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The hospital sheets are soft and silky, the mattress plush, like he’s lying on a cloud. It’s such a foreign sensation that Nick is certain that’s what’s keeping him awake despite the loads of pills and morphine they’re pumping into his blood stream. It’s definitely not because of his healing stab wounds and endless stitches. The bandages holding him together.
His body aches even now, remembering it. His brother is dead. The police had told him as much when he’d woken up from surgery. Nick thinks they thought he was involved with Tommy’s massacre initially. The secret co-mastermind.
The truth is a lot more difficult to comprehend. How one person could wipe out over a dozen people in a single evening… Nick had almost been included in that group. He remembers running out of the Science and Nature Cabin, going to the Hanging Tree, Tommy fighting him with the kitchen knife—
Dying.
He remembers that too. The blood that dripped out of his mouth, that trickled into his eyes like tears. The pain. They found Tommy’s body beside him, his throat slit from ear to ear, hence the initial suspicions. Those had died quickly though. Nick spares a quick glance to his bedside table. A litany of cards and flowers are cluttered together. Reds, pinks, yellows. A sugary sweet perfume.
There’s a stack of newspapers too.
Nightwing Massacre!
Sole Shadyside Survivor!
Shadyside Boy Brought Back from the Dead by Sunnyvale heiress, Christine Berman! Read down below to find out what makes his survival so remarkable.
Remarkable. Special. Nick doesn’t know what to make of that, exactly. He’s never been remarkable or special. He’s never had any friends, really. He’s spent his life on the sidelines, head down, nose in a book. He watches people. He’d known Tommy through Will – they were both on the Shadyside football team, but Tommy had been infinitely nicer. At least Nick thought he was, right up until he shoved a knife in his stomach.
Nick winces now at the memory. The druggish haze in Tommy’s eyes, the hatred. The venom. Nothing could get through to him. He’d been like something out of the Night of the Living Dead. So many dead.
And yet he had survived. He’s still alive. And for what? To be called special? Remarkable? Let them be stabbed in the stomach relentlessly and see how remarkable it is. Despite all the cards – from people like Sheila and Kurt even, ughh – none are from his mom or dad. His dad fucked off ages ago. Joseph in his all-mighty glory. Last Nick heard; his dad was still living with his eighteen year girlfriend in Vegas. His mom has spent her time drinking herself to death or trying to snag another husband.
Now, Will, her shiny boy, is dead. He’s dead. Her golden child. Nick feels some pity for her. Some. Doesn’t make it okay that she hasn’t shown up at all.
Special. Remarkable.
Why is he alive? How? All those massacres and there are no survivors until him.
It doesn’t make any sense. Nick has read so many books. Hundreds and hundreds of them. He’s lost himself in countless stories. But this isn’t a story. This is his life. That was his blood, his heart. He died. Nick has never thought himself better to anyone else, but there’d always been a quiet part of him that could never imagine being massacred or brutally killed by some stranger or someone he new. A part of him that believed he would be immune to it because he recognized that it was hopeless to try and leave Shadyside with your soul intact.
Besides – he didn’t want to end up like his dad. If that’s what it took to leave Shadyside, Nick decided long ago he was happy to stay where he was.
At least up until now.
“You’re brooding again.”
His head snaps up to the doorway. Christine – Ziggy is there, her head tilted as she gazes at him. Her blue eyes twinkle under the fluorescent lights. She’s wearing a baby blue sundress that matches her eyes. At the end of the skirt of her dress, Nick can see a white bandage peak out from where Tommy’s knife had cut her.
Run Nick! She’d told him. Run! He remembers cutting his hand on a shard of glass, the way Tommy had turned towards him, Ziggy forgotten. Nick had ran then, confident that Tommy would follow.
At the end of the day, it hadn’t mattered.
Nick still died anyway. He remembers waking up, pain in every single fiber of his body. Recalls Ziggy hovering over him, her hands in his hair, relief flooding her face. She’d looked like something unearthly then – her skin almost golden, her eyes feverish.
It had been the strangest few hours of Nick’s life even before he died. As a rule, Nick tended to keep to himself whenever he went to camp. He liked to bring his books and read. They even had a small library section in the infirmary. Mary always brought a few books herself that she always let him borrow. They tended to be classics or old romances, but Nick devoured them all the same.
