NO Love Club (Boy × Boy) ✔

33) A ZEBRA CAN'T CHANGE ITS STRIPES.

Cole Walker's POV 

"Wait until I get the chair." Cody warned me, like he actually believed I would throw myself out of the car and crawl across the yard, if I didn't get my chair soon enough. I cursed under my breath, trying to distract myself with the music blasting from my earbuds. 

The truth was that a part of me wanted to throw myself on the ground and crawl across the yard; anything to get away from the car. We hadn't taken the same route where X and I had had the accident, but I only needed the lights and the passing views from the window to take me right back there.

My stomach lurched, making me pull a shaking hand over my mouth to keep me from throwing up all over the car. How embarrassing it was to be scared of such a normal, everyday thing. When Cody and Chloe were back with my chair, helping me out of the car, I quickly wiped that fear off my face.

"Come on, slugs, I don't have all day." I joked, knowing full well that I had nowhere to go for the next few days. I was out of the hospital, but I was nowhere near ready to go back to school. According to mom, that is.

When I looked around in my room, I was taken aback by how unaltered it was. My bed was still unmade, like I had left it in the morning before the accident, my games and books still neatly stacked on the desktop. How could nothing have changed, when I had become so irreversibly different? How could everything around me stay the same, even as my life had turned upside-down?

"Should I —" Cody began, hesitantly. 

"No." I shook my head, pursing my lips in a firm line. I had to be able to do one simple thing on my own. "Just shut the door when you leave."

"Okay, but shout if you need something." Cody agreed, backing up to the door. Then he grimaced, explaining: "Chloe and I will be making some sugar-flour-everything-free cookies, so you know where to find us."

"Cody." I called after him, and he peeked back in from the door chink. I thought about everything he had done for me and how much he continued to do for me still, and how I could never pay back for it all. "Thank you."

Mom used to put all the blame on him. Her favorite claim was that I was depressed because Cody left for university and forgot all about me, like it was his responsibility to take care of Chloe and me. When dad had a heart attack and Cody didn't answer her call right away, she blamed Cody for only caring about his friends and partying. 

Little did she know that Cody only went to that one party and that he hadn't even had friends for a long time. She had absolutely no clue what kind of hell Cody was going through. He kept it all to himself so that we wouldn't have to worry about him.

Now he's risking his perfect attendance record to make sure I settle back home without trouble. Cody doesn't have a selfish bone in his body and all he has ever done has been for our family. And yet, he was the main subject of mom's blame game. 

When Cody had shut the door, I rolled my chair to the bed and tried to come up with a way to get there without further damage. I opted on slumping in the unmade sheets face first, rolling to my side a bit and then pulling the rest of my body on the bed. I sent X a quick word of me being home, and then returned to listening to music. 

For as long as I can remember, my taste in music has been all about melancholic lyrics and angry beats. When I'm feeling blue, like all the way down -type of blue, the more melancholy and self-pity the better. When I'm pissed off, like I was then, it's all about the raging beat. 

Perhaps I had no reason to hold on to the anger for mom, but after all this time I refused to let it go. The way she had treated Cody and how she had downright ignored his feelings wasn't something she could be forgiven for with just an apology. What were those three words in the face of all the damage done to Cody?