Freak (Hillcrest University #2) Read online

  Ash was my main problem. She was also my main hope, the light at the end of the tunnel. I needed her so badly every nerve ending in my body ached. My heart felt hollow, as if it was just a fake appendage, pretending to beat. I needed her to fill me up in ways no other girl could; Ash completed me like no one else could.

  My family was…different. Anyone in our bloodline would say obsession tended to run deep, even for those who were not born into the family but raised in it. It was a natural thing for us, a second nature. To obsess was to live; if one wasn’t obsessing over one thing or another, were you truly living?

  Everyone else pretended to be normal, but I would go so far as to say everyone obsessed over something. Technology, movies, TV shows. Everyone had their secret obsessions, whether it was porn involving feet or women with big breasts. Everyone had their obsessions; I was simply comfortable with myself to let my obsession free.

  Ash would be mine…but I’d give her time.

  Sawyer picked up after a few rings. He sounded out of breath. “What’s up, man?” Being so out of breath, I knew he was either in the middle of banging a nameless girl—and let’s be honest, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d answered his phone during sex—or working out. Either way, I didn’t so much care.

  However, seeing him with another girl might just make Ash forget all about him. Hmm. That was an idea, definitely.

  “I’m coming over,” I said, stating it as a fact. Even if he was balls deep in a girl, he wouldn’t tell me no. We had an open-door policy when it came to each other…or, really, he had an open-door policy. He was the one who had a house rented; I was stuck in a dorm, and even though I’d bought out the other half of the dorm room, a house was still worlds better.

  “All right,” Sawyer said.

  I hung up, picking up my pace as I walked across the sidewalks through campus. Ash’s dorm was behind me, and I tried my best not to think about her as I walked. She would dominate my mind, but if I was going to give her time, I needed to try to think of something else.

  I reached Sawyer’s house after fifteen minutes, and he greeted me at the front door, wearing nothing but athletic shorts and a towel draped around his shoulders. He guzzled from a water bottle, and I noted the sweat lining his bare chest.

  Working out, then, not sleeping with another girl. A pity.

  I made my way to the living room, plopping myself down on the couch and turning on the TV for some mindless background noise. “I’m surprised you don’t have a girl over,” I said, tossing him a knowing look. In all the time I’d known him, Sawyer hadn’t gone without a pair of legs wrapped around him for longer than a week.

  He said nothing as he came to the couch, sitting beside me as he finished off his water bottle. He took the towel and rubbed it against his face, catching the sweat on the light grey fabric. “I know,” he muttered finally.

  “It isn’t like you,” I told him.

  “I know,” Sawyer said again. “I had a girl earlier, but…I kicked her out.”

  I stared at him. He kicked a girl out? “Before or after sex?”

  “During.”

  It took everything in me to keep my surprise to myself. Sawyer kicking a girl out during sex—something like that didn’t just happen. He always finished, and then he kicked them out, unless he wanted to go for another round. Kicking them out during sex was blasphemous.

  I almost asked if he was feeling sick, but a sick person did not go and weightlift. Or at least they shouldn’t. I noticed the way his jaw clenched, how the hand that wasn’t holding onto the empty water bottle curled into a fist. Sawyer wasn’t happy.

  “Why would you kick a girl out during sex? Was she that bad?” Even if a girl was bad, there was always room for improvement. Rope, mouth gags, really, there was no excuse. If Sawyer wanted to get laid, he’d get laid…unless, I realized in abject horror, he didn’t want to get laid.

  Or, more accurately, he didn’t want to get laid by her.

  Maybe he wanted to fuck someone else. Maybe he wanted to be with the one girl who I’d never let him be with. Ash was mine, and he better get it through his thick skull sooner rather than later, or else I’d make him regret his choices.

  “No, she was fine,” Sawyer said begrudgingly. “She was just…” His bare shoulders rose and fell once. “I couldn’t do it, Travis. I couldn’t fucking do it.”

  I kept quiet, letting him dig his own grave.

