I walked home to my apartment even though it wasn’t convenient or safe. I needed the exercise and the air to clear my mind, even if I knew it would never be clear after what happened today. I walked until I was exhausted, and I walked more after that. What could I do to close the doors inside of my brain again?
What was I going to do?
Chapter 2
I woke up the next day feeling more alone than I ever had before. I’d gotten maybe a little too accustomed to Shawn not being around. Our friendship had been on the rocks for months. But now I didn’t know how to act around Patrick, whom I saw almost every day.
I put off calling the hospital, instead convincing myself that it would be better to keep my mind off of everything by going to class. It was my photography studio class today, with my adviser, Mercedes Valdez. She had been urging me to drop Shawn as a partner for my senior project—the culmination of my photography degree. She would have even more ammunition against me if I didn’t get myself to class, so I figured striving for normalcy would be my best bet.
I had trouble looking at the bloody clothes I’d left by the hamper. I shoved them in a plastic bag and threw them away in the dumpster behind my apartment complex before walking to class, painfully aware that I didn’t have any work to show for myself. Half-heartedly, I took a few shots of people walking around campus on my own commute. It had been ages since I printed photos to show Mercedes in class…not since my photos from the Golden Gate Bridge…the morning Patrick and I had kissed and I’d made up my mind to pursue whatever might be there.
Even if people got hurt.
I shook my head and tried to rid myself of my funk before getting to class. I couldn’t have known how everything was going to transpire after that morning. If I’d had even an inkling that Shawn would react as violently as he had, I would’ve thought twice about pushing Patrick to consider me as a romantic partner.
If I had to make a list of pros and cons of my relationship with Patrick, the pros far outweighed the cons. But the one con was the heaviest…the situation with Shawn and everything that had happened. Could just one bad thing negate dozens of good things?
“Loren.”
It was Mercedes’ no-nonsense tone of voice. I could hear the rest of my classmates pretending to busy themselves, but they were really gearing up to listen in delight. I wasn’t friends with very many of them, but I was aware of how jealous they were of me. A lot of them considered me to be a teacher’s pet, that Mercedes liked my work unfairly. I couldn’t help how my teacher treated me in class, or how she received my work. I tried to ignore all of them and focus on what I was here to do—to learn and grow as a photographer, but this new development irked me. They had no idea what I was going through. They were just happy because it was obvious Mercedes was upset with me—and that I was about to get a verbal lashing.
“I have work to show you,” I said quickly, “but only on the viewfinder of my camera.”
“Work related to your senior project?” she asked, sounding dubious. I was already pushing her; she liked to see either prints or a slideshow of work on a larger computer screen.
“In a way,” I hedged.
“Loren, it’s a yes or no question.”
Someone tittered, and I bristled. “Could we meet in your office, privately, about this matter?”
My tone of voice made Mercedes raise her hackles. “In the real world, photographers have to deal with honest criticism of their work—or their lack of work—in front of colleagues. That is why, when we’re in this studio, whether you’re working or not, you will receive feedback from both me and your fellow photographers. It would do you a disservice to receive criticism privately. You wouldn’t learn as much.”
What I was learning was that a surprising percentage of my classmates were more than gleeful to watch me get reamed over something I was having trouble controlling. I couldn’t help that Shawn was upset with me and in the middle of ruining his life over a romantic decision I’d made for myself.
It became suddenly clear to me that it had been the wrong choice, coming to class. Everything seemed so small and petty and pointless here. Just last night, surgeons had fished a bullet out of Patrick’s chest. Just last night, Shawn had to get his stomach pumped because he’d swallowed a bottle full of pills because he hated what life had become without the possibility of me loving him back. Yet, I was supposed to care about snapping some photos so I could graduate? This was way low on my totem pole right now.
“I have somewhere I need to be right now, actually,” I said, grabbing my bag and camera and standing up from my desk abruptly. Scandalized, my classmates gasped as a whole. They were no longer bothering to hide the fact that they were pretending to edit their photos, but instead, they were obviously listening to Mercedes fuss at me.
“The only place you have to be is right here, right now,” Mercedes said, angry and bewildered at me, her star student, disappointing her. That was some tough shit; I didn’t have to impress anyone. I was done with this charade.
“There are things a lot more important going on right now than class,” I said, scowling at her. “The world doesn’t revolve around your classroom, Mercedes. It doesn’t revolve around this school either. You think I need this right now, to be bitched at because I haven’t done a damn thing on my senior project? There are reasons for that, reasons that I would love to discuss in private, but apparently I would lose out on learning something if we did that.”
Mercedes gaped at me. I had never acted like this in her classroom—or anywhere, for that matter. It had been a mistake to come to class. I could’ve dodged a concerned email from her much easier than this situation, which was quickly unraveling into a shit show.
My professor spluttered at me, trying to spit out the appropriate response, but I knew she’d struggle for a while. There wasn’t an appropriate response to the way I was behaving. There wasn’t a single response in the whole world for what had happened to me to make me act like this.
