brought him up. “Everyone knows there’s no one more defensively heterosexual than a finance bro!” Tao told him, as if Charlie needs the warning.
Elle and Isaac encouraged him to introduce himself. “Put yourself out there!” Elle urged him. “What could it hurt to just walk up to him and ask his name?”
Isaac nodded his agreement. “You already know he shows up 08:01 to 08:15—”
“—every morning, Monday through Friday,” Tao and Elle finished in unison, leading Charlie to wonder exactly how many times this has been his refrain.
“—so if it goes sideways, you know how to avoid him in the future.”
Charlie just shook his head. “You’re forgetting a key detail.”
“Which is?”
He gestured to himself. “I’m me. I’m a fucking station cleaner. One hour on the job and I actively reek of other people’s shit and piss and rubbish. Not to mention I have no degree, no prospects, no future—”
“You’re working on that,” Elle reminded him, tapping the cracked screen of Charlie’s phone.
He grimaced. “I’m me. And he’s him.”
So Charlie contents himself with watching. For five or so minutes each morning, he empties the rubbish bins while stealing furtive glances at him, hiding behind the assorted broom handles on his cart. Those fleeting minutes are enough to build a fantasy. Charlie envisions stepping away from the cart, pulling off his gloves, and sticking out his hand to shake. “Hi,” he’d say. “I’m Charlie.”
The man might raise an eyebrow at first, surprised at Charlie’s boldness. But then maybe he would smile—slowly, unfurling by degrees until it reaches his eyes. He might share his name, something solid like Jack or Arthur or Henry. Maybe they would get to chatting. Maybe Jack-Arthur-Henry would miss the train he was waiting for, let the next one pass them by. Insist that they can wait for him at the office and ask if Charlie would like to grab a coffee.
Coffee for the first date, really quite standard. He would issue an invitation to lunch somewhere near his office, and lunch would spiral into dinner somewhere extremely posh. It’s Charlie’s fantasy, he can indulge a little, imagining bottles of red wine with names he can’t pronounce and dimly lit booths and Jack-Arthur-Henry’s strong jaw resting in his hand as he leans on the table and listens to Charlie babble about English literature. “I’m so glad you found me,” he would say, and mean it. “My life was so boring until I met you. Please tell me more about Chaucer.”
It would be a simple, intimate wedding and an extravagant honeymoon. They would keep a cottage in the countryside for Charlie to abscond to when he needed to focus on his writing, but they’d spend most of their time in a cosy flat somewhere way out of Charlie’s price range, but nowhere too lavish. The sweet spot between trendy and posh.
It’s enough to occupy him while he’s scrubbing the filthy loos or picking up food wrappers that overflow from the bins. Whatever his hands are doing, his mind is off meeting Jack-Arthur-Henry’s family—would his mum knit Charlie a matching red scarf?—or scrolling through vacation getaways with Jack-Arthur-Henry on their couch. The weather often provides surplus inspiration. In November, Charlie imagines Jack-Arthur-Henry greeting him at the door with hot chocolate, complete with whipped cream and chocolate shavings on top. Pictures them snuggling in a spacious apartment, watching the snow fall. By December, he’s selecting ornaments and colour schemes for their Christmas tree.
The Monday before Christmas, for the better part of an hour, Charlie ponders whether or not he would be easy to buy for. Ties and cufflinks seem too cliché. The Jack-Arthur-Henry of his mind has far better taste than that, and far deeper interests. He pictures him unwrapping a journal with a rich leather cover, and when he opens up to the first page, he gasps.
“I wrote them for you,” Charlie tells him in the fantasy, leaning over and tracing the handwritten words on each page. “I wanted you to be the first person to read them.”
