Freak (Hillcrest University #2)

by Candace Wondrak

  The medics had loaded Declan into the back of the ambulance, and his brother was climbing in with him.

  They were going to leave me behind. What the fuck?

  “Wait!” I called out, rushing to the doors before the woman could close them. I held out my injured hand, and the woman’s eyes fell to the dislocated thumb and the skin that had been scraped off when I got myself free in Travis’s room.

  Just when I thought she’d tell me no, that I had to get my own ambulance or something—because let’s face it, the American healthcare system sucked ass—she said, “Get in. We’ll need to ask you what happened to your friend, and then we’ll take care of you.”

  I climbed in, sitting beside Declan’s brother, my stare on Declan’s still form on the gurney on the opposite side. Two guys were currently applying pressure to the wound and checking his vitals as best they could since he wasn’t conscious. The woman near me and Declan’s brother had a notepad on some clipboard, writing down something. Intake papers, maybe?

  Honestly, I didn’t know. I also hoped that this would be billed to Declan and his family, because I was as uninsured as a person could be.

  The drawbacks to being poor.

  The ambulance started going, its siren flaring as it drove us as fast as possible to the nearby hospital. “What happened?” the woman asked me, and both she and his brother stared at me.

  “I came home and found him in the bathroom, passed out. I wasn’t home when it happened,” I carefully avoided saying he cut himself, not wanting these people to think he was suicidal. I mean, maybe he was, but there was no way he did this to himself…right? He was getting better. People who were getting better didn’t relapse like this. “I took off my shirt and tied it around his elbow, hoping to slow the blood long enough for you guys to save him.”

  Honestly, I hated how I sounded: broken, tired, weak. It’d been a doozy of a day, and it wasn’t even over yet. Today was a day that would go down in infamy. In hell. Today was a day I really hoped was never repeated for the rest of my life, regardless of how long my life turned out to be.

  If I stayed at Hillcrest during my college years, it might not be that long.

  “You might’ve saved his life by doing that,” the medic woman remarked. She filled out whatever she had to fill out before gesturing with her pen to my hand. “And what happened to you?”

  I pretended not to notice everyone’s eyes on me. “Oh, I…I fell.” Oh, fuck me. Totally stupid response, one that wasn’t even believable, but it was the only thing I could think of at such short notice. I was worried about Declan, not myself. I didn’t have the mental capacity to come up with a lie.

  “You fell?” the medic woman repeated, clear in her tone she didn’t believe me. Hell, I didn’t believe myself, and I was the one who said it.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I was flustered. I mean, Declan’s my roommate, and I thought he was dead.” Yes, freaking out over coming home to Declan all bloody and cut up was a natural response, right? Telling them about Travis and what he did to me…I was stupid, but I didn’t think it would help much.

  Besides, Travis was mine. The vengeful, spiteful part of me wanted to make him pay for what he did to me, for what he had to have done to Sabrina. That bastard thought he knew me? He had no idea who I was, but he’d find out.

  I glanced down to my hand, finding that my thumb had swelled. I’d been too busy dealing with Declan and reading the journal that I hadn’t noticed. In addition to hanging at a weird angle, my thumb was also starting to go numb. Or maybe it was in my head. Maybe I was mentally preparing myself for the worst-case scenario tonight. Declan looked worse and worse as the minutes wore on.

  We arrived at the hospital within fifteen minutes, and as the medics pulled out the gurney Declan was on, I was the last out of the ambulance. The woman medic was speaking to Declan’s brother, telling him he could wait in the waiting room until Declan was stabilized, and to me, she started saying I’d get my own room, I’d need an X-ray of my hand to see how bad the dislocation was, blah, blah, blah. Technical stuff. Stuff I didn’t care about.

  “Just take care of Declan,” I said as we walked through the sliding glass doors of the ER.

  “Are you refusing medical care?” the medic asked, ready to add something to her clipboard of wonders.

  Declan’s brother glanced at my hand, and he was the one who said, “No, she’s not.”

