Wicked Restless (Harper Boys #2) (21 page)

We reach my floor, and I step out, not inviting him. If he wants my help, he’ll just have to show himself in. I unlock my door, toss my mail and keys and purse on the table and walk down the hallway to our bathroom. I hear the door close a few seconds later, and soon Andrew steps into the frame, stopping with his hands gripping either side of the wall, his head slung forward. His knuckles are covered in blood, and his legs are spackled with red. He’s wearing black shorts that drape below his knees.

“Why were you fighting?” I ask, pulling the alcohol from the cabinet and the bag of cotton and gauze from underneath our sink. I step to him, and notice his grip tighten on the wood as I move into his view, his lip twitches on one side—he sneers like a stray dog not ready to trust the hand about to feed it.

“I fight for money,” he says, his mouth now a hard line, his brow still shadowed by his sweatshirt. I reach up to move it, but freeze the second his eyes meet mine, the swelling on his brow, the blood on his cheek nothing compared to the broken look in his eyes.

“So this wasn’t like some pissing contest in a bar or you trying to act like a big shot on the ice?” I ask, dabbing the cotton again, ignoring what I saw in his eyes. I wish for that look to go away—it makes me weak.

“I fight to forget about things,” he says, leaning forward just enough that his breath tickles my neck. I swear I feel his lips against my skin. Maybe I imagine it.

Maybe I want it to be real.

My breath hitches, but only once. I look down at the bottle in my hands, inhaling once more, deeply, the scent a mix of the alcohol fumes and him, then I pour some solution on one of the pads, moving it to his face. He’s playing me, and I don’t like it. I expect him to jerk when I touch him; his cuts are deep, and the alcohol is bound to burn at first. He doesn’t flinch. My eyes move from his wounds to his gaze—off and on as I work to clean him up. His expression never changes. It’s hard. His eyes hazed as he watches me. He’s trying to intimidate me.

“What are you trying to forget about, Andrew?” I speak softly; something about him feels like I could set it off at any moment. I push his hood back just then, and my hand finds his hair as I do. The movement is natural, and I don’t know why my fingers act as they do. It’s muscle memory, from one night and years of dreams. I push a few strands back, letting my fingers touch his scalp—touch him. He’s still so familiar. The feeling of him rushes through me, and it burns.

He doesn’t answer me. His eyes watch me as I work to clean out the deep cuts on his face—one on his eyebrow definitely in need of sutures.

“I’m going to have to stitch this one,” I say, touching it once more with the cloth. He shrugs with one shoulder. “Unless you’d rather wait and have someone else. Lindsey will be home in an hour.”

“You can sew me up.” His answer comes fast, the words crisp and short. His tongue lingers between his teeth as his mouth curves to smile, as if everything he says means something else, too.

“Where else are you hurt?” I ask, treating him like a patient. Andrew is no different from one of the people I talk to at the clinic when we volunteer and fill out charts. This…is just a clinic visit.

Andrew is just a patient.

Just a patient.

His face forms a response to my question, but slowly, his lips curl ever so slightly more on the side, and his eyes close just as slowly. He laughs, the kind of laugh that seems like it comes from somewhere else—from memories, from the past, from loss maybe. What begins as smug body language meant to dominate me gives way before my eyes to confession.

“Everywhere, Emma. I. Hurt. Everywhere.”

My breath stops, and I wait as his eyes look down at his hands, as he turns them to see his palms, to look at the scrapes and cuts on his fingers. He snickers to himself again, but stops quickly, looking at me as he stands in front of me, our bodies maybe a foot apart, maybe less. He grabs the bottom of his sweatshirt and pulls it up over his head, all of him overshadowing me, his skin and muscles bare before me.

I don’t look at first, but when I do I see the dark purple bruising that’s taking over his sides and ribs. That’s not what I’m supposed to see, though. That’s not why he pulled his shirt from his body, why he’s standing here with his sweatshirt lying on the floor at his feet. That’s not why his breathing has changed, or why he sounds like a frightened boy, each exhale short and desperate. The largest scar is maybe three inches long, and it starts an inch to the right of his belly button. Others are smaller, but clustered, and they look like burns. The lines are faint enough I know they’ve been there for a while.

