by Linda Kage
She heard him but what he said didn’t make a lot of sense. When he nudged her along, she fell into step, drifting in whichever direction he prodded.
In the surprisingly roomy supply closet, he instructed her to sit on a sealed box full of Styrofoam cups. She eased down gingerly, not about to risk the chance of falling through the unstable makeshift stool.
After showing her how to hold her wrapped thumb tight so he could let go, Logan turned away and scoured the shelves until he located the medical kit. By the time he turned back, her heartbeat throbbed into her thumb with the force of a sonic boom.
“How’re you doing?” he asked, his calm voice somehow stabilizing her.
She could only nod, her tongue too thick with pain and dizziness.
The kit clanged open, and she winced against the crack of sound it made in her pounding head.
“Okay,” he said, easing her hand off the offended area. “Let’s take a peek. I need to clean it first to see what we’re working with.”
She closed her eyes and turned her head aside, knowing better than to look at the damage while he carefully removed the apron bandage. But she could practically taste the metallic flavor of blood, making her tongue tingle and her jaws ache, and knew it wasn’t good.
Paige concentrated on breathing through her nose. When an entire palate of scents entered her nostrils, she inhaled more, feeling strangely comforted. Who would’ve thought a musty old supply closet could smell so nice?
When she realized the smell wasn’t coming from the room, but from the boy tending to her, her eyes flew open in horror.
Oh God, she must be totally out of it if she thought Logan Xander smelled good. Clean. Like mountain spring fresh dryer sheets and spearmint gum.
He winced as he removed the apron. “This is deep. It might need stitches.”
Slamming her eyes closed again, Paige swayed.
“Hey, are you okay? Paige?”
His voice. Her name. They sounded so strange together.
“No hospital.” She slurred out the words.
“But—”
She flashed her lashes open just long enough to glare at him. “I don’t have insurance. My father can’t afford it.”
His bright sky blue eyes caught her off guard. She’d had no idea his eyes were so…blue. His mouth snapped shut as his blue, blue eyes studied her. “Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”
He cleaned the wound first, apologizing softly as he poured the antiseptic over the cut, filling her entire hand and half her arm with liquid heat. Hissing out a strangled exhale, Paige grabbed a nearby shelf and held on for dear life.
Logan cursed quietly under his breath. “I should’ve forced him to put that safety guard on. You wouldn’t have gotten cut if it had been on. What was I thinking?”
Shocked he wanted to take responsibility for her stupid mistake, Paige shook her head and began to say, “No. No, you’re not—” But a second later, she realized what she was doing. She scowled and quickly added, “Yes. Yes, you should have. You owe me a new finger.”
He glanced up and his mouth fell open. His blue eyes blinked twice before he murmured, “Uh, how…how about I just patch up the one you have?”
She wanted to giggle. For some reason, the whole encounter seemed hilarious. A murderer was actually taking care of her, and she was damn near flirting with him, demanding new fingers as she fought back the gray fringes of unconsciousness that kept nudging at her brain.
She tossed out her unharmed hand with a sloppy flair. “Whatever. Fine. Do your best.”
He nodded and went back to work.
It took everything she had to stay conscious. She concentrated on him, reminding herself why she hated him and what he’d taken from her. Meanwhile, he tended to her the same way he worked his job: with quick, precise efficiency. Keeping his touch tender, he—
Wait. Tender?
Paige furrowed her brow in confusion. Yeah, she must be totally out of it. She stared hard at that place where their hands stayed in constant contact to find he’d already cleaned her up and was wrapping the area with a wad of sterile, white gauze. His warm fingers grazed hers with every rotation.
“This doesn’t mean I forgive you.”
He paused before continuing with his work. “Don’t worry. No one else has either. I wouldn’t expect you to be the first.”
She wrinkled her eyebrows, wondering what he meant by no one else. Had he been to see her father recently, begging for forgiveness? She could only imagine how well Dad had received him.