“Here. I know everyone is dying to find out just what I’m talking about.” No one would make eye contact with me, as I rolled my gaze across the studio. “I would hate to leave a single person in suspense. But I can’t start my senior project yet, the one I’d planned on doing with a visual art major, Shawn Paulson. I can’t because he’s been giving up on himself, and though I’ve been encouraged to give up on him, too, I refuse to. I can’t give up on him because I’m the reason he’s doing so bad. He’s in love with me, but I’m not in love with him. I’m in love with someone else, someone close to him.”
I had everyone’s rapt attention, but Mercedes laid her hand on my arm. “Loren, I made a mistake. This is something better discussed in private. In my office.”
I covered my face with my hands. What was wrong with me? Had I really been about to air out all of my dirty—no, bloody—laundry in front of my class?
“I can’t be here right now,” I said, looking at my professor, mortified to discover I had tears in my eyes. “Something really bad happened, has been happening, and I can’t be here right now because I can’t make sense of taking photos right now.”
“We can talk about this,” Mercedes said, but I was done. I had to leave. Right now.
I fled the studio as my classmates exploded into exclamations and conversations, running across campus with no direction but away from there. It had been wrong to try for normalcy because nothing was normal right now. Patrick and Shawn were in the hospital because of me, and I didn’t deserve to try to ignore the fact that everything was upside down.
I hopped on a bus and took it to the hospital. My first stop was Shawn’s room, but the police officer there, a different one from last night, blocked me.
“No one’s allowed in, ma’am,” she said dutifully.
“I’m his friend,” I said. “I was there yesterday, when it all happened. I just want to know if he’s okay. I wanted to tell him I’m here.”
The door was closed, and I couldn’t see anything through
the small window, but I hoped Shawn could hear me.
“He’s going to be all right, physically,” the officer said, softening a little. “But he’s not seeing anyone at all right now.”
“I understand.” I walked to the elevator, took it up to the floor Patrick was staying on, and sidled into his room. He was lying flat, but talking on his phone, his voice weaker than I’d ever heard it.
“I don’t give a shit that he’s going to be offended we’re postponing the meeting again,” he was saying. “We have to postpone the meeting. No, I’m not going to explain myself, especially not to him. Who does he think he is? Yes, I understand, but that doesn’t make us beholden to him. I’m the CEO, for fuck’s sake.”
That heart monitor was beeping away, and Patrick hadn’t seen me yet. I leaned forward and snagged the phone from his grip.
“Mr. Paulson has just gotten out of surgery,” I said in my sweetest, most professional voice. “He needs to focus on recovery right now, so clear his schedule for the rest of the week and don’t bother him with anything remotely stressful. Thank you, and goodbye.”
I ended the call and set the phone down on a rolling table before pushing it out of Patrick’s grasp.
“That was an important phone call,” he said hoarsely, eyeing me.
“Not more important than your health,” I said, raising an eyebrow at him. He looked as fragile as I thought he had felt last night, the machine marking his heartbeats for him. The machine was still on today, but it was better that he was awake. I was too frightened for him when he was asleep. It seemed like anything could happen.
“Regardless of where I am, or how I’m feeling, my business continues,” Patrick rasped. I poured him a glass of water from a plastic pitcher left on the table and bent a straw into it before offering it to him.
“Well, you need to tell the business to continue by itself for a bit,” I said, as he eyed me balefully, sucking down the water. “I know I don’t have to tell you that you just survived a bullet to the chest. What I do have to tell you is that you need to rest and let your body recover.”
“They’re not telling me anything about Shawn,” he said, spitting the straw out and indicating that he was finished with the water.
“That’s probably because ‘they’ are the healthcare professionals who would like you to fully recover before stressing yourself out further,” I said. “For your information, and in the hopes it will get you to relax, Shawn is going to be fine.”
I said the words, even if I didn’t mean them or believe them. I would say anything to drown out that chirping from the heart monitor, reminding me just how close Patrick had come to losing his life.
“Who told you he was going to be fine?” Patrick demanded. “Did you see him for yourself? Could you verify that statement?”
This was still Patrick with his CEO shoes on, I was convinced. I could visualize him talking to people at his company like this, but I didn’t think I liked this demanding side of him. I had to understand that Shawn was his son, that he was concerned about him. I swallowed my pride and tried to smile for him.
“I spoke with the police officer outside of Shawn’s door,” I said. “She said he was fine, physically. She added that he wasn’t seeing anyone right now.”
“What does that even mean, ‘fine, physically’?” Patrick asked. The heart monitor was beeping faster and faster. “Is she implying that he’s not fine, mentally? And how is it that a police officer is outside of his door? Can’t they make him see somebody?”
“You need to take a deep breath and relax,” I told him, crossing my arms over my chest. “This is why they’ve been refusing to tell you about Shawn. Shawn is going to be okay, but you’re not going to be if you keep this up.”
“I need more details to process this, and no one is giving me details,” he said. “That’s what I do, Loren. I process information; I chew it up and spit it out until it makes sense to me. Tell me everything you know.”
“If I tell you everything I know, you have to promise to stay calm,” I said. “If processing information is what you do for a living, then you can process this dispassionately.”
