Dangerously Damaged (Addicted To You, Book One)

LINDSAY

I’d worked ridiculously hard to get into Cambridge University, and so when the guy handing out the orientation packets told me he couldn’t find mine, I had a moment of panic.

“Are you sure?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. “Can you look again?

Lindsay Cramer?”

The boy who’d been assigned the duty of handing out packets began thumbing through the stack again. He was older, probably a senior, with broad shoulders and the kind of smile that spoke of money. In other words, he looked like he belonged here.

Me, on the other hand?

Not so much.

Which is why I was trying to quell my pending panic attack.

What if this had all been a mistake? What if I had turned down Yale and Cornell and Princeton because Cambridge was supposed to be better than all of them and now my acceptance had been some sort of horrible admissions error? Or a joke someone had played on me, and now they were going to –

“Oh, here you are!” the orientation guy said happily. He plucked my packet out of the stack and handed it to me. “It was stuck to the one behind it.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

I went took a few steps away and started to open the packet, but he called after me.

“I’m Adam, by the way.”

“Lindsay,” I said, before remembering he obviously already knew that.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

There was no one behind me in line, probably because it was starting to get late.

Orientation packet pick-up was from noon to four, but apparently everyone had decided to get there early, because it was close to three and there was no one around. Of course, there were lots of packets left, which led me to believe that either there were a lot of incoming freshman, or there were a lot of people who hadn’t picked up their packets.

So maybe I had it wrong, and I was actually one of the first ones. Maybe everyone cool was picking up their packets late, maybe they didn’t –

“Are you going to get your I.D. card now?” Adam asked.

I stared at him blankly.

“At the administration building?” He grinned. “You’re supposed to go and get your picture taken for your I.D. card.”

“Oh.” I swallowed. “Thanks. Um, yeah, I guess I am.”

“I can show you where it is.” He turned to one of the other students working nearby. “Hey, do you mind covering for me? I need to take someone to admin.”

Before I knew it, he was ushering me outside, like he’d just adopted me as his own personal freshman.

“Where are you from?” he asked as we walked down the sidewalk. A girl carrying a huge beanbag chair walked right between us, so it took me a second before I could answer.

“Ohio,” I said. “A little town outside of Cincinnati.”

He nodded, and I got the sense that he was actually listening, filing this information away for further reference.

“Spent much time in Boston?” he asked.

I shook my head no, hoping he wouldn’t ask me for specifics. The truth was, I’d never been to Boston before. I hadn’t even visited Cambridge University before I’d accepted their offer of enrollment. The thought made me a little nervous – that I’d committed to spending the next four years of my life at a school and a city that I’d never spent time in, but it was
Cambridge University
, after all.

They had the best pre-med program in the country. Not to mention Boston had some of the best hospitals in the entire world. Plus they offered me a fantastic financial aid package, and so even though I’d gotten into Princeton, Stanford, and Yale, I picked Cambridge University. It was harder to get into than all of the other Ivies, a fact they had splashed all over their website.

“You’ll love Boston,” Adam said. He chatted on about different things to do in the city, and I walked along beside him, happy just to listen.

When we got to the administration building, there was a line of students out the door.

“Thanks for walking me,” I said.

“Looks like you’re going to be here for a while,” Adam said.

“Yup.” I didn’t mind. It wasn’t like I had anything better to do -- my parents and I had already spent a couple of hours setting up my dorm room when they’d dropped me off this morning. Actually, “dropped me off” wasn’t an accurate description, because it makes it seem like it happened quickly.

In actuality, the three of us had gotten into Boston late the previous evening and spent the night in a hotel. Early this morning we’d come to check out my room, and then spent an agonizing three hours at Target, picking out all the things my mom thought I was going to need, including but not limited to, a bulletin board (for what?), extra-long sheets (necessary), and house slippers (she’d gotten it into her head that the dorm floors with filthy, and that I was going to acquire some sort of foot fungus unless I was protected.)

My roommate, whose name was Rachel Flowers, wasn’t going to be arriving until tomorrow. We’d spoken on the phone over the summer, just a quick conversation which had amounted to me letting her know that I would bring a dorm fridge, and her asking me if I partied, to which I’d lied and said I did.

Adam was standing there awkwardly, and I hoped he didn’t think I expected him to wait with me.

“You should probably get back,” I said.

“Yeah.” But he didn’t show any signs of going anywhere. Then, a second later, his eyes brightened.

“Come on,” he said. He took my hand, which was a little bit weird, since he was practically a stranger, but I decided maybe it was a college thing (didn’t people always say you’d make your best friends for life at college?), and just went with it.

He led me behind a couple of buildings and then looped back around toward the rear of the administration building.

“There’s a back entrance,” he said. “And if we go in that way, you can cut the line.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s okay, I don’t mind waiting, really.” The thought of breaking a rule on my first day was enough to almost make me break out in hives. (I’m kidding. Sort of.)

“We just have to figure out how to get over this fence,” Adam said, either not hearing my protests, or just deciding to ignore them. He put his foot on the bottom of the wrought-iron fence behind the administration building and began trying to hoist himself over. “Once I get to the other side, you can climb up and then I’ll lift you over.”

Lift me? Oh, dear God. I hadn’t been lifted anywhere since I was ten and my grandpa would have too much to drink at the Cramer family Christmas party and toss me into the air like I was a toddler.

