Andrew’s POV

I wanted to be mad at him, furious even. I told myself that if he ever came back I would scream at him for days. That I would force him to get his shit together so we could work things out. That I would feel better after a screaming match.

Yet watching Barrett drag a barely conscious Jem down a hospital hallway made me forget the anger I had been feeling this whole time. 

I knew the fight wasn’t over. The second he was awake and feeling himself he would scream for us to leave; I knew that, I expected that. I also knew I wasn’t going to listen. 

Jem had been a dick but he was hurt. We were all hurt. Jem, Barrett, and Devon were grieving, Patrick and Jem had been tortured, and the three of us were abducted. We made a lot of rash decisions and hard conversations at the wrong time. It wasn’t just Jem in the wrong, it was all of us. 

I still like Jem. And right now Jem was laying in a hospital bed with a heart monitor strapped to his chest and a liquid IV digging into his forearm. His chest was bare but the stab wound was already redressed by a nurse and honestly looks better than the half-assed one I and Patrick had attempted. 

Dev stared at Jem like he was the most precious thing in the world while Barrett continued to glare at us. The nurses left the second Jem didn’t need help leaving the four of us alone in an awkward silence as we waited for Jem to wake up. 

“He’s not going to let you stay,” Barrett says after a while. “You might as well leave now. It’ll save us all some time and save you your dignity.”

“Play nice,” Dev sighed, breaking his staring contest with Jem’s body for the first time to glare at Barrett. 

“Right, because they played so nice before.” I go to say something but Dev beats me to it. 

“We’ve been over this,” he sighs, frustration somehow clear in his emotionless voice. “We aren’t a part of ‘before’. We don’t get to be mad at them for ‘before’. ‘Before’ is between them and Jem. If you can’t be a regular human with them then you need to go do something else until they leave on their own terms.”

I shouldn’t be surprised. Devon was always the calm one. Always the ‘adult’. I shouldn’t be surprised that he doesn’t hate us but I am. 

“They left us too,” Barrett seethes but look nowhere but the floor. 

“And we let them.” It’s a practiced argument, done without heat or malice, just statements and answers as if both of them know how the fight will go yet neither of them are willing to back down from what they believe. 

I don’t know what to say so I say nothing. We sit there for an hour in complete silence before Devon sighs again. 

“He just left,” he said, eyes still not leaving his best friend. “It was 3 in the morning last Saturday, he had been in his office all day which was normal, and all of a sudden he grabbed his car keys and left. Jem is Jem. He’s an adult. I don’t worry about where he goes because he’s strong, smart, and capable. I go to sleep assuming he’ll be back by the time I get up. Suddenly it’s been two days without so much as a text and I start looking for him.

“I’m watching security cameras, asking drug runners, holding people at gunpoint just to see if they’ve seen him yet no one has. It’s like he just disappeared. I’ve been having a nervous breakdown for the past eight days straight and suddenly he turns up with both of you, a hole in his stomach, and mumbling something about drugs, yet somehow the nervous breakdown is still happening so if you know a damn thing about what he is even remotely going on about, I would really enjoy hearing about it right now.”

His voice remains as calm as ever but his body shakes and even Barrett seems surprised with his behavior as the smallest tear wells up in his eye.

“He said they’re calling it ‘Kerp’,” Patrick said as he stares at the floor.

“Well that’s a dumbass name,” Barrett mumbles just above a whisper but no one pays attention to him. 

“It’s highly addictive, causes hallucinations, increases hostility, and is apparently very easy to overdose on. He said they’re marketing it as a pain reliever, we all know how easy it is to get people to try those. He said he was trying to keep them off his street and suggested I do the same before he tried to leave.”

“We’ll have to tell the runners about it. The last thing we need is for them to bring it here,” Barrett said with a shake of his head. 

“Not just them. Everyone is going to need to know that if they’re caught with it Jem will kill them before the drug has a chance to.”

“It’d be easier to let the section leads deal with it. Call them in, give them a run down, and have them call a meeting with their sectors about it. Better than trying to find a common time between everyone that works for us,” Barrett said as he rubbed his bottom lip with his thumb.

“Jem will want to be awake for it,” I find myself saying before I have a chance to stop myself. Barrett still glares but Dev actually answers.

“We don’t have time for him to wake up for it. They need to know now. If Jem is afraid of it there’s a reason and that fear should be taken seriously. We need to put a stop to it before it even starts,” he said before finally looking over at Patrick. “I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job or anything but if I were you I’d be doing something similar.”

“I don’t think I need to worry about my officers getting hooked on some random drug.”

“Is that so? Do you think your men are so high and mighty that they couldn’t get addicted? Interesting,” he said with a smirk that he and Dev seemed to share like it was their own little secret. “When you go in next time ask Williams if that last round was worth the money.” Patrick scowled but Barrett continued as if he didn’t just accuse a cop of using. “And it’s not just about your officers. You have people to protect do you not? That’s like kind of your whole job. If Jem was trying to warn you, it wasn’t for them, it was for the civilians. You have start-up programs, don’t you? The at-risk clubs, the Narcan centers, the no-ask rehabs? They’ll all need to know about this so they can be ready just in case. If people start dropping like flies without warning these places are going to be so unprepared that a lot of people will die which is exactly what Jem was trying to avoid when he warned you.”

“Section leads are on the way,” Dev said as he forced himself away from Jem’s side. “There’s no telling how long this will take. I won’t make you leave, not yet, but if he wakes up before we get back and asks you to go away, please just listen. It’s been a hard 8 months and Jem is just now starting to piece himself together. I know he came to you and that he started this but please don’t push him harder than what he’s ready for.”

He doesn’t let either of us answer before he’s out the door. Barrett follows him without saying a word and the two of us are left in a hospital room alone with Jem. 

I’m reminded of the last time we were here. Jem putting his life on the line for a random man that worked in one of his warehouses, getting shot before his friends were able to stop it from happening, and nearly bleeding out on the way home. 

He looked paler then, the second scar on his face was missing, and the bags under his eyes were less obvious. Despite the fact that his injury was significantly less life-threatening than the last he looked worse than last time and it made my heart ache. 

The past eight months had been hard and Patrick and I but at least we had each other when times were hard; when the nightmares came or the anxiety crept. Jem had no one, likely pushing his friends so far away they couldn’t reach him 

I would make it up to him somehow. He didn’t deserve the way we left things. Before we left this time we would be finishing our last talk like adults. I’d make sure of that.