This is something that’s been with him for years.

“How long have you been fighting?” I ask, my arms no longer able to hold the open alcohol still enough not to shake drops on the floor. I set it down on the sink, leaving my hand on the counter to brace myself, my arm shaking with my own weight and need for balance.

“You see my scars there, Emma?” he asks, stepping closer. I try to move back, but I’m in a corner, the bathroom small, and my back already against the sink.

“I do. Andrew, how long have you been fighting?”

I answer him and repeat my question fast, thinking it will make him pause. It doesn’t. He keeps moving forward, his eyes down on his own skin, and the closer he comes, the faster my lungs fight for air. When he reaches for my right hand, the one now gripping the corner of the counter so hard that my knuckles are white, I refuse to let go. Andrew leaves his hands on mine, though, waiting for me to surrender. I eventually loosen my grip, and he picks my hand up in his, his touch tender, slow, sweet. My lip quivers at the memory, but I hold it in. He places it on the line of four small circles on his side, holding it there against his bare skin, his eyes unflinching as he watches his hand cover my hand as it covers his wounds.

“This isn’t from fighting, Emma. These scars…they’re from surviving,” he says. His body shakes under my touch.

He never looks up. Several seconds pass in silence, and the tiny room begins to
s
tink of the opened alcohol bottle. I look over his face, his arms and hands and body—so much of him covered in bruises. It’s like he was stolen—taken by someone, tortured, and returned half the boy he was—only to grow into a man with holes and broken pieces.

“What happened to you?” My voice cracks when I ask, my eyes still on the look of his hand on mine.

His hand. On mine.

“You have no idea, do you?”

I feel my brow pull in tight, my stomach binding as my mind begins to run through the thousand of possible things that means. I shake my head, my eyes moving up his body, gazing along his long torso, his golden skin, his curved muscles and neck and chin—his face so much older, but still the same. His eyes the ones I waited for, the only ones that ever looked at me that way before a kiss. Even if I didn’t realize it, I was waiting for him. I was in love with Andrew Harper the first time he held my hand. I’ve just been waiting to see him again to fully fall. I can’t fall now. Not when he’s…like this. But I fear I may not have control over any of that—over…
feeling.

“I’m afraid, Andrew,” I tell him. When his chest fills with a deep breath and his head drops to the side, I know he understands.

“You have no idea…” he says, this time not asking a question.

His hand lets go of its hold on me, but I leave my hold on him a little longer, noticing his eyes close again as I do. When he opens them, he keeps his gaze down and away, his thoughts lost somewhere else entirely.

I let my hand slip away carefully, like a child trying to balance two cards in a pyramid. I watch him for a sign, waiting for him to say something more. I don’t know what to ask. I don’t know what I don’t know. But I’m starting to think it’s a lot—and it might mean the difference between the man standing here in front of me, and the boy I once thought I loved.

“I should stitch you up,” I say quietly, my lip pinned between my teeth to keep me from saying more. A shift happened just now—I hold the power. I can feel it. I’m not sure I want it, or am ready for it. Andrew only nods, his movement small, his eyes still at the corner of the room.

I slide the small drawer at the edge of the counter open and pull out the medic box from our hours at the clinic. Tech believes in teaching the basics early, so all pre-med students are trained medics before they begin their four years of med school. I’ve stitched maybe a dozen lacerations. I’m a better sewer than Lindsey. But I wish…oh how I wish it were her hands doing this now.

I flex my fingers, rubbing the tips against my palms, working the nerves through them. I pull the thread and needle out, readying it before preparing the alcohol and tape and gauze.

“I’ll need you to sit,” I say, expecting Andrew to use this, to take my request and turn it into a challenge, to defy me just for the sake of watching me suffer. Instead, he nods with the same lethargy he’s had since I touched him, his legs moving to the edge of the bathtub where he sits, holding on to the side, his eyes still lost.

I’m careful with every movement at first. And when I finally puncture his skin, I move my hands swiftly, repeating to myself that this is only a patient, that this is just like the other times, and that I can move smoothly. My hands work fast, closing the wound on his brow before the shaking settles in. I don’t feel it until I bring the scissors up to cut, and I have to pause before finally slicing the ends of the thread away.