In his fantasy, his eyes shine bright with something more than gratitude. It’s humility, or privilege, that Charlie trusts him enough to share his first attempts at short stories with him. And in lieu of thanking him, he cradles Charlie’s face in his huge hands and kisses him—
A rough shove cuts the dream short, and Charlie falls to his knees, hissing in pain. The gloves catch the brunt of the impact, preventing any serious scrapes on his hands—a mercy, that, considering all the bacteria thriving on these floors—but everything on his toppled-over cart is scattered on the floor. Two teenagers, determined to out-lad each other, laugh and run toward the Jubilee Line toward Stratford, looking over their shoulders to see if Charlie will follow them.
He grunts as he stands up and brushes himself off, his ears suddenly cold. His cap must have come off when he fell. He rights his cart and starts to collect the brooms, mops, and spray bottles. There’s a sudsy puddle from where the bucket overturned that Charlie does his best to avoid; he mopped up a worrying amount of sick from the loos an hour ago.
“Here.”
Charlie turns and sees his knit cap in an outstretched hand, thankfully dry. He reaches out and takes it, only then looking up to see who offers it to him. Swoopy auburn hair, cheeks pink from the chill aboveground, brown wool coat, red scarf.
He stares, dumbfounded, clutching his cap. Up close, he can see the freckles sprinkled across his nose that disappear into light stubble, gets irretrievably lost in the warmth of those eyes. Who ever said brown eyes are boring? Charlie wants to write sonnets about these eyes.
“I—er, thanks.”
Jack-Arthur-Henry nods with a tight smile. “Happy Christmas.”
He trails the scent of his cologne in his wake, and Charlie sags against his cart as he watches him round the corner. Then he smacks himself on the forehead. “‘Er, thanks?!’” he snaps at himself. “How about, ‘Nice coat?’ Or, ‘Happy Christmas to you, too,’ or ‘you’re beautiful.’ ‘Will you marry me?’” He kicks a bottle that’s fallen out of the rubbish on his cart. “‘I love you.’”
He takes his time picking up the crumpled up paper bags and coffee cups that have tumbled onto the floor. One mortifying interaction with his dream man is enough for the day. But by the time he makes it into the station proper, Jack-Arthur-Henry is still there, typing furiously on his phone. Charlie resists the urge to duck and turn his cart around.
The platform is largely empty; the train’s likely just come through. The teenagers are still there, shoving each other back and forth and cackling. One boy makes a start at chasing the other, runs a few steps, and then pulls back. Charlie rolls his eyes, but between their games and Jack-Arthur-Henry’s phone crisis, he figures he’s audience free. He sets about sweeping beneath the benches.
Then he dares a peek. Jack-Arthur-Henry’s brow is furrowed in frustration as he scrolls on his phone. Any lingering obligation to walk up to him and thank him again for rescuing his hat dissipates; he looks too upset to bother. The teenagers near him, roughhousing as they go, but he pays them no mind. Finally, with a huff, he slips his phone into his pocket and looks up, catching Charlie staring at him.
It happens very quickly, but Charlie feels the stretch of every excruciating second. Jack-Arthur-Henry’s neutral gaze morphs into one of discomfort and confusion as his center of gravity shifts, and Charlie spots the puffy coat of one of the teenagers as they knock into him—sending him flailing onto the tracks below. There’s an awful crunch when his head smacks one of the metal rails, then his body bends in a way it shouldn’t as it slides between the rails.
Charlie’s scream is caught in his throat. He waits to see if he’ll get up, dazed and livid, from the tracks. Waits to hear him call for help. The boys look onto the tracks, their shrieks of laughter dying out.
The man lies motionless on the tracks.
“Shit,” one of the boys says. “Should we call someone?”
“Fuck that! Do you want to get fucking nicked?” The other casts worried glances around the various security cameras before darting off the platform and back into the hall, and his friend flees behind him before Charlie can even call after them.
He’s frozen with uncertainty. Isn’t anyone else here? Didn’t someone else see that? Should he call the police? The man hasn’t moved or made a noise since he fell. Charlie can hardly see him. From his spot by the benches, all he can make out is the red of his scarf, hanging listlessly over one of the rails.