“He’s my son.”
“I know that. But if it upsets you too much and the doctors have to come rushing in here, I’ll get in trouble, you’ll get in trouble, and they’ll probably ban me from this hospital.”
Patrick inhaled slowly, then exhaled heavily, wincing a little. “I’ll try to stay calm.”
“You’re going to have to do better than try.”
He eyed me, but there was less rancor in that gaze than before. “I promise I’ll stay calm.”
I told him everything I knew, everything I remembered from before—the pills, the gun, the conversations I’d had with first responders and police and hospital personnel alike. I kept one eye on that heart monitor, listening to the tempo of the beeping, but Patrick was true to his word. He stayed calm, breathing evenly as I told him what happened.
“Why did you pull the gun toward you?” I asked finally. “I’ve been replaying it over and over again in my mind, and I can’t figure out why you did that. You could’ve pointed it away from you.”
“Toward you?” Patrick asked. “Never. I never would’ve done that.”
“I could’ve gotten out of the way,” I argued. “There wasn’t any need for you to take a bullet.”
“If it meant keeping you and Shawn safe, that’s what needed to happen,” Patrick said, firm in his words.
That meant that he was keeping me safe from Shawn and Shawn safe from the hell I had imposed on him by dating his father and not loving him instead.
“We need to talk more about Shawn,” I said, hesitant.
“Agreed.” Patrick looked irritable. “I wish I could sit up for this.”
“If the doctor says no, then no,” I said. “You have to listen to your doctors.”
“I thought we were supposed to be talking about Shawn.”
“We are.” I sighed. “What’s going to happen with him? What happens after the three days is up and they make a decision? Where is he going to go?”
“He’s going to have to go to rehab in some form or fashion,” Patrick said. “There isn’t going to be an option beyond that. And as hard as it might be for him to go, and as painful as the things he might’ve said to the two of us were, we have to support him.”
I swallowed hard. “I know that. That’s why I think we should stop seeing each other.”
Patrick’s eyes fluttered closed, and I whipped around to the heart monitor, trying to figure out what was happening. The beeps didn’t give any indication that there was anything amiss.
I felt like I had to explain myself to him, even with his eyes still closed, his lips sealed. “Think about it,” I said. “If we hadn’t been together in the first place—if I hadn’t pushed you to give our relationship a chance, there wouldn’t have been a relationship for Shawn to get upset about. He wouldn’t have resorted to numbing himself with drugs and alcohol. He wouldn’t have gotten into trouble with the police. He wouldn’t have sold his car, bought that gun, taken those pills. And you wouldn’t be in the hospital with a bullet hole in your chest.”
Patrick still didn’t say anything. I wished he could’ve at least looked at me, but the man had been through a lot over the last twenty-four hours or so.
“I’m the common denominator of all of these problems,” I said. “It would be better if I removed myself—for Shawn’s sake. For your sake. And for my own sake. Because this is so fucking hard and I’m not even the one in the hospital bed.”
I readied my next comments to refute whatever Patrick was going to say. I was ready to tell him about my struggles at school, about the fact that I hadn’t been working on the senior project at all because Shawn was a vital component of its completion. I was ready to argue every point he possibly could’ve made…except for the one point he actually did make.
“I think that’s probably the wisest decision,” Patrick said, opening his e
yes.
It was what I’d wanted, but I’d assumed he’d at least put up a fight. He’d tried to end things several times, talking about how good we had it but all the difficulties we faced. I’d always talked him out of it, convinced the good was better than the bad. But now that I’d brought up ending our relationship, he rolled over and accepted it. Maybe he was tired. Hell, I knew he had to be tired. Maybe he was putting up so many fights right now that he didn’t want to fight this one.
But of all the emotions I could have had in this moment, the moment when I proposed to end a wonderfully complicated relationship with someone I loved, I felt anger the most.
I realized I’d wanted Patrick to fight for us. I wanted him to assure me that everything—even this—was worth fighting for. The love was there. We’d agreed on that point profusely. We loved each other, but we were giving up. Things had gotten too complicated, too difficult, and we were giving up. We were throwing everything away.
Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe this whole thing hadn’t been worth fighting for. Maybe none of this meant anything.
There wasn’t anything left to say. I hitched my bag up on my shoulder and walked out of the room without another word, those green eyes on me, the heart monitor’s chirp the only sound.
Chapter 3
Nothing made sense anymore to me. I hadn’t felt at home in school, and Patrick and I weren’t together. Where could I go? What could I do to feel normal again?
For the first time since I’d come to San Francisco, stars in my eyes about the opportunity to attend college here, I missed Los Angeles. I missed my foster parents and wished I could talk to them about my troubles. I didn’t want them to worry, though, and I didn’t want to take up any of their valuable time. I wasn’t their first—or last—foster child. They were career foster parents, the progeny of their hard work spread out across the country. They were raising a new needy boy or girl right now, and I didn’t want to distract from that.
Even when I’d turned eighteen, they’d both assured me that just because I’d aged out of the system, I could always think of them as my parents.
Crushing On The Billionaire (Part 3) Page 2