“The place was called Lake Crest,” he says. I wait for more, but his silence indicates that he wants a response from me. I don’t know what Lake Crest is, where it is, what it means, but I want more—I think I
need
more. Even if it terrifies me.

“Okay,” I say, my voice quiet, unthreatening. I cut a small square of padding and two strips of tape to cover Andrew’s stitches. He remains on the tub, his hands still clutching—holding on. I’m delicate with my touch, but the tape doesn’t stick, so I run my finger softly along each strip against his face. When I look to his eyes again, they capture mine.

“Lake Crest is a place they send boys who need to be broken…when they fuck up and do something wrong. It’s run by the state, and a guy named Nick Meyers. The first time Nick choked me, it was because I refused to kiss his feet…
actually
kiss his feet. He held my windpipe in his hands while security stood behind me with a Taser, just in case I decided to fight back.”

Oh my god!

“The second time, I decided to try. The volts sent me to my knees.”

My eyes close involuntarily.

“Some of the boys did him favors. That’s how it worked there. You were either on top, on the bottom, or invisible. Favors put you on top. I tried real hard to be invisible, but they wouldn’t let me. The ones who did him favors would leave the campus late at night, coming back with large envelopes—sometimes coming back with stab wounds and beaten faces.”

“Nick kept after me. He didn’t like that I said
no
, that I wouldn’t bend to his needs. I was a threat to his secrets, because I saw more than the others. I paid attention. Money passed through his hands like water, and I saw it all. I didn’t want any part of it. I only wanted to survive. And there were so many things to endure. So many factions, gangs within gangs, groups you needed to be
in
with and
out
with. I only wanted to be left alone.”

His eyes find mine again, but his words pause, his jaw working back and forth while he thinks. I think he’s trying to protect me from knowing too much after knowing nothing at all.

“I wrote you letters. Dozens.”

His eyes penetrate me. Mine grow wide, my stomach becomes sick as I clutch the sink again, letting my legs have their way this time as I slide down to sit on the floor, my world spinning.

“You never wrote back. Not once.”

No!

His voice sounds angry, but only at first. It breaks quickly; the realization squelching years’ worth of hate and doubt caused by some unknown force. I never knew. I would have written. I would have traded him, saved him—
loved him
. I needed him. My heart was broken.

And I needed him.

He needed me.

He needed me…
more!

“One day, I said
yes.”
He looks down again, running his thumb over the long scar on his belly.

“He did that?” I ask, my words crackling from my chest, my eyes barely able to look at the long line that slices through him.

Andrew nods.

“I said
yes
just so I could get out, so I could find you. I had to know why you weren’t writing, where you were…if you were okay. I never collected what was due to him that night. I never had any intention of meeting his people at all. He found out before I could make it to the bus station to buy a ticket with the money I’d hidden under a loose tile on my floor. You were a forty-minute bus ride away—but I never got to see you. At least not then. I had to continue to live off of your memory. He took me into his office as soon as we got back to campus, hitting me until I could no longer stand. And when the guard pulled my arm over his shoulder to carry me on my weak legs back to my room, he told them to wait for one more second so
he could give me something to make sure I’d never forget.
The knife was small, but sharp; more of a razor. I bled for days—just deep enough so it would heal on its own…
in time
.”

It’s all too much. His story—
his life!

“Andrew,” I whisper, my lips dry, my mouth drier. My throat aches, and my heart hurts as it never has before.

“You didn’t know,” he says, his mouth half open, his eyes back to the lost place. I shake my head to confirm his assumption. He notices. “All this time…you…you didn’t know.”

“I would have come. I swear, Andrew…if I knew what had happened to you…I would have made them…” I’m breathless with my words, my plea cut short before I can tell him I would have made them stop, would have confessed the truth.

“Em? You home?”

Lindsey’s shout and clamor through the front door rocks me like thunder, and I stumble to my feet, clearing the counter of the remains of my work on Andrew. I look to him, expecting him to be just as frozen, just as stunned and worried about what to say, what to do. Instead, he’s already standing, pulling his sweatshirt back over his body as he moves toward the sink to wash his hands.