Charlie leaves his cart behind and runs over to the platform edge. “Sir!” he calls out, crouching by his dropped briefcase. “Sir, are you okay? Can you get up?”
He can see the man’s face now—ashen, with a concerning splatter of blood at his temple. Without thinking, he slips down into the very gap that Oswald Laurence tells him every Tube ride to mind, distantly aware that there is a third rail he needs to worry about but not knowing which one it is. “Oh, God,” he says to himself, “this is not good. Erm—”
Charlie hops over the rail closest to the platform and kneels near his splayed out body, afraid to touch him. What if he broke his neck during the fall? If Charlie tries to move him, he could paralyse him. “Oh, God, sir, erm—could you—are you breathing—?” He lowers his ear to his nose and hears a soft exhale, tries not to get caught up in the smell of his cologne again. “Please wake up,” he begs, barely touching his hairline, trying to ascertain where the blood is coming from. “Can you wake up? Can you hear me?”
Then he hears the unmistakable rattle of a train about to enter the station. If Charlie doesn’t move him, paralysis is the least of Jack-Arthur-Henry’s worries. “Oh, God.” Desperately, he starts to fan him, as though that will help. “Please wake up—erm—can somebody help me, please?!” Someone stirs on the platform above, and there are muffled voices. Charlie waves to try to catch their notice.
“There’s a train coming!” he tells the man uselessly. More voices start to shout and ask questions as people step onto the platform, but Charlie can’t hear them, much less understand them. His focus is on the two headlights beaming at him from the dark tunnel ahead, approaching with dizzying speed.
He looks down at the man. A man he knows nothing about, except that he takes the Tube from Bond Street toward Stratford Monday through Friday, sometime between 08:01 and 08:15. A man who has occupied all of Charlie’s daydreams for the past three months. A man who’s given him reason to hope through his existence alone.
Charlie is not going to let him die.
With strength he doesn’t know he has, he flings his arms around the man’s torso and falls back across the rail, pulling him on top of him and out from between the rails. By now, enough people have gathered on the platform edge to see what’s going on, and hands reach down to haul them out of the gap just as the train pulls in. Charlie lies on the floor, gasping like a beached fish and blinking up at the fluorescent lights while someone calls 999. When he tilts his head, he can see the lapel of the brown coat, the fringe of the red scarf, and a trail of blood on the tile.
He doesn’t get a good look at his face until the paramedics arrive and clear out the crowd. Jack-Arthur-Henry looks peaceful, his face smooth and childlike as they stabilise his neck and strap him to the gurney. Charlie gives his story hastily to the police and leaves his cart behind when the paramedics wheel him out, taking the stairs two at a time to beat the lifts to the surface. He hails the first cab he sees, not caring a whit that he can’t afford it, and orders the cabbie to follow the ambulance.
Charlie stumbles into A&E just in time to see the paramedics rushing him down a corridor behind a glass wall. He races to the front desk and says, “Erm, excuse me? Sorry, just—about two seconds ago, a—a man was brought in—”
The nurse talks him down with practised calm in her voice, her hands hovering over Charlie’s shaking ones. “All right, all right, luv, what’s his name?”
“He’s right there!” he all but screeches just as the gurney passes by. Charlie doesn’t know how to stop himself; he just drifts over to the wall and reaches for the first door handle he sees, anxious to follow him.
A doctor steps in and blocks his way. “Sir, you can’t go in there!”
“No, no, no,” says Charlie, “you don’t understand—”
“Are you family?”
“No, but—”
“Family only,” he informs him sternly, disappearing behind the glass door. The doctor joins the throng of medical personnel surrounding the man’s body, and when they wheel the gurney out of sight, Charlie staggers back from the glass wall like he’s been punched.
Shock and helplessness coalesce within him. Inexplicably, he finds himself laughing, his trembling fingers lifting to his lips to contain the mirthless giggles that spill forth. “Oh, God,” he whispers. “I was going to marry that man.”
The nurse at the desk drops her jaw. “Oh, luv.”