Kurt had found Nick reading by the Hanging Tree, far away from his group and—
“Jesus, you’re fucking weird,” Kurt snarled, yanking the book out of his hands. It was Salem’s Lot. Nick was only two chapters away from finishing. Kurt always tended to have a small posse around him. Will worshipped the ground he walked on – he didn’t seem to agree with Nick that Kurt was a first grade asshole, but then again Will was obsessed with all things Sunnyvale. Especially Sheila.
Sheila snorted, cackling under her breath as Nick flushed. He wasn’t sure why they liked to target him so much. He kept quiet. He shut up. Maybe because it was they knew it made Will uncomfortable, pointing out that his big brother was a freak. A loner. A bookworm.
Nick gave up on trying to retrieve the book and found himself surrounded on all sides like a pack of lions preparing to pounce on a deer. Sheila ripped the pages out, let them scatter in the wind. When Nick moved to protest, Kurt shoved him against the tree.
The only thing more humiliating about it was the fact that Will was laughing too.
“Bug boy,” Sheila taunted. Kurt snickered as Nick rubbed at the back of his head. His cheek was throbbing too. “Tell me, Will, how did your brother come to be such a freak?”
Bug boy was a slogan Nick had earned at Camp ever since he was thirteen and picked up a spider that had escaped in the Science and Nature cabin. Will is only ten months younger than Nick is, and yet it feels like he’s been in his brother’s shadow his whole life. Many people want to get out of Shadyside. Tommy Slater, for example. Even Gary Rogers.
The only difference is that they don’t act like assholes to do it. Will saved the whole year for polos – even dipped into the money Nick saved for rent, all so that he could blend in with Sunnyvalers. Nick isn’t sure why Kurt and Sheila feel fine with having his brother around.
Kurt shoved him again, and Nick—
He felt his skin crack open on his cheek as his skin scraped against the Hanging Tree and—
“What is going on here?”
Kurt whirled around. There, in all her glory, was Christine Berman. Though it was only her first year as counsellor, it was her who organized the schedules, the rounds, the activities. In a way, she was similar to her older sister Cindy, who was now at college and had been head counsellor last summer. Except Christine wasn’t as nice as Cindy in the most obvious way. She was quieter, observant. Sometimes Nick caught her looking at Kurt with pursed lips, like she was either about to cry or laugh at how idiotic he was.
Nick has read many books in his life – but he could never read her.
Everyone knew who she was. Everyone in either town knew who the Bermans were. Her dad had been the Sheriff and his father before him. The Berman sisters are the most eligible people in town, everyone knows that.
‘Whoever marries those girls gets the keys to the kingdom,’ Joseph had told them more than once growing up.
“Nothing,” Kurt lied, slinging an arm around Nick’s neck.
Nick wriggled his way out of the boy’s grip and bent down to try and collect his books pages. Sheila snickered.
“He’s bleeding.” Christine took a few steps towards them, and Nick glanced up to find her collecting some the pages too. Sheila laughed again. “That’s enough, Sheila.”
The laughing stopped. “You may go.”
Nick looked up to find Christine shooting his brother an unimpressed, almost mildly regretful look. Sheila ran off, cheeks red at the dismissal, and his brother followed like the lap dog he was.
“If people find out that counsellors are harassing the campers it wouldn’t look good,” she told Kurt. “So I suggest you stop.”
“It was just fun—”
“Didn’t look like it to him.”
“Understood, Christine.”
Nick didn’t know if Kurt’s obedience was because of her name or her prettiness, but he didn’t particularly care.
“Here,” Christine said, handing him the loose sheets of paper. Kurt was already walking off without so much as an apology. “These are yours, I assume?”
She offered him a soft smile. She really was unfairly pretty. Nick’s stomach jolted as her fingers brushed against his as he took the paper back. She’s wearing a pair of jean shorts and a flowy white top that shows off the freckles on her shoulders. His lips dry a little. Nick has never been a very good liar, so he avoids looking at her for too long, certain that she’ll notice the red in his cheeks.
“Thanks,” he murmured, staring fixatedly at the ground. He felt her looking at him. He’s caught her staring at him once or twice, but often than not it’s because he was looking at her first. In his defence, he hasn’t done it often and—well, it’s hard not to.
“I’ve read Salem’s Lot too,” she told him. “It’s my favourite of his.”
Nick snapped his head up so fast he got vertigo.
“You’ve read Stephen King?”