  “But I—” I stopped myself from saying I didn’t have health insurance. Hell, did I even have my ID on me? I didn’t think that would stop them from treating me, but how were they to know whether or not I was lying about my identity? I clamped my mouth shut, not knowing what to do.

  Since I wasn’t bleeding out like Declan, they checked me in at the front desk of the ER. Declan and his brother disappeared down some hall, even though they tried telling his brother he wasn’t allowed. The brother probably said something about money, or what family he was from, which then promptly shut them up.

  Me? I was left alone, filling out paperwork with my good hand. No driver’s license, no insurance card. All of that, I said, was back in the dorm room. Lies, but they took them. Mostly because they couldn’t refuse anyone service, even if they highly suspected that person wouldn’t pay their insanely large medical bill.

  It was over an hour before I was taken to my own room, and an additional thirty minutes before I was taken to get an X-ray of my hand. This, from what I’d heard, was actually considered fast for an ER visit, though I didn’t really know. My mom never took me to hospitals when I got sick. She paid for my vaccinations, but that was it.

  As I waited for the doctor to come and see me, I leaned my head back on the pillow behind my head. I lay on a white bed, IV fluids dripping into my vein, because apparently I was dehydrated, go figure. That’s what being chained to the floor would do to you, I guess. I couldn’t even remember the last time I peed.

  The doctor came soon enough, an older gentleman with an accent that was hard to understand. He injected my hand with some kind of pain-numbing liquid, and then he told me it’d probably be better if I looked away while he relocated it.

  I didn’t look away. I watched, not even wincing when my thumb was back in its socket.

  After one final X-ray to make sure my thumb was entirely back in the position it was supposed to be in, a nurse bandaged a splint to my thumb, telling me it had to be on for three to six weeks, depending on the healing.

  Great. I could so plan out revenge while being a gimp.

  It was as I was waiting for my discharge papers that Declan’s brother appeared in the hallway. I watched as he went to the nurse station in the center of the hallway, where all their computers were, leaning his elbows on it as he asked them something. A younger nurse pointed in my direction, and he straightened his back before walking to me.

  He entered my room, gingerly sitting on the chair near the bed I was in. He looked tired, but still attractive. If this was what Declan would look like in a few years…

  Whoa. Almost made a comment about signing me up for it. That was a bit too close to commitment for me. It wasn’t like I was against commitment, it’s just that after everything I’d been through, it was hard to picture me being with anyone. Me wanting to be with someone who was actually sane and not batshit crazy.

  “How’s the thumb?” he asked.

  “You have eyes,” I muttered. “How does it look?” A bit bitchier than I intended to be, but today was just not my day.

  A muscle in his jaw clenched. “You didn’t fall.” His words were not an accusation; merely a statement of fact. He knew the truth, somehow, and I knew nothing about him. “You also don’t have insurance.” He knew so much about me, so fucking much, it was a wonder why he was even here, talking to me. Surely he knew everything there was to know already.

  “How do you—”

  “It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out,” he said. “You’re obviously uncomfortable here. You didn’t want your own room. You were going to den
y their help.”

  “No,” I said, meeting his hazel eyes. Such a handsome, pretty stare, but now was not the time to get lost in them. “I mean how do you know I didn’t fall?” The doctor and nurses had accepted the story, so why didn’t he? My delivery of it had gotten better after repeating it so much.

  “Your whole hand is scraped, not just the front or the side.” He ran a hand through his brown hair, sticking its short lengths up. “Either way, don’t worry about it. I’m not going to tell them your hand was someplace it shouldn’t be, and I’m taking care of the bill. It’s the least I can do, considering you saved my brother’s life.”

  I was almost too lost in my own mind—because how could I have saved his life when this was all my fault to begin with—but I heard it. I heard the fact that he was paying for this, and I instantly grew annoyed. “I didn’t ask you to pay for any of this,” I told him, frowning.

  “I know.”

  “So don’t do it.”