__________________
He doesn’t know what compels him to stay. His part in this is over. But stay he does, his knees jackknifed below his chin on a stiff waiting room chair, fielding texts from his boss. Charlie’s pretty sure the only reason he’s not sacked for walking off the job is because he promised to work through Christmas, same as last year.
The nurse’s gaze keeps landing on him. Her nails clack on her keyboard as she speaks with patients’ families, finds rooms, provides updates, fiddles with her braids and sips Diet Coke out of a straw when she has a moment to herself. Charlie feels her eyes on him. He knows what she must be thinking. You don’t belong here. Why don’t you free up that chair for someone who’s actually waiting for a loved one to come out of surgery?
Still he doesn’t leave. His phone dies after two hours. He flips through magazines, absently wishing he brought a book. He finished his modules and won’t start the new term for a few weeks, but he could always get a head start on that Dickens course he’s looking forward to. His stomach grumbles, and as shredded as his nerves are, he forces himself to go to the closest vending machine and get a packet of crisps.
When he finishes them, a shadow crosses over him, and a hand holds out a cup of brackish coffee. “Here, luv,” says the nurse, freed from her desk. “Meant to bring this to you sooner, but it’s been full on here today. Ice skating accidents, fallen Christmas trees, the whole lot.” He takes the cup, and she taps her name tag. “I’m Tara, by the way.”
“Charlie.” He grants her a thin smile and raises the styrofoam cup in a toast. “Cheers.”
“So I called Dr. Farouk,” she says, “and they’ve released Nick from surgery. They’re taking him to critical care right now.”
He frowns, confused. “Nick?”
“I can take you to him, if you like.”
Nick.
Hope has a name.
Charlie swallows hard and nods. Tara steers him out of the waiting room and through corridors and into lifts. There’s a jarring contrast to it, the bright overhead lights and intermittent beeps interspersed with festive cheer, tinsel banners wound around nurse’s stations and plastic holly in every eave. Tara leads him into a wing where the lights are dimmed and voices drop to a murmur, then stops him in front of Room 902.
“Now, I don’t want to alarm you,” Tara says, “but Nick’s in rough shape. The head trauma he sustained caused massive swelling in his brain. Dr. Farouk was able to get the swelling down during surgery this morning, which went as well as we could hope.”
“Surgery?” Charlie should have paid better attention in the station. He should have chased after those boys when they pushed him and told them to keep their hands to themselves. He should have told them to knock it off on the platform before someone got hurt.
“Dr. Farouk’s the best there is,” Tara reassures him. “But it’s a lot of trauma for the body to handle, so for now, Nick’s been placed in a medically induced coma.” She places a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Charlie, it’s all standard. The coma gives Nick’s body a chance to heal and relax, and the critical care team will keep a close eye on him. If his condition improves in a day or two and the swelling continues to go down, we’ll try to wake him up.”
“Try?!”
Her mouth presses into a grim line. “One day at a time, yeah?” She twists the handle on the door behind her and opens it. “Are you ready to see him?”
Charlie doesn’t belong here. This isn’t his responsibility. Surely he—Nick—has family, friends, maybe even a partner who would be sick with worry to know where he is, what’s happened to him. Charlie is just a bystander. A fool with a crush.
But he’s all Nick has right now. He takes a fortifying sip of coffee and walks in behind Tara.
The lights are low, and the monstrous hospital bed takes up most of the space in the room. Charlie can hardly find him in it, covered as he is from head to toe in wires and tubes. Tara sees him scan all the equipment surrounding him and points to each machine. “This is the ventricular drain,” she says, not quite touching a tube that extends from the crown of his head. “Drains the fluid build-up from his brain, lets us know if the pressure’s getting too high.”