  “I kept picturing Ash—” To that, he swore under his breath. “—and then I’d see it wasn’t her, and I just couldn’t do it.” Sawyer leaned his head back on the couch, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed a large gulp of air. To say he was ashamed at what he told me would be the year’s biggest understatement. I knew he wanted to crawl under a rock and die for admitting that to me.

  Hell, if he wanted to go die somewhere, I wouldn’t stop him.

  Ash was mine, and I’d be damned if I let Sawyer’s dick anywhere near her.

  “I don’t know why, either,” Sawyer went on, propping up his legs on the coffee table before the couch. “She’s not even that pretty. She’s…annoying. She’s aggravating. She’s everything I hate in a girl and I still can’t stop thinking about her. I hate her, but…”

  “You hate her but you don’t,” I finished for him, holding back my frown.

  “It’s fucking stupid is what it is,” he said.

  We sat in silence for a while, watching whatever was on the TV across from us. A giant flat screen that was half the size of the bed in my dorm room. Sawyer thought his family was richer than mine, and maybe they were. There was a lot of money to be made in America thanks to its for-profit healthcare system. My family’s money came from someplace else, multiple places we couldn’t advertise about. Some of us called them donors, others called them sponsors. Either way, they paid us to do what we were good at.

  “Is it the hair?” I offered an idea, glancing at him. “Why don’t you just get a blonde, make her dye her hair, and then see if it helps?” Forcing a girl to dye her hair before fucking her wasn’t something Sawyer was used to, but if he needed help to convince the girl, I’d be down for it.

  Sawyer chuckled. “Make a girl dye her hair pink? You really think I could do that?”

  I shrugged. “You have the money and the dick. I’m sure there’s some girl desperate enough out there who’d be willing to break their own back for you, so hair dying would be a step up, I bet.” I was really pulling most of this from my ass, because I didn’t want to destroy Sawyer. If I could get Ash away from him without hurting him, that would be ideal.

  However, I was more than willing to throw down the gauntlet and play dirty. She was mine; she’d never be his. I would fight tooth and nail for her, even destroy my own friendship for her. I would burn it all down.

  Sawyer didn’t look too convinced, but he was curious, which was all I needed to see. If he was curious, it meant he was willing to try it. I’d seen the expression on his face before, and I knew what came next. I also knew what would happen if he pushed the curiosity to the side: he’d spiral a hell of a lot worse than he would’ve if he would have just done what he should’ve done to begin with.

  “I’ll help you,” I said, “if you want.”

  It took him a while, but eventually Sawyer nodded. “All right, deal.” He rubbed his cheek, blonde stubble coating his jaw. He needed to shave; he was so torn up about thinking of Ash during sex that he was neglecting his appearance. Not a good sign. It meant he cared for her more than I wanted him to. “Can I show you something?”

  It was good he got up just then, good that he changed the subject, because I was about to lay into him. When it came to Ash, my patience was at an all-time low. In addition to doing anything for her, I’d also act stupidly and rashly, apparently.

  “Sure,” I said, biting my tongue to keep myself from saying anything else.

  Sawyer moved to the kitchen, the off-white light casting shadows along his back muscles. He picked something up, a piece of paper, a
nd brought it over to me. The towel still hung around his shoulders, and he grabbed both ends of it, waiting as I looked at the paper.

  A letter. A letter that read Stay away from her. She’s mine.

  “It’s about Ash,” Sawyer said, to which I wanted to glare at him.

  Of course it was about Ash. Who else would it be about? Even the world’s densest, stupidest person would know who this fucking letter was about. I folded it back up, how it had obviously been neatly tucked into the envelope, and handed it to him.

  I sounded bored when I asked, “Where’d you get this?” Bored, uninterested. As if I’d seen the letter before.

  “It was shoved through the mail slot, in an unmarked envelope,” Sawyer said.

  As he went on about what it could mean, I wondered what Ash was doing right now, if she was thinking about me as much as I thought about her. She was all my mind thought about, and it was hard to pay attention to Sawyer when I really just wanted to wrap my hands around his neck and tell him that Ash was off-limits.