  “There’s no taking it back.”

  “I don’t want you to pay for me,” I said. I would’ve crossed my arms, but I wasn’t sure how that would work with the splint. Plus, I still had my IV in.

  He looked at me then, a small smile forming on his face. The two dimples in his stubbly cheeks made my stomach do a little flip. “I can tell,” he said. “And I don’t blame you. I hate using my family’s money, too. I’m William, by the way. William Briggs, but you can just call me Will.”

  William Briggs. Sounded like a rich guy’s name.

  “Ash,” I said, offering no last name and no full name. Ash was enough. “How’s Declan doing?”

  “He’s a little better. They stitched him up and are giving him a blood transfusion since he lost so much.” Will’s gaze fell to the tiled floor. “They said if you hadn’t found him when you did, he would’ve died. They’ve also put him on a suicide watch. He’s going to be in the hospital for a while, at least until I can grease some wheels. I’m just hoping I can do it before our dad learns of this.”

  Hiding something like this from Dean Briggs didn’t seem like a good idea. “Why don’t you want him to know?”

  “Because he’ll believe the same thing the nurses and doctors do,” Will spoke, glancing at me. Behind those hazel eyes, I detected something sinewy, something new, something I knew deep down, too. “Declan didn’t try to kill himself.”

  I thought about asking him why he thought that, but I knew better. If I readily agreed with him, he’d ask me why I suspected differently. After all, I was only his roommate for the last month and a half. What did I know about him? Will was his brother, someone who’d grown up with him. Will knew Declan inside and out, probably.

  Instead I asked, “Why do you think that?”

  “Declan called me, said he wasn’t feeling right. He said he couldn’t get ahold of his roommate all day and he was worried about you.” Will studied me in a new light. “I had no idea his roommate was a girl until you told the emergency responders you were his roommate.”

  I didn’t know why me being a girl meant anything. “Did he mean he was feeling sick, or sad, or…” There were a lot of things Declan could’ve meant by not feeling right.

  “I don’t know,” Will said. “I didn’t get a chance to ask him. The next thing I know, it sounded like he passed out or the phone dropped. I lost the call, and every time I called back, he wouldn’t pick up. So I dropped everything and drove to Hillcrest, even though I swore to my dad I’d never step foot on the campus.”

  “You go to college somewhere else?” I shouldn’t ask. I shouldn’t care, but I found myself curious about this older Declan. He was more serious, and yet he seemed just as lovable as Declan was. And from what it sounded like, he didn’t like to lean on his family’s money, which was appealing. Rich boys just didn’t do it for me…although, based on recent behavior of mine, you’d never know it.

  Will let out a chuckle. It was not one merriment; it was one of resigned sadness, a deeply held regret. “Yes, but I knew I should’ve transferred this year. To keep watch over him. I know everyone else treats him like a pariah, but I never imagined this would happen.”

  A pit settled in my gut. Was he saying he believed someone else hurt Declan? It took every ounce of self-restraint in me not to leap onto his bandwagon, even though I believed it, too. Then he’d ask who I thought could do it, who would do it, and I’d have to lie.

  Despite how I’d been acting and what I’d been doing, I really wanted to stop lying.

  “You think someone else hurt him?” I asked slowly, careful to sound suspicious and not like I believed him. “Who could do that?” My voice shook a little, and I sounded exactly how a girl caught up in a situation like this should sound: in over my head, anxious, nervous to the extreme. I sounded normal and not at all how I’d sounded when Travis had chained me up in his room.

  “People with money are the worst of the worst. The freaks of the freaks. Their money only helps hide it. It’s why I refused to go to Hillcrest.” Will’s shoulders—which I noticed were wider than Declan’s, more filled-out and muscular—rose and fell once. “You’d be surprised at what people are capable of. The rich like to think they’re different, but they’re not.”

  He spoke the truth, remarkably blunt for one of said rich people. Even if he didn’t like to use his family’s money, he still came from it. He was still born to it.