She hesitates, unsure if this is too much, but Charlie nods at her to continue. A gentle fingertip grazes the tube fastened to his mouth, the one that scares Charlie the most. “The ventilator, so the machines can do the breathing for him for a little while. Gives the brain a break from sorting out functions like that, hmm?” Her hand moves to his nose. “NG tube, helps with feeding. We’ve also got a catheter here for fluids, meds, anaesthetics, nutrients.” She taps the tubes taped to his hand, and then her hand gestures to the wires that disappear beneath the hospital gown. “EKG wires to monitor his heart. We’ve got a catheter in to catch waste, socks on to prevent clots…” She claps her hands softly together. “You see? We’ve got it all under control. Your Nick couldn’t be in better hands.”
He flinches at how she phrases it—your Nick. Is his pointless crush that obvious, even to strangers? He sinks into the seat next to Nick’s bed, away from the machines all the tubes feed into. There’s gauze taped to his temple, but Charlie can see faint dots of blood that leak through the fabric and the shadow of stitches. His hair is matted and mussed, and his face—those freckles—are pale in the glimpses Charlie catches in and around the tubes.
“How long will he be…” Charlie shivers involuntarily. “…like this?”
Tara shrugs. “It’s hard to say, luv. Could be days, could be weeks. Of course, there is always the chance…”
No Christmas trees in a colour scheme they pick out together. No scrolling through vacation options, no meeting the family, no first coffee date. Nick’s story might end here in this hospital, without fanfare or outcry. Just a beautiful man who never wakes up. Charlie’s eyes fill with tears.
“I’ve seen patients come back from far worse,” she tries to reassure him, taking the styrofoam cup out of his shaking hands and setting it aside. “I’ve also lost patients who were in better shape. There’s no way to know, so this isn’t something we want to rush. But you being here will help.” Tara makes a little shooing gesture with her hands—go on, then. “Talk to him. Let him hear your voice. Oh, and I almost forgot.” She retrieves a stuffed plastic bag with a familiar red scarf spilling from the open top and places it in Charlie’s lap. “These are his personal effects. We called the emergency contact listed in his phone as he went into surgery, he should be here any minute.”
With a final pat on his shoulder, Tara makes herself scarce. The door clicks shut behind her. Liquid drips out of one tube and into another with eerie little splashes. A heartbeat beeps on the monitor. His chest expands and contracts with the rhythm of the breathing machine.
Charlie lets the plastic bag slide to the floor. Tentatively, he raises a hand and looks for somewhere safe to place it. The hand closest to him is wire-free. Charlie covers it with his own, his heart breaking a little at how cold and waxy it already feels. He blinks his tears away and says, “Hi, Nick.” In spite of himself, he smiles. “I wasn’t too far off. Something solid and classic. Nick.”
There’s no reply, no interruption to the rhythm of beeps and splashes and forced air. Charlie pets his hand with one finger, in time with Nick’s heartbeat. “It’s going to be all right, Nick. It’s going to be fine. You’re not alone.”
Inspiration strikes. He tugs the red scarf from the bag. There’s no way of knowing whether or not his mother actually made it for him, but Charlie can tell it’s handmade. Someone cared enough about Nick to make this for him, imbuing the yarn with their love for him. It’s the one talisman he can give him now. He tucks the scarf across Nick’s knees and places the fringe under his cold fingertips before he takes his hand again. “You’re not alone,” he repeats. “I’m here with you. Everything’s going to be okay, Nick.”
There are raised voices outside Room 902, and Charlie’s head whips over his shoulder to determine their source, his grip tightening on Nick’s hand. He can hear Tara try to employ a soothing yet stern tone with a man, and then the door swings open and someone blusters in.
The man—older than Nick by a good few years, blond with a mustache fighting for its life on his upper lip—goes rigid when he sees Nick in the hospital bed. “Fucking Christ.”
“Mr. Fournier, please!” Tara says, throwing an apologetic glance Charlie’s way. “I know this is a lot to absorb, but this is the critical care unit, and we do ask that—”
“How the fuck did this happen?” he asks. He rakes a hand through his hair. Too young to be his father, Charlie identifies him as a brother; there’s something similar in the shape of their faces and eyes. The brother lifts an arm, ensconced in the sleeve of his black designer coat, and then lets it fall. “I mean, what happened to him that turned him into a bloody vegetable?!”