“Yup. What about you?”
“Me?”
She smiled, and his heart made that terrible flip again. “Your favourite King novel?”
“Carrie,” he admitted, just as blood trickled down his cheek from the wound. He moved to wipe at it, but Christine beat him to it. Her warmth bled into his skin.
“I’m sorry,” she told him. “That they did that to you.”
He bit down on his lip.
“Not your fault.”
She frowned. “Still. I’ll walk with you to Mary.”
There weren’t many people who called Nurse Lane Mary. Many called her other, horrible things, but few called her Mary.
“You don’t have to,” he said, clutching his book to his chest. “I can get by on my own.”
She shot him a quizzical look, almost as if he’d done something to surprise her. Almost as if she’d surprised herself.
“I know,” she replied. “But you don’t have to.”
They walked side by side towards the infirmary.
“Thank you, Christine,” he added. “For stopping them.”
She stopped in the middle of the field so abruptly he did too.
“Ziggy.”
“Sorry?”
“Ziggy,” she said, extending out her hand. “My family calls me Ziggy. And my friends.”
Had Cindy called her Ziggy? Nick couldn’t remember. He didn’t see them interact so often. Their dad may have been sick last summer too before he died earlier this year.
“Ziggy,” he repeated, tasting the name on his tongue. He accepted her hand and shook it, tried to ignore the jolt of electricity that shot up his arm. After all, it wasn’t like she felt it too. “I’m Nick.”
He flushed. Of course she knew his name – or maybe she didn’t, even though they’d been going to camp for five years or so now—
She laughed, and it was like music to his ears.
“Nick,” she said. “Nice to meet you.” She looked at him closely. “You look a lot happier when you smile.”
“Oh.”
“It’s nice,” she told him. “You have a nice smile. I just haven’t seen it before, really, because you tend to brood a lot.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“You say sorry too much,” she commented lightly, but her eyes remained bright.
She didn’t remove her grip from his, and Nick was too stupefied to do anything about it either.
“Tell me,” Ziggy said, looking over his shoulder into the distance. He turned to find Kurt laughing with some other Sunnyvaler campers. Other footballers and jocks. “How do you feel about putting your proclivity for spiders to good use?”
Now, Nick’s heart still flutters at the memories. It’s hard to reconcile the images of them frolicking about after Carrie’ing Kurt with memories of them running across Gary’s body in the mess hall. God, what had happened to Kurt? There weren’t any mentions of him in the papers. He must have been locked in the outhouse during the whole massacre. He wasn’t there on Ziggy’s arm, which was something.
“Sorry,” he says.
She cracks a smile as she sits on the edge of his bed. “You say that too much,” she murmurs fondly, reaching out to hold his hand. The machine betrays his frantic heartbeat, the loud squeaking echoing through the room. He closes his eyes in embarrassment. Fuck. Now? Seriously? Nick has just been stabbed. Has seen awful, unimaginable things. His brother is dead. And yet she’s still the most beautiful, otherworldly thing he’s ever seen.
Ziggy chuckles a little, eyes shining as she gazes at him, and it makes his heartrate skip all over again. It had been beating this frantically too when they kissed in the Science and Nature cabin. She was his first kiss. It hadn’t felt real and yet it’d felt too real at the same time. He’d thought it was going to happen, but even when she grasped his chin and whispered is this okay? before he pressed his lips against hers it hadn’t felt like reality.
There’s something dreamlike to Ziggy Berman. Something he can’t quite pin down. Etheral.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” she tells him, eyes scanning his pale features. Nick knows he looks like shit. “When I found you in that field…”
He squeezes her hand. “It’s okay,” he assures her. “I’m okay. You brought me back. Besides, none of this is your fault.”
She inhales sharply and squeezes his hand back so tightly he winces.
“Sorry.”
“Now who’s the one unnecessarily apologizing?”
He succeeds in bringing back a smile to her lips, but only for a moment. Her gaze flickers to all the cards and flowers on his nightstand, her thumb caressing his wrist.
“Who knew dying and being brought back to life would make me so popular?” he muses. “If I’d known, I would have done it sooner.”
Her brows knit together. “That’s not funny,” she snaps sharply. “You could have died, Nick. For good. You should have gone on the bus like I told you to, fuck. There’s a chance you could have stayed dead, do you know that?”