  “Everyone thinks Declan had something to do with Sabrina’s suicide,” Will spoke, shaking his head. “What better way to get back at him than make it look like he tried to commit suicide, too?”

  I nodded, my hair falling in my face. The pink lengths were looking a bit pale. It was almost time for a touch-up. A stupid thing to think about while in the hospital with a splinted thumb.

  “I’m surprised my dad let you room with Declan,” Will spoke, his hazel stare studying me in a more intense way than it was before. Almost like he was seeing me for the first time—I was a girl, and not just that, but a pretty girl, too. “You look like her, kind of. I’m assuming by now you know all about what happened with Sabrina?”

  I nodded again. I knew I looked a bit like her; his words didn’t come as a shock to me. Sabrina was who I’d be if I had money. My looks were more punk, more I don’t care what you think of me, than hers were, but still. Our hair, our eyes, even our cheeks were similar, minus the pink dye in mine.

  “Declan loved her a lot,” Will muttered, running his hands over his knees, where dark jeans sat, clinging to his long legs so tightly I couldn’t help but notice them.

  My mind flashed back to the morning when he’d called me Sabrina, right after we spent the night cuddling after a nightmare. It pained me to say, “I know.” And I did know, just like a part of me knew he still loved her. If Sabrina rose from the dead, looking just as pretty as she did when she was alive, he’d run to her without hesitation. He’d drop me like a fly.

  Which was fine, because taking the place of a dead girl was not on my agenda. Declan being in love with his dead girlfriend—dead ex-girlfriend, technically—wasn’t my problem. I didn’t want to replace her.

  Will said nothing else for a few minutes, simply staring at his hands. It was a while before he got up and said, “I should check on him.”

  I said nothing, only nodding again as he walked out. My eyes fell to his ass in spite of myself. Will had a good one. Firm in those tight pants, but maybe that was just my horny self talking. Being around these guys, not throwing myself at them, was a lot harder than I thought it would be.

  And, anyway, tonight wasn’t about getting laid. It was about making sure we were all alright.

  And we were. We would survive this night. This wasn’t the end for me or for Declan.

  Chapter Three – Travis

  She wouldn’t even let me into her room. Which, okay, made sense, considering what I tried to do to her in my room, but still. It wasn’t like I was going to physically hurt her. At least, I didn’t plan on it. As long as she learned her lesson with Sawye
r, I’d planned on letting her go. Then we could’ve been happy and together and said fuck the whole fucking world.

  But I’d underestimated her. She’d escaped. She was more resourceful than I thought, and when I saw that Sabrina’s journal was missing, I knew I had to explain, lest she start to get ideas. Ideas which were not in the realm of being correct.

  If she read that journal…we needed to talk. I needed to explain. I needed her to know that her suspicions about me weren’t right.

  Yes, it looked bad, but I was confident I’d be able to salvage the situation, somehow. I wasn’t going to give up on her. Ash was the one. I knew she was. She was different in ways I couldn’t describe. I needed her to know that she was mine and I wasn’t about to share her, especially with Sawyer. Sawyer, who would rather fuck every single girl he met than ever settle down with one.

  I knew Sawyer was only acting out because he knew it was a matter of time before his family ended his wild days, but still. That was no excuse for trying to take Ash away from me. She was mine, and if I couldn’t make her realize it, I would make him realize it.

  So, as I walked out of her dorm building, I pulled out my cell phone. Ash’s phone rested in my other pocket; I’d use it as an excuse to see her, but I’d give her time. How much time she’d need before seeing me again, I wasn’t sure. There was a lot I wasn’t sure about out there, but she was the exception to that.

  I was so sure about her it hurt.

  I scrolled through my contacts until I reached Sawyer’s name, and I dialed him. The night was dark above me, the sky growing cloudier as the minutes wore on. I liked gazing up at the sparkling dots in the blackness; it reminded me that we weren't as large as we thought we were. There were probably other planets out there, other beings both similar and dissimilar to us. Our problems were miniscule.