  No, my friend was a big, strong guy. I had to be smart about this. We’d try making a girl dye her hair pink first.

  Chapter Four – Ash

  As I was signing all the paperwork the nurses needed to fully release me, I kept getting reassured that it was all being taken care of. I needn’t worry about a thing. A bunch of other stuff spoken in soft, hushed voices, meant to be kind, but I just found them insulting. I didn’t need a rich guy to pay off my debts. I…well, okay, maybe in this instance, having a rich guy paying off my medical bills wasn’t something I should argue against. One less thing to pay back in the future, even if I’d always feel like I owed him something.

  Once everything was good, they let me leave. I headed through the confusing hallways of the hospital until I reached the ER’s doors, stepping outside. A gust of fresh air blew past me, and for a moment, I let the cool air hug me, a welcome embrace during this terrible night.

  I gazed around the parking lot, seeing the road a good ways away. I was sure a bus station was nearby, somewhere, but I didn’t know the area. And with no wallet, well, I doubted the bus driver would take me all the way back to Hillcrest University out of the generosity of his or her own heart. They only took cash, and I was severely lacking that right now.

  I moved to a nearby bench, the bench made of metal and totally uncomfortable. It looked out at the parking lot, and for a moment, I let myself just be. No squaring my shoulders up, no tough girl act. I sat there, let my frown grow, and remembered coming home to all that blood.

  Bad things had a way of following me. I should’ve known it was only a matter of time before everything caught up with me. What if Travis was my penance? What if Travis’s obsession with me was because of what happened back in high school?

  Shit. I didn’t want to think of that, and I sure as hell didn’t want to think of him. I’d done my best to push him from my mind for months now. He was so far removed from my mind that I had even tried to forget his name.

  But I couldn’t. There were some things you could never forget, and he was one of them, just as this night would be. This was a night I’d never forget. It was one of the worst of my life, and that was saying something.

  My shoulders slumped, and I set a hand on my face. My splinted hand rested in my lap, feeling weird, out of place. I’d never broken a bone before, never had something as bad as a dislocated anything. All in all, and especially considering what I’d lived through, I’d been lucky. Too lucky. It was only a matter of time before my luck ran out, and now that I was at HU, I think it was just about squeezed dry.

  No more luck for me. No more lucky breaks.

  I didn’t know how much time passed, but soon another presence stood near me. I didn’t have to turn my head to see who it was. Will. He smelled like Declan, which was just insane to me. I knew what Declan smelled like, and I liked it. Musky, a bit, manly in every way.

  He smelled like home, like someplace I’d want to be.

  “He’s going to be okay, right?” I asked, needing the reassurance. Even though I might’ve saved his life with that tourniquet, I didn’t feel like a hero. If Travis did this, he did it for me. That was the thing about people like Travis. Everything they did, they did it out of urgency, because it needed to be done, at least from their eyes. As sick as it was, he thought he was doing it for me.

  Locking me up in his room? For me.

  Keeping me there? My punishment for my date with Sawyer.

  Hurting Declan? Declan’s punishment for daring to get close to me.

  Hanging Sabrina? I hazarded a guess, but maybe it was Sabrina’s punishment too, for something she did, or something he thought she did or would do. The only person who could get inside Travis’s mind and truly know what he was thinking was Travis himself. I never wanted to enter a mind so dark. I was fucked up enough on my own, thanks.

  “He is,” Will spoke, his hands in his pockets. He stood beside me for a while. “Visiting hours are over, but I plan on staying with him.” I felt his gaze on me, even though I wasn’t looking at him. “Let me call you an Uber, or a taxi.”

  Another bit of charity, more money of his I didn’t want.

  “I know the way,” I said, I think. Of course I wasn’t one hundred percent sure, as I was in the back of the ambulance for the ride; paying attention to where it turned and when it headed straight was the least of my worries at the time. “I can walk.” Having my phone and GPS would help, but of course Travis still had that, so using my phone to find my way back was off the table.