She pinches the bridge of her nose, her neatly shaped nails glinting under the fluorescents. She had told him to wait in the mess hall with the other campers and counsellors, Gary’s body rotting away in the kitchen. But they’d had no other option. To go outside would have been to sit there like waiting ducks.
You stay here, she’d insisted. I’m not letting you get hurt.
It had been the first time in a long time that anyone had expressed concern for his wellbeing. But so many of the counsellors were missing. His brother was nowhere to be found. Nick never particularly liked Will, but that was still his brother.
And Ziggy.
She may be a counsellor, a Sunnyvaler, may be slightly older than him, but Nick didn’t feel right leaving her to go out alone. He couldn’t just stand there. He’d been on the sidelines all his life, keeping his head down, being quiet. Being alone. For once he wanted to be different.
And look how that turned out.
“I didn’t want you to get hurt,” he says, voice hoarse.
Some of the frustration on her face ebbs. “Oh, Nick,” she sighs, picking at the linen with her free hand. “I would have been fine.”
“You don’t know that,” he insists. “And I just – I wanted to be brave. You make me want to be brave.”
And she does. She’d been the one to help with the prank with Kurt, to huddle beside him in the outhouse stall. She hadn’t even seemed that weirded out by his okayness with spiders, only mildly impressed. Nick never would have done it on his own. When they’d kissed, Nick had felt like his life was finally, finally starting. Like he’d been reborn into some new, something brighter. Something that had value.
She reaches out and smooths back his hair, making a shiver run up his spine.
“You’re unlike any boy I’ve ever met, do you know that?” she asks in a tone that makes Nick unsure whether or not she’s talking to him or herself. She presses a soft, lingering kiss to his brow, his fingers still wrapped around her wrist. She’s so small, but she’s real. Even though Nick is taller, broader, he’s the more delicate one. Fragile.
“You mean I’m not like Kurt?”
She laughs gently, her breath caressing his lashes.
“No,” she says. “Definitely not.”
They’d used her name on the note to lure Kurt to the outhouse, to draw him away from Colour War. Chances are, before that night, if asked Nick would have said that Ziggy and Kurt would get married. The golden boy and the princess. Kurt’s family was second only to the Bermans in the hierarchy of Sunnyvale royalty, or so people said. Sheila’s family was also equally prominent.
But Ziggy doesn’t want Kurt. She wants him.
And he –
He wants her. It’s terrifying how much it consumes him even now.
“They found him in the outhouse, screaming about bugs and spiders in his hair,” she tells him. “Didn’t make a good impression.”
Nick almost laughs at it all. There Kurt was, concerned about his hair, meanwhile the entire time the rest of them were being massacred. Arnie. Joan. Gary. Will.A few other of Will’s friends. They’d been assholes, sure, but Nick wasn’t glad to see them dead. God, he doesn’t have a brother anymore. The only non-Sunnyvaler counsellor who had made it out alive was Alice.
He casts a glance towards the newspapers. “Surprised he didn’t try and steal the spotlight from you.”
Ziggy stills, bites down on her lip.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he says after a moment. “It’s just…”
“Kurt is Kurt, and he doesn’t think a woman can be in charge.” There’s a hint of derision in her voice as she shakes her head. She reaches out and unfolds one of the newspapers. “Twelve people.”
Of those twelve, only two were under fifteen.
“I’m sorry,” she offers. “About Will.”
Nick searches inside him for some kind of grief. Sadness. Depression. He doesn’t like the idea that his brother was butchered mercilessly. But all he finds deep down inside him is relief. They’d never been close, him and Will. Joseph disregarded both of them, especially Nick, after he figured out that his eldest son was weird. That he lacked his mean streak. Will was their mom’s golden child – by the time Joseph decided to give up on Nick, their mom didn’t have enough room in her heart to love both her children equally.
Maybe he is a monster. Maybe he is a freak. Nick will no longer have to worry about going home and Will’s friends being there. Of the crushing humiliation of being shoved and having your brother just laugh. Nick had to stay out for hours every night, even in winter, to have some kind of escape because their mother never stopped Will bringing his friends over all the time.
“Where’s your mom?” she asks before he can find the words to respond.
Nick shrugs, ignoring the pang of pain in his stomach. “Out. Probably at O’Connell’s.”
“She hasn’t been to see you?”
“Not really.” His eyes sting, even though they shouldn’t. Nick has known the truth ever since he came to in the hospital. “She wishes it were Will who lived, not me.”