I wasn’t sure how to handle the situation. I didn’t want to break any rules—and I definitely didn’t want to climb this fence—but at the same time, he was the only person I knew here, and to refuse might lose me the one friend I’d made so far.

But then something happened that made the whole thing a moot point.

Adam tried to hoist himself over the fence, and his leg scraped against one of the spikes on top, tearing into his flesh and gashing his thigh. Whimpering, he dropped back over to my side of the yard.

“Dammit,” he said, grabbing at his leg.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Really, it’s not that big of a deal. I told you, I don’t mind waiting.” I kneeled down next to him. A stream of blood was dripping down his leg, and the cut looked deep. I reached into my bag and pulled out a scarf, using it to put pressure on the wound. But I could already tell it was going to need stitches.

“Sorry,” he said, sounding sheepish. “I guess we’ll have to join the other line.”

“Yeah, probably,” I said. “But first we’re going to have to get you to the hospital.”

***

The emergency room was a lot less busy than I’d thought it would be.

I felt bad for Adam, I really did, but I also couldn’t help but feel a little thrill as we walked through the doors of the hospital. Most people hated hospitals, but I loved them. Everything was so exciting – doctors running around, patients waiting to be seen, tests being ordered, people being healed. It was amazing.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Adam moaned as we sat in the waiting room.

“You’ll be okay,” I said. I was filling out his insurance form, asking him for the information as I wrote it down. It felt kind of weird, honestly. I had just met this guy, like, an hour ago. And now here I was at the hospital with him.

When it was our turn, we got called into an ER bay where Adam laid down on a cot and waited for the doctor. I didn’t know what to do, so I kind of just hovered nearby.

“I think I’ve lost a lot of blood,” he said. “Do you think I’ve lost a lot of blood?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think you’re going to be fine.”

There was a snort from the other side of the curtain.

I frowned.

“Yeah, you’re definitely right,” Adam said. “I think I’m just going to need one or two stitches.”

“Probably.”

Another guffaw from the other side of the curtain. How rude. Some other patient was making fun of Adam’s distress.

But before I could decide what to do about it, the doctor arrived. She was a short woman with dark hair named Dr. Singh. She took one look at the cut and told Adam he was most definitely going to need stitches, probably three or four.

His face went pale.

“Maybe we can use those butterfly stitches,” he tried. “You know, those special Band Aids that close you up so you don’t need to use a needle?”

“Those are only for people who have very small wounds,” the doctor said. She patted Adam on the hand. “I’ll be right back after I get the sutures.”

She left, and Adam got decidedly paler.

From the other side of the curtain, someone muttered, “Relax dude, it’s just a cut, not the end of the world.”

That was it.

I didn’t know Adam that well, but still. He was my sort-of friend, and he was hurt.

And besides, other patients in a hospital should not be making fun of people. It wasn’t right.

“Excuse me?” I said, reaching out for the curtain and yanking it back. “You’re being really rude.”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I stopped.

On the other side of the curtain there was a guy getting stitched up by a doctor. It was surprising enough that there was a doctor over there letting this guy make his dumb comments, but it was even more surprising that the guy making the comments was doing it while getting stitched up himself.

The patient met my eye and grinned, no small feat since at that exact moment, the doctor was pulling a needle through the cut above his eye.

“Me, rude?” the boy asked. “You’re the one who just pulled back the curtain and invaded my privacy.”

“It’s not nice to make fun of someone,” I said. But my bravado was gone. It was the way he was looking at me. Something about it was unnerving. His eyes were a deep brown, but they were anything but ordinary. He looked like he was about twenty or twenty-one, and his face was chiseled and rugged, the kind of face that belonged on a male model.

I took in a deep breath through my nose, suddenly feeling faint.

“I wasn’t making fun of him,” the guy said. “I wasn’t even talking to him.”

“Yes, you were,” I said. “You were snorting and judging.”

“I don’t snort.” He shifted a little on the bed. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and I tried not to stare. He had the most perfect body I’d ever seen – lean, toned, with a six-pack that betrayed hours in the gym. There were bruises on his pecs, a tattoo of a cross on his bicep, and of course the cut above his eye. It gave him a certain grittiness that made it clear he hadn’t gotten that body merely from lifting dumbbells in the gym. “I might judge, but I don’t snort,” he clarified.

“You did,” I insisted. “You snorted.”

“If you say so.” He shrugged.

The doctor finished stitching the guy’s wound and tied off the stitches. “I’ll be right back with your discharge paperwork,” he said before walking out of the bay.

The boy glanced over at Adam, who was touching his leg and grimacing as he waited to be stitched up.

“So what’s with Mr. Yale?” he chuckled.

“What do you mean?”

“Why’s he so pussy?” He looked down at his fingers and flexed them, and I noticed his knuckles were all cut up. And then I got it. He’d been in a fight. Figured.

“He’s not a pussy!” I whispered. “And we don’t go to Yale, we go to Cambridge.”

The boy jumped off his cot, then picked his shirt up and pulled it over his head.

“Whatever.” He started to walk toward the door, like he was leaving.

“Hey,” I said. “You need to wait for your instructions.”

“I know how to take care of myself,” he said, and then he was gone.

***

Half an hour later, Adam and I were sent on our way with a paper detailing how to keep the wound clean, and instructions to come back in two weeks to get the stitches removed.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said as we walked down the steps. “You really shouldn’t have had to babysit me.” He made a face that was something between a grin and a grimace. “I’m the senior, I’m the one who’s supposed to be looking out for you.”