It didn’t matter. I didn’t have it in me to argue.
I left, closing her door behind me, deciding to take a hot shower to wash the hospital scent and my mother’s venomous words out of my skin.
When I got out, my phone was vibrating with text notifications. Holding my towel around my body with one hand, I unlocked the home screen with the other.
Stacy’s name and number popped up. I opened the unread text message from her.
They took Drew off the sedation early. He’s asking for you.
9
Drew
-THE FUCKING HOSPITAL WITH NO CLUE WHAT DAMN DAY IT IS-
Everything hurts.
My head, my back, my rib cage.
Breathing feels like being stabbed over and over again.
The hospital is the absolute worst place on earth to get some rest. And you know what they keep telling me? All of them—the police officers, the doctors, the nurses, my own damn mom—
all do the exact same thing. Every time they come in, they wake me up by flipping on the world’s brightest fucking florescent lights, then ask me a million questions, then tell me to get some rest.
Yeah, okay.
It’s happened so many times it would almost be comical if I didn’t feel like I’d been hit by a Mack truck.
Not a truck.
A guy. A boy, really. Though he’s the same age as me, I’d recently learned just how juvenile he really was. Beautiful, angry, sad boy.
If I close my eyes too long, I still see him.
Crying.
Kicking.
Raging.
I focused on the before instead. Before his brother. Before he lost control. When it was just him and I, in his Range Rover at the park.
I hadn’t been alone with him since that night at camp. I was nervous about seeing him again. But the minute we were away from the rest of the world, he reminded me what we’d had was real.
His mouth sliding up and down on my throbbing cock, my hands in his gorgeous golden locks. He looked like a Disney prince giving me the hottest blow job of my life.
Just like at camp, he’d surprised me in so many ways. Being a tender lover when I’d expected rough. Being a giver, when I’d always seen him as a taker.
There were two of him. The one everyone saw in public—the version everyone expected him to be. And the one only I knew privately, which I’d believed to be the real version.
Now I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t think he was either.
He missed me, he said. He’d been thinking of me constantly.
But then his brother pulled up, in a car with some chick. Screaming. Cussing. I hid in the back of the Rover, thinking it was safe when his brother finally left.
It wasn’t.