Ziggy’s eyes grow cold. “Well,” she says tightly. “It’s a good thing it wasn’t up to her.”
He chuckles a little, more out of something to do than anything else.
“I’m sure she’d like to have words with Sarah Fier or God regardless.”
“Or me.”
Nick looks at her. She’s staring at him steadfastly, almost expectantly. The clogs in his brain work. He feels like he’s missing something, some key piece of information she so obviously knows, but he can’t name what.
“I’ve liked you for a while,” she confesses out of the blue. The machine picks up again. She ignores the beeping this time around, her expression thoughtful. “I sensed you were different from the other Shadysiders. The other Sunnyvalers. Not just because you read, but because of how you’d observe everyone. You’d be watching the others, and I’d be watching you.”
“I watched you too.”
She cracks a small smile. “I know,” she says. “There’s something about you, Nick Goode. Something that tells me we’re alike. That you’d understand.”
He frowns. His heartbeat slows again. “Understand what?”
She grabs both of his hands this time around, the skirt of her dress hiking up her thighs as she turns to face him more properly.
“We haven’t had many girls in the Berman family line. A few spares here and there, but always a boy first. My sister and I were different. An anomaly. For many years, my dad was disappointed. Confused. Until he realized – what if this was time for a new era. Time to start something new.”
“I don’t understand,” Nick says. Maybe it’s the drugs finally catching up with him.
Ziggy reaches out and strokes his cheek with the back of her palm, the other holding his hand in a vice grip, the metal of her ring digging into his skin. It’s oddly soothing.
“My dad trained my sister and I to be leaders,” she continues. “Taught us the value of our name, how to use our resources. He said that people would underestimate us because of our sex but that we’d have help on our side if we proved worthy of it. If we were brave enough to offer our hands.”
Nick remains quiet, mind buzzing with confusion.
“He showed me,” she says. “What he couldn’t show Cindy.”
“But—” he stops, bites his lip. “But Cindy is older.” Usually that would mean she’s the heir. She’d be the one in charge. It’s odd, really, to think that Ziggy and Will have anything in common. Had.
Ziggy seems to follow his line of thinking.
“Cindy is special,” she states carefully. “Cindy wants to see the world. Cindy is different in ways that make her unable to fulfill certain expectations.”
“What do you mean?”
“Cindy… Cindy has her own burdens,” she replies. “Things she can’t be open about in Sunnyvale. But I – I can. My dad sensed it from when we were young. Cindy is pure of heart, kind. Willing to fulfill expectations.”
“You’re kind too.”
“Maybe. But I also want. I crave. I saw my dad’s vision, saw that it was possible, that I could do it. And I wanted it. I want it. And I’m willing to do what it takes to get it. My dad showed me what I needed to do before I died. How I was going to make it work. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life pushing at walls and only stirring up dust.” She pins him down with a single look. “Do you understand what I mean, Nick? Do you understand what I had to do?”
He can hear the machine pick up again in the distance, the sharp beeping sound hollow in his ears. He remembers waking up by the Hanging Tree, Ziggy crouched above him. The look in his eyes. He’d thought her an angel then, beautiful even with the blood soaking her shirt, coating her chin.
But he was wrong.
She’s a siren instead. The knowing glint in her eye, the surety that she would be fine. It all makes sense with a sudden, horrible rush.
“It’s you,” he says. “Tommy Slater. It’s you.”
He moves to withdraw his hands. Suddenly her skin feels like ice. Was that an illusion? A game? He suddenly isn’t sure. She lets his hands go, almost looking a bit disappointed.
“It was,” she confirms sadly. “I didn’t want to kill Tommy. But it had to be done.”
“Had to? Had to? You killed my brother.”
“Yes, and what a loss that was,” she drawls. Her hands ball into fists in her lap. “He didn’t appreciate you. Your mom, Shadyside – none of them appreciate you. None of them realize how special you are.”
“And you do? You’re the reason I died.”
“I brought you back.”
He jerks his head towards the stack of newspapers. “Yeah, so it would look good for you. Is that why you did this? For publicity?” Hurt and humiliation blooms in his chest. He was just a toy to her after all. Something to be used and thrown away.
It’s pathetic, really, how that’s what hurts more than anything else.