Probably by throwing a beer bottle at his head. He was kind of famous for that these days.
“I didn’t know…about your mom,” he said into the silence, his voice low and clogged with emotion.
Paige swayed. She didn’t like to think about her mom. Ever.
He kept his attention lowered as he worked, using a pair of scissors to neatly sever the gauze wrapped around her from the roll it had come from, cut a piece of surgical tape, and fastened the wrap.
“You didn’t have a picture of her on your desk in your dorm room like you did Trace.”
Trace.
The entire reason why she hated Logan Xander.
Immediate rage engulfed her, once again reminding her she did not and never would like this guy. Paige snapped her hand away from him and surged to her feet. “Don’t you dare say his name!”
Startled blue eyes popped up to gawk at her.
She glared at him. “Don’t…don’t talk to me about any of this like we’re besties or something. I only stayed to help clean up because I want to be a good employee, not because I wanted to hang out with my brother’s murderer and share my feelings, okay?”
His expression fell blank. But he opened his mouth to respond.
She didn’t think she could handle hearing his voice, so she pushed past him. “And I only let you near my finger because the sight of blood makes me pass out. So can we please not talk?”
“Okay.” His voice was defensive as he lifted his hands, showing his surrender. “Okay, I get it. No talking.”
But with his hands in the air and his palms facing her way, the un-cuffed sleeves of his shirt sagged down, exposing his wrists…and the multitude of scars slashed over his veins.
He’d cut himself. A lot. Had probably even tried to commit—
Her mouth fell open as she gasped, unable to take her eyes off his ruined flesh, unable to believe the pampered, got-everything-his-rich-heart-desired lawyer’s son had actually tried to kill himself.
It took him a second to realize what she was ogling, but when he caught her expression, his face drained of color and he yanked his hands down, burrowing his mangled wrists against his waist and out of sight. But those scars continued to blaze through her mind’s eye as clearly as if she was still looking at them.
He backed up from her, looking more afraid of her than she’d ever been of him.
When he whirled away and staggered from the closet, Paige remained frozen, staring at the spot where he’d exposed what might possibly be his deepest, darkest secret.
Seeing him looking all depressed on her dorm room floor might’ve stirred the tiniest bit of empathy in her. Knowing he’d cried at the grief meeting had been unsettling. But this…this blew her away.
For the first time in three years, she actually felt completely aware of another person—outside her family—hurting. Suffering.
Logan Xander had definitely suffered.
She plopped down hard onto the box she’d been sitting on before…and promptly fell through, landing in a pile of plastic and Styrofoam.
Chapter Eleven
PAIGE HAD NO IDEA how long she sat in the supply closet of The Squeeze among scattered and squashed cups, staring dazed at the doorway where Logan had disappeared. Could’ve been twenty seconds or twenty minutes; her brain was too dazed to keep track of time.
But seriously, what was she supposed to make of this new development?
Logan Xander was no longer just a name
to her, the name of the evil being who’d taken away her brother. He was a person with feelings, lots of feelings. Reserved and moody, hard-working and keeping to himself, he wasn’t anything like she had assumed he’d be. He seemed more like a guy who’d made a horrible mistake and was constantly struggling to make some kind of amends. Full of an inner strength and sturdy determination she wished she could have.
And he had beautiful, sad, blue eyes.
A sound from the front of the store jolted her out of her rambling thoughts. Blinking, she glanced around her and scrambled to her feet. After setting the broken cardboard box and stacks of cups back to rights, she hurried into the main area, certain Logan couldn’t be lingering around.
From the way he’d lit out of the supply closet, she would’ve thought he had escaped the building without even bothering to punch his time card. Wondering if it might be a burglar, she snatched up a broom and crept down the hall. After peeking around the corner, she stopped short.
Logan had already finished cleaning the meat slicer of doom and was wiping down all the countertops. Keeping his back to her as he scrubbed with a vengeance, he said, “Go ahead and go. We’re pretty much done here. I’ll lock up.”
