Page 22 of Pucked Up

He raised a brow at me.

“Drink until you forget what’s in that fucking box.”

He burst into another peal of laughter and took a long shot off the bottle. He didn’t choke the way I did. He just met my gaze and swallowed like he was pulling off a glass of water.

“I hate you,” I told him.

“Try harder because I know that’s fucking bullshit. Be angry, but don’t lie.”

I snagged the bottle back and took another sip. It was too much. I’d barely eaten, and the liquor was sitting heavy at the top of my stomach. “Some days, I really don’t want to be me.”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“You can’t get it.”

He blinked at me, then took the bottle back, and another shot went straight down his gullet. “I was adopted.”

Those words felt like a bag of bricks clobbering me on the side of the head. I hadn’t known that. Did Tucker know that?

“No, he doesn’t,” Ford said. Shit, I must have been talking out loud again. The world seemed fuzzy already. The tequila was hitting hard. “No one knows. It’s…whatever. It’s a thing. My birth mom was a family friend. She had a rough life, and CPS took me from her at the hospital. It was a whole…thing. Obviously, I don’t remember. I was a newborn.”

I blinked sleepily at him. “You…are angry about it?”

“I don’t like being lied to,” he said. There was tension in his voice I wasn’t expecting to hear. “They lied. When I got mad at them for not preventing my accident, they told me I should be more grateful that they took care of me at all. That I wasn’t blood, but out of the kindness of their hearts, they took me in. That someone in my position would have been putinto a foster home and a lot worse off if I’d been injured in state care.”

“Ford…”

“There’s a reason I don’t talk to them.”

Crisse, I was a terrible friend. I knew he never spoke to his family. When we were in Beijing, I’d asked him who had come to support him, and he’d told me no one. No one was there. No one had been invited.

I was too wrapped up in my own shit to ask why.

“I—”

He shook his head. “I don’t want pity. I just want you to know that I get it. I know shitty dads and shitty moms, okay. But I don’t let it wreck my life.”

I stared at him, bewildered. He hadn’t let it wreck his life? Maybe not. But he’d let it stunt him, just like all the rest of us had been stunted—stuck here, unable to move past whatever had us in a chokehold.

At least he knew my trauma.

“I’m allowed to be angry. And I want to know that I can count on the both of you to stand by me, even when I’m being irrational.”

He sighed and took the bottle, shoving the cork in the top and pushing to his feet. He wobbled a bit, then gripped his prosthetic knee and wrenched it slightly to the left. “It’s because we love you that we don’t want to see you ruin a good thing. I don’t know Hugo, but he’s a decent?—”

“Don’t fucking say it.”

“Coach,” he finished. “And you need to learn to cope better.” He set the bottle down on thenightstand, then kicked my dick box back under the bed. “I’m going to crash in Tucker’s bed. Come get me if you feel like you’re going to choke on your own vomit. And maybe have a big-ass glass of water before you crash out.”

I flipped him off. Nothing felt solved, and a small part of me wished I’d yelled myself hoarse instead of drinking disgusting liquor until the world felt like it had tilted too far on its axis.

But there I was, on the floor, and the tequila shots were hitting.

I most definitely wasn’t getting up.

I had never been the sort of person who could crash on the floor and get up the next day like it was nothing. There had never been an “in my youth” time in my life. The first time I tried drinking, I had a seizure that lasted seven minutes, and my mom was certain it had given me brain damage. It hadn’t, but it was a reminder that I was never quite allowed to be carefree the way my friends were.

And that morning was a stark reminder of that. It was going to be an electric wheelchair day—which at least I had the upgrade to my manual chair rather than one of the hulking beasts that needed six hours to charge and weighed a thousand pounds. But I felt a bit like a failure. I hadn’t listened to my body, Ihadn’t listened to my friend, and now I was going to pay for it.

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