“If I wanted to look especially good in the papers, I would have saved a kid instead,” she points out. “I brought you back because I want you. You’re not like Kurt or other Sunnyvaler boys. You’re unique. You’re gentle. And you don’t condescend me. You don’t patronize me. We’re alike, you and I. Overlooked. Judged.”
She reaches out and cups his face in her hands, forcing him to look at her. It hurts. But there’s some twisted, desperate part of him that’s relieved at her words. Fuck. What does that make him? She’s the first person in his life that’s seen him.
“I want to build a new, better world for people like us,” she says. “I just—I had to neutralize a few players on the chess board.”
“Tommy?”
“No. Not Tommy. He was a sad but necessary sacrifice. Kurt. Sheila.”
Nick thinks about it. Kurt, he understands. People looked to him as the next Sheriff, as the future King of Sunnyvale. Then this happens, and he’s found locked in a bathroom, shrieking about spiders. Ziggy had been the one to get the kids on the bus. To find Alice and give her the keys. To go out looking for more people. She was the hero.
“Sheila?”
“She ran to the bus in her underwear and your brother’s shirt,” she says. “Tommy attacked your brother in her cabin. A bit hard to hide that away and a difficult pill for her Sunnyvaler boyfriend to swallow.”
“Jesus.”
She hums in agreement. He can see her plan so clearly in his mind. She’s the hero of this story. The one they can rely on. Not Kurt. Not Sheila. Not the other counsellors. Ziggy is the one who fought Tommy, who rescued the kids. In one fell swoop, she’s ruined the reputations of two prominent Sunnyvale families. In a way, he can almost admire her strategy. Almost.
But he knew Tommy. Tommy was nice. He offered Nick extra fries and made the other boys stop picking on him. Gary was into comic books. They didn’t deserve to die.
“In order to build something new,” Ziggy says, “there has to be sacrifices. This will enable us to build something better. We can shape Sunnyvale and Shadyside into whatever we want. Fuck people like Kurt and Sheila and their snotty, conservative families. We can equalize the playing field. Make something brighter.”
Nick pauses.
“We?” he asks gingerly.
“You and me. We can do this. Think of all those people who shit on you, who didn’t appreciate you – you can show them. You can help me build a world in which no one is shat on for liking Stephen King. Where those old, conservative, fuckheads lose their significance.”
For once, vulnerability shines in her eyes as she gazes at him. “I can do this on my own,” she murmurs. “I just don’t want to. I want you. And I want you to want me back. To extend your hand out to me, as I extended mine to the devil.”
“You want to own me.”
“I want to take care of you,” she corrects soothingly. “I want you to see that you don’t deserve how your mother or brother treated you. Would that be so bad?”
Would it? She killed Will. That’s a monstrous thing to do. All those times he’d been called a freak, a weirdo. All those times he’d been shoved against a wall or a door or a tree or been laughed at. All those times he’d been called different. Nick never used to be afraid of the dark. Or spiders. One time his mom caught him playing with a snake in their backyard when he was six. She’d looked at him like he was something terrifying. Like there something wrong with him.
If he takes Ziggy’s hand, wouldn’t he be proving them right? Wouldn’t the blood on her hands transfer to his?
He wouldn’t be like Carrie in Stephen King’s book. He’d be more like Chris.
He meets her gaze again. Her skin is soft, unblemished. Scattered with perfectly placed freckles. But God didn’t make her—Satan did. Evil with a pretty smile and a soothing voice. She’d tricked him. She’d lied to him. She’d hurt him.
She brought him back. She stayed with him right until the paramedics insisted on hauling him into the ambulance. She’d kissed him like he was something to want, something to crave, something to value. She kissed him and her lips made him into something new. Changed his life irrevocably.
He thinks about what his life will be like at home. A mother who doesn’t love him, who hates him for surviving. A father gone. Shitty meals and crappy heating. A house full of memories of times people never choosing him.
But Ziggy did.
She did choose him.
She is choosing him.
He just needs to choose her back.
Slowly, gently, he extends his hand out to hers. She takes it, sighing with slight relief. An odd, powerful rush shoots up his arm, invades every aspect of his body. He knows in that moment that he can’t ever take his hand back. This decision is cemented in stone. And Nick—Nick doesn’t mind it. He finds he doesn’t mind it at all.
Ziggy smiles, and it cuts through his heart like a knife.
But Nick isn't afraid.
He won't ever be afraid again.
End.