Charlie stands up, nearly knocking the chair over, and buries his hands in his pockets. “Erm, I can explain that,” he says in a rush. “He was pushed off the platform at the Tube station at Bond Street, took a bad fall and hit his head on the rail. I—I pulled him off the tracks before the train came in, and the paramedics rushed him here—”
“You.” The brother points to Charlie like dog shit on the bottom of his leather oxfords. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Now, Mr. Fournier, as scary as this situation is, there’s no need to raise your voice and there’s no need for that kind of language,” Tara reprimands him. “Not in the critical care unit and definitely not toward the man responsible for saving your brother’s life.”
Charlie demurs at the compliment, secretly chuffed at Tara’s defense of him, so he’s entirely unprepared for what comes next.
She scoffs and crosses her arms. “Especially considering that he’s his fiancé.”
Charlie thinks, for a moment, that he got it wrong, that he misheard Tara and the irate man in front of him is Nick’s fiancé. It’s only when he sees how Tara’s triumphant grin is trained on him that he realises. She means him.
“Oh,” he chokes out, “I’m—”
“He’s not his fucking fiancé.” The man—brother it is, then—cringes, repulsed. “What the fuck are you on about? Are you mental?! My brother’s not gay, and he’s certainly not engaged to a bloke!”
Charlie’s eyes narrow. He harboured no illusions that the Jack-Arthur-Henry of his imagination was even a little queer in real life, but that’s no excuse for the brother to act so disgusted at the prospect of Nick being engaged to a man.
Then again, if Nick is anything like his brother, the prospect might disgust him, too. There isn’t any time to waste in clearing this up. “There’s been some kind of miscommunication—”
“I mean, he’s only been in London three bloody months,” the brother says. “He just ended things with that blonde, and he never mentioned—not once, not one fucking phone call—he would have told me—” He digs into his pocket and pulls out his wallet. “What is it you’re after, hmm?” he asks Charlie. “Heard the name Fournier and did your research, did you? Thought you could bag yourself a sugar daddy?” He grabs a handful of bills and starts counting. “How much do you want?”
Charlie just looks on in horror, and Tara’s patience finally breaks. “Now, that is quite enough from you, Mr. Fournier! Your brother is fighting for his life, and the bloody hero who saved him, who waited six hours while his fiancé was in surgery and has been sick with worry over him, doesn’t deserve to be insulted by you!”
Nick’s brother is half a head taller than Tara, but he cowers a bit under her reproach. She takes a steadying breath and adds, in a calmer voice, “Accidents like this bring out the worst in us, and there will be plenty of details to sort out later. But right now, Nick needs your support, and some decisions have to be made.”
“Decisions?” For the first time since he swaggered in, the flicker of concern crosses his brother’s face. He looks at Nick in the hospital bed, and the scarlet flush in his cheeks starts to fade. “W-What kind of decisions?”
“Nick’s condition is highly critical. We’ll do everything we can to help him heal, but his injury was severe, and there’s a possibility—”
“—that he won’t wake up?” There’s still an edge to the brother’s voice, somewhere between inconvenienced and deeply grieved.
Tara doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to. “Point is, if he has family, now’s the time to call.”
“I’ve already let our father know,” his brother informs her sharply. “He’s—he’ll be here as soon as he can.”
“And your mother?”
He pockets his wallet and makes a dismissive hand gesture. “Better not to let her know.”
Heat prickles in Charlie’s fingertips. He peeks down at Nick, at the scarf looped over his knees, and then looks up at his brother. “Sorry,” he says, “but what the fuck do you mean, ‘Better not to let her know?’ She’s his mother.”
Tara doesn’t chide him for swearing, though he wonders if he shouldn’t have spoken up. The mother he pictured knitting the scarf for Nick is an angel, but Nick’s actual mother might be a terror. Maybe she’s abusive, or neglectful, or completely out of the picture.
