Unleashed Hearts

The tennis ball came back wet and covered in sand, which was Leo's way of telling me he'd rather dig for crabs than play fetch.

"Seriously, man?" I held it up between two fingers. The tide was out, and the late afternoon light turned the whole beach the color of honey, and my dog sat there grinning at me with his tongue hanging sideways, proud of himself. "You couldn't find a dry one?"

Leo barked once, sharp and demanding, then dropped into a play bow, his fluffy tail sweeping figure eights in the sand. That dog could make me laugh even when I didn't want to. I chucked the ball as far as I could down the shoreline, and he took off like a golden missile, sand spraying behind him.

I shoved my hands in my jacket pockets and walked after him. The beach was mostly empty this time of day, just a few gulls fighting over something dead near the rocks and a couple walking their toddler in the shallows. My kind of quiet.

Then my phone buzzed.

I pulled it out and saw Cassie's name on the screen, which was strange because Cassie never called. She texted. She sent memes at two in the morning. Phone calls weren't her thing. I answered on the third ring.

"Jude?"

Her voice sounded wrong. Thin. Like she'd been crying or was about to.

"What's going on?"

"Can you come to the hospital? It's my dad."

I stopped walking. Ahead of me, Leo had reached the ball and was shaking it violently, sand flying in every direction. The gulls scattered. The couple with the toddler glanced over, then looked away.

"Which hospital?"

"St. Mary's. Jude, he collapsed at work. They don't know what's wrong yet. My mom's a mess and I can't, I just need someone here."

"I'm on my way."

She hung up before I could ask anything else. I stood there for a second, phone pressed to my ear even though the line was dead, watching Leo trot back toward me with the ball in his mouth and that same goofy grin. He dropped it at my feet and waited.

"Not now, buddy." I clipped his leash on and we jogged back toward the parking lot, sand filling my shoes, heart already beating too fast.

---

The hospital waiting room smelled like antiseptic and burnt coffee. Cassie was hunched in a plastic chair near the window, her dark hair pulled back in a messy knot, her face pale under the fluorescent lights. She looked up when I walked in and something in her expression cracked open.

I sat down next to her. Leo pressed his wet nose against her knee, and she let out this small broken laugh and buried her fingers in his fur.

"He's in surgery," she said. "They think it's his heart. He's only fifty-two, Jude. Fifty-two."

"He's strong. He's gonna be fine."

I didn't know that. I had no idea if it was true. But it was what she needed to hear, and I was never good at saying the right thing anyway, so I just put my arm around her shoulders and let her lean into me. She smelled like vanilla lotion and fear sweat. Her whole body was trembling.

We sat like that for hours. Her mom came out once to give us an update, her eyes red-rimmed, her hands shaking around a paper cup of water. Cassie's little brother Marcus showed up around nine, still in his work uniform from the diner, and he sat on Cassie's other side and didn't say anything either. Leo rotated between us like a furry nurse, resting his head on whichever lap seemed saddest.

Somewhere past midnight, the surgeon came out and told us her dad was stable. That he'd pulled through. That they'd caught it in time.

Cassie sobbed into my shoulder and I held her and Marcus hugged his mom and Leo wagged his tail so hard his whole back end moved. Relief flooded the room like water breaking through a dam. I felt it too, this loosening in my chest I hadn't realized I'd been holding.

But I also felt something else. Something I didn't want to look at directly.

---

Cassie fell asleep on my couch around three in the morning, curled up under the fleece blanket I kept for exactly this kind of thing. Leo was sprawled across her feet, snoring. I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched them both, and my chest did this thing it had been doing more and more lately, this tight, achy thing that I kept telling myself was just friendship.

We'd known each other since third grade. She'd punched a kid for making fun of my stutter back when I still had one. I'd held her hand at her grandmother's funeral. We'd been through breakups and bad grades and her dad's layoff and my parents' divorce, and she'd never once looked at me like I was too much or not enough. She just looked at me like I was Jude. Like that was sufficient.

I loved her. Of course I loved her. That wasn't the problem.

The problem was that lately, when I looked at her, I couldn't remember how to breathe right.

I grabbed a glass of water and drank it standing at the sink, staring out the window at the dark street, at the streetlight flickering on the corner, at nothing. Leo lifted his head and watched me with those brown eyes that always seemed to know too much.

"Don't look at me like that," I muttered.

He put his head back down.

I slept on the floor next to the couch that night, my back against the cushions, close enough that if she reached out in her sleep she'd find me. She didn't. But I stayed anyway, listening to her breathe, wondering when exactly my best friend had become the center of everything, and what the hell I was supposed to do about it.

The answer, I decided around four a.m., was nothing. You don't risk fourteen years of friendship on a feeling you can't even name. You don't gamble with the one person who's always been there.

Except.

Except when I closed my eyes, all I could see was her face in that hospital waiting room, and how she'd looked at me like I was the only solid thing in a world that had just tilted sideways.

And I wanted to be that. God help me, I wanted to be that for her.

Leo whined softly in his sleep. I reached up and scratched behind his ear without opening my eyes, and somewhere in the dark of that apartment, with Cassie breathing slow and steady above me, I made a decision I wasn't ready to admit I'd made.

I wasn't going to tell her.

But I wasn't going to stop feeling it either.