She shook her head in disbelief. By the tense set of his shoulders, she could only imagine how strongly braced he was, ready for her to mention his scars.
She didn’t think she could, though. She knew why he’d done it. He was sorry for Trace’s death. Really sorry. He wasn’t all oops-my-bad kind of sorry or I’m-only-sorry-I-got-caught; he was filled with bone-deep regret.
How was she supposed to configure this into her brain and slot it in with the anger and hatred she’d always felt for him? “Th-thanks for wrapping my thumb.” She pushed out the words awkwardly, feeling lame because she couldn’t summon the courage to outright apologize for her behavior.
He paused in his scrubbing, glancing over his shoulder at her as if he couldn’t believe his ears.
It was more than she could handle. Their gazes met, and an awareness she wanted to deny rocked through her; she gasped and whirled away. Her attraction to him was the straw that broke it all. Hurrying down the hall, she cradled her stomach and silently punched her time card before fleeing back to her dorm building through the dark evening.
Every muscle in her body ached by the time she reached Grammar Hall. Temples throbbing, she unlocked the front door, ready to collapse onto her bed and bawl, when she entered madness.
Startled by the yelling and things flying by her head, she instantly ducked and wrapped her arms over her face.
“Suck on this, Einstein!”
A bulky football player-looking guy, his expression contorted into an evil, taunting sneer, wound his arm back and threw something into the shadowed space under the stairs.
A second later, the item was lobbed back and landed on the floor not two feet from her shoes. Paige squinted and made out what looked to be a baby’s pacifier.
Laughing and jostling against half a dozen replicas of himself, the football player hurried up the stairs with his friends, leaving her alone in the foyer.
She knew who Einstein was. She’d seen the boy around and heard the rumors. Nearly every university had one of them—a genius kid who’d enrolled in college way before he was old enough to graduate from high school.
His real name was Anthony something-or-other. Anthony…Morris, that was it. But everyone made fun of him, calling him Einstein. He was sixteen, if the rumors she’d heard were correct, and he was already a junior. What’s worse, the poor kid was small for his age, so he looked closer to twelve.
When he didn’t emerge from under the stairs, she inched forward to check on him. But as soon as she got too close, he threw a jar of baby food at her. She jumped back to save her sneakers from getting splattered as the glass shattered against the floor.
“Sheep,” a young voice jeered from the shadowed nook. “You’re all sheep. Baa.”
At his exaggerated bleating, Paige snickered. “Yeah, they do kind of act like a big dumb cluster of sheep, don’t they?”
“Flock.” The voice turned sullen as it responded.
“What’s that?” she asked, trying to sound as polite and non-threatening as possible. Stepping around the puddle of strained carrots, she cradled her wrapped hand protectively closer to her chest and approached the nook again, much more cautiously this time.
“A group of sheep is called a flock. Or a herd, a trip, or a drove. Sometimes a mob. But never a cluster.”
She flushed, a little indignant he’d corrected her vocabulary when she was the only person trying to be nice to him. “Oh. I like a mob then. They looked like a big group of dumb mobsters.”
“I said mob, not mobster. There’s a huge difference.” He appeared, frowning at her with impatience. A green glob of peas had been smeared across his youthful face. When he saw her, he stopped dead and his pale brown eyes flared open wide.
She cringed at the torment he’d received. “Oh, you poor thing. Here. I think I have some wet wipes in my bag.” Unzipping her purse, she fished around until she found her package of wipes, wincing when her injured thumb bumped her compact.
She pulled a single sheet free and handed it to him, but he backed away, scowling. “Diaper wipes?”
Great. Now he thought she was making fun of him. “No, actually, they’re face wipes. I use them to take my makeup off each night.”
When he didn’t reach out to take the cloth from her, she sighed and stepped closer to dab the smudge off his face for him, hoping he didn’t take insult from her motherly treatment.