His brother runs his fingers through the hair at the back of his neck, looking abashed. “She just—she’ll kick up the worst kind of fuss, and she’ll blubber and make a scene, and—”
“And that’s somehow not the kind of reaction you’d want from a mother whose child is in a medically induced coma?” He shakes his head. “What if—sorry, but what if Nick dies before she finds out? What if she never gets to say goodbye to her son? You want that on your conscience?”
His brother stares at the floor. “We’ll sort it out once Papa gets here. Of course we’ll tell her, we just—” Hostility returns, chasing out the shame, and he fixes Charlie with a glare. “Sorry,” he seethes, “but this isn’t exactly your business. I have no clue who you are, so as far as I’m concerned, you’re a gold-digging opportunist who seduced my baby brother into some gay shit—”
“I didn’t—”
“—and for all I know, you’re the one who pushed him onto the bloody tracks,” he concludes, arms crossed. “I don’t know what you did to make him propose, but I can promise you this: if you think you’ll squeeze a single bloody pound out of my brother, dead or alive, you will not only end up just as skint as you clearly are now…” He gestures to Charlie’s grubby jumper, the reflective vest, the torn up jeans. “You will fucking regret the day you set your sights on him in the first place.” Then he turns to Tara. “I’m Nick’s emergency contact, and unless this arsehole can produce a fucking marriage license, that means I have power of attorney. And I’m saying we don’t call our mother. Not until we know what’s going to happen to him.”
Though she looks eager to fight him on it, Tara retreats and closes the door behind her. The brother wraps his hands around the footboard at the end of the bed and asks, without looking up, “Could you give us a minute?”
Charlie hesitates. This man has as much healing power in him as a bottle of weed killer, and he highly doubts that any time spent at Nick’s bedside would spur on rest and relief. But he is Nick’s brother. Nick listed him as his emergency contact. And their father is on the way.
Charlie stayed with Nick until his family could take over and care for him. He might not like what he’s seen of Nick’s family, but it’s not his call to make. There is no reason for him to stay. And God, what a thing to say! Why on earth does Tara think he’s Nick’s fiancé? If he leaves now and never makes an appearance again, Nick’s brother will assume he got it right, that Charlie was a fortune hunter who left when it became clear there was no payday on the horizon. He probably won’t even mention him when Nick wakes up.
If he wakes up.
Charlie thinks of his own mother. He hasn’t spoken to Jane in over three years. But if it were him in that hospital bed, despite everything he’s put his mother through and the wreckage of their relationship, he would still want someone to call her if there was a chance he was dying.
He leaves without a word, but takes the bag of Nick’s personal effects out with him into the hall, carrying it to the nearest waiting room. Item by item, he unpacks it. Nick’s warm wool coat, the suit he was wearing, a pair of shoes, his briefcase. AirPods, a wallet stuffed with shiny credit cards under the name Nick Fournier. Finally, in the bottom of the bag, he finds Nick’s phone—a flashy iPhone, the latest model, with a golden retriever puppy as the background screen. Charlie smiles at the picture and finds the phone unlocked. Evidently, there’s nothing worth hiding on it.
He scrolls through the contacts until he finds ‘Mum,’ takes a deep breath, and presses the call button.
A female voice answers after two rings. “Nicky? Darling, is that you?” Charlie opens his mouth to reply, but the woman trills ahead on the phone, high-pitched and nervous. “Did you get the card I sent for your birthday? I know it isn’t much, but I wanted you to know I was thinking of you. I was hoping, maybe for Christmas, you might come visit—oh, I’m sorry I didn’t pick up your call this morning, but—”
“Sorry, erm—is this Nick’s mum?”
The unfamiliar voice stops her in her tracks. “Yes, this is Sarah Nelson. Who is this?”
“I’m…Charlie Spring.” He doesn’t see the point in hiding his identity. He hasn’t done anything wrong. “There’s been an accident. Could you come to St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington as soon as you can?”