  Walking in the middle of the night, when anyone could pull their car off the road and grab you wasn’t my idea of a fun time, but again, I was at the point where I didn’t rightly care. If a psycho wanted to kidnap me and torture me, go right on ahead. Fucking Travis would somehow find me, and re-kidnap me for himself.

  Tonight was a night for depressing thoughts, I guess.

  “Stubborn,” Will remarked, eyeing me up.

  I glanced at him, even though I really didn’t want to. He wasn’t exactly a Declan lookalike, but he was close. He had a few years on Declan, and his nose was a size or two bigger, but all in all, he was gorgeous. The kind of gorgeous that made you wonder just what sort of romantic comedy you fell into.

  But that’s the thing—my life wasn’t a rom-com. It was…well, it was more like those documentaries the news stations play late at night. The kind of documentary old people sat and watched together, trying to figure out if they would’ve spotted the psycho sooner than me. My life was a cautionary tale.

  “I’m not stubborn,” I said.

  “If you say so.” Will’s lips quirked into a smile, and I felt a sudden heat rise in my lower gut. I told myself it was only because he looked like Declan, kind of like how Declan had called me Sabrina. Projecting feelings onto me. I was doing the same thing to his brother, because I’d come to care for him over these last few weeks.

  It was impossible not to start caring about Declan. With the way everyone treated him, I still felt like he was a precious cinnamon roll, too pure. Even after seeing him get angry at Sawyer’s party, I liked him. That wasn’t to go as far as to say I loved him, but I did feel strongly for him. I’d be devastated if something happened to him and it was my fault.

  “I do,” I whispered, watching as Will pulled out his phone, his fingers working fast on the screen. “What are you doing?” Seemed a horrible time to check the social media sites.

  “I’m getting an Uber,” he said simply, not glancing up from his phone. The light from his screen and the parking lot lights were the only things illuminating the area. The moon was covered by clouds, which I was almost certain it wasn’t a few hours ago, when I’d been running from Travis’s place.

  A few hours. That’s all it’d been? God, it felt like ages. Years. Time had slowed to a fucking crawl when I wasn’t looking.

  “I said—”

  He cut me off, “I’m getting an Uber, and I’m going with you to make sure you get home safe,
and then I’ll come back here for Declan.” His hazel eyes looked at me finally, so intense I couldn’t look away. “You might be stubborn, but so am I. And if you think I’m letting you walk home in the middle of the night with a gimp hand, alone, you’re wrong.”

  I stared at him, my words failing me as I watched him move to sit beside me, a mere few inches between us. “You don’t have to worry about me,” I whispered. “In fact, I wish you wouldn’t.”

  Will let out a sigh before turning his head to me. “I have a feeling Declan would never let me hear the end of it if I let you walk back to the dorm. Plus, with that hand, what would you do if someone tried to take you?”

  Honestly, I was a bit shocked he’d bring it up, but such was the world girls today were raised in. A lovely reality of not having a stick swinging between our legs. “I’d figure something out,” I said.

  “I’m sure you would, but still, I’d rather tell Declan when he wakes up that I helped you get home safely rather than sending you off into the unknown by yourself,” Will said. His stare fell to my splinted hand. “What happened to your hand? Don’t worry, there are no nurses or doctors around. No one but me.”

  Yes, he was right there. We were alone, sitting on this bench, the ER’s doors quiet. He was a stranger to me, and yet I felt oddly comfortable around him. Maybe because he reminded me so much of Declan. Or maybe because he was cute, and I hadn’t learned my lesson when it came to cute guys. Not yet.

  I was a glutton for punishment, and not Travis’s twisted sense of it. Punishment meaning dangling things and people I could not have in front of me. Punishment meaning liking guys I shouldn’t. My roommate’s older brother? Definitely off-limits, and I knew it.

  I knew it, and yet I still found myself sighing internally as I breathed in the air around us. He wasn’t touching me, but I could still feel his warmth, his heat. My mind was so fucked up, I’d just escaped Travis, Declan was in the hospital, almost dead, and here I was, ogling his brother.