But instead of pushing her hand away, he tipped his chin up, encouraging her ministrations. Logan had wrapped her cut thumb so snug that she couldn’t bend it. Sticking out awkwardly, its gauze surface brushed Anthony’s cheek as she scrubbed. He didn’t seem to notice, however, he seemed more concerned about trying to keep his fluttering eyes open as Paige pampered him.
She slowed as she removed the last little bit of peas. “There,” she murmured, forcing a bright smile. “All clean.”
When he simply studied her, looking utterly awed, she shifted her stance, uncomfortable by such intense scrutiny. “You’re Anthony, right? Anthony Morris.”
“Einstein,” he corrected, his wary frown returning.
Okay, so he actually liked his derogatory nickname. She supposed she could deal with it if he could. “Right. Sorry. I think I knew that. I’m Paige. I live up on the—”
“Third floor,” he finished for her in a trance-like state as if he was reading her stats verbatim. “Room three-oh-eight with that rude tramp named Mariah. Suitemate to Bailey Prescott and Tess Simpson.”
When her mouth dropped open, he shrugged. “It’s incredibly easy to hack into the university’s database.”
She nodded, gulping down her instinctive need to flee. But the genius sixteen-year-old definitely had a creepy vibe about him.
“Well…” She floundered, not sure how to tie up this little conversation and flee, yet somehow show him she wasn’t like the mob who’d just harassed him. “Don’t let those bullies get to you, okay, Einstein? Someday when you’re a successful billionaire, they’ll be too busy begging you for a job to laugh. You can get your revenge then.”
Einstein snorted. “If I survive until then.” He lifted his hands to show her his wrists.
She reared back, stunned to see a copy of the same marks she’d seen not-so-long-ago on a different pair of wrists.
“Who did that do you?” she demanded, instantly wanting to beat up whoever had hurt him.
Einstein, blinked, looking confused. “No one. I did it to myself.”
She furrowed her brow. “But—” Why wasn’t he hiding them in shame the way Logan had?
Einstein sniffed. “Yeah, I doubt you know what it’s like to be made fun of at all. You don’t know true pain. You’re too pretty.” He spat the word as if it were a curse.
Paige took another step back and slipped in the carrots on the floor. W
aving her arms and making a dull throb arch up her arm from her cut thumb to her elbow, she caught herself and hopped over the pile until it lay between her and the eerie little genius.
People didn’t call her pretty. Not as a compliment, and certainly not a curse. To hear such a word applied to her felt strange all by itself, but to be labeled the kind of person he seemed to think she was piqued her to no end.
Anthony “Einstein” Morris filled her with all kinds of confusion. She wanted to protect him, to mother him, to yell at him, and run from him all in the space two minutes. It had to be some kind of record.
Stiffening her back, she straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin. “Actually I do know what true pain is like.”
He studied her a moment before saying, “Oh, right. Your mom.” When she gasped, he shrugged. “Your record said your dad is the only contact you have, so I figured she was already—” He shrugged again. “My mom ran off with a rock star when I was five. They died in a car crash together.”
Paige squinted at him, wondering if this kid was for real. A rock star? That was something a seven-year-old would concoct.
His brain might challenge that of a college student, but he was sadly lacking in the social skills department. She wondered if he was even sixteen yet. Immediately, her emotions reverted back to pity. She was going to have to take this poor child under her wing.
“So why did you hurt yourself?” she asked, motioning to his wrists.
For some reason, she knew she could ask him that question. Unlike Logan, Einstein showed off his scars as if he were proud of them. He probably had a big, crazy reason for cutting himself, like—
“I wanted to see what it felt like.” He grinned and showed her the marks again. “The vertical slashes here that run the length of your arm are actually more painful than the traditional horizontal cuts. They must hit more nerve endings. But these others bleed more.”
Slightly ill from even the mention of blood, Paige cuddled her own injury to her chest and winced. It pulsed with more pain, reminding her how fresh and deep it was.
“Did you have to go to the hospital?” she asked.
