falling for 13 || Johnny Kavanagh

You Don't Have To Go

G R A C E

I had been out of hospital for a week, so I wasn't sure what I was expecting to find when I walked into Johnny's spare bedroom, but my brother passed out on the bed wasn't it. He was lying diagonally across the foot of the bed, but his feet were still planted on the floor. Johnny had called and said he and Gibsie found him walking like Bambi on ice through the town, and took the liberty of cleaning him up.

I wasn't surprised when Johnny said that he reckoned he was on drugs or something, because I knew Joey. When things were all over the place, Shane Holland and his friends always happened to be around Balylaggin, and when things were rough Joey never knew who to turn to, so he chose drugs.

I remembered how it was last year. The fighting at home had been terrible – the mood exceptionally awful. Dad was spending all of his time at the pub, and Mam was rotating between working herself into the ground and falling apart in her bedroom. Dad had been having yet another affair with one of the barmaids, an affair that had come out in glorious fashion a few short months later, and Mam knew. She knew and instead of throwing him out, she took to the bed. Sean hadn't even turned two, so he was a handful. Between cutting his back teeth and screaming through the night, all of us were exhausted.

Things were getting worse for Shan at BCS, and Joey was losing his temper more often. Talking back to teachers, getting into brawls at school and even bigger brawls at home, until one day, he had a new group of friends. Friends who were too old to be hanging around with a school boy. I was walking home from the bus stop when I saw Joey across the green in the middle of our terrace, with those boys. A humongous part of me wanted to storm over there and give all of them a piece of my mind, but then my Dad opened the front door and roared about how the dinner wasn't ready.

So right now I was praying to god that Joey would just sleep off whatever he had taken out of his system, then maybe he would wake up with some clarity.

"You can stay over," Johnny said suddenly, his voice low enough not to wake Joey. He was standing in the doorway.

I blinked at him, caught off guard. "What?"

"You can stay," he repeated, shifting his weight on his crutches. "It's late. Gibsie's still downstairs. My parents are in Dublin, and Joey clearly isn't going anywhere. Just stay here."

I let out a nervous laugh, shaking my head. "Johnny, I can't—Darren will kill me if he finds out."

Johnny snorted, his lips curling into that familiar cocky smirk. "Since when do you listen to what people tell you to do, Gracie?"

I gave him a pointed look, trying to ignore the flutter in my chest at the way he said my name. "This is different, Johnny. Darren's—"

"A pain in the hole," Johnny interrupted, finishing my sentence for me. "And not your keeper. Seriously, just stay."

I glanced over at Joey, who let out a loud snore in his sleep. "What about him?"

Johnny shrugged, his grin widening. "Joey won't care. He probably won't even notice."

I hesitated, the weight of everything that had happened over the past few days pressing down on me. "Are you sure?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.

Johnny's expression softened, and he stepped closer, the rubber caps of his crutches squeaking faintly against the floor. "Gracie," he said, his tone steady, reassuring. "I'm not kicking you out."

I swallowed hard, my heart doing that annoying thing where it sped up whenever he looked at me like that. Like I wasn't just some girl he was stuck with because of rugby and coincidences. Like I mattered. "Okay," I said finally, my voice small.