14
Austin
“Bro, how are you going to get there when your rideis fucked?”
His jaw pulsates when the realization hits him. His pride and joy is smashed to fucking pieces and stinks like a sewage treatment plant and his independence temporary stilted. But life’s not that bad, and he’s got the funds to buy a replacement and insurance. It’s just inconvenient not to have a vehicle now.
“Fuck,” he roars in fury, hurling his car key at the wall.
“Bro, calm down,” I press, grabbing my helmet. “I’ll go on my bike. I’m likely to get there faster anyway, weaving through the traffic and dodging the red lights and shit. You call a cab, and I’ll meet you there.”
“Jeezus, fuck,” he seethes, clenching his fists and puffing his chest out like a balloon about to pop.
“She didn’t say that anything bad happened to Xave?” I argue, opening the door to leave.
“It was fucking obvious. She’s never contacted me for anything else ever, and she was fucking half-crying down the line. She doesn’t seem like the type to exaggerate or make shit up,” he growls, pacing back and forth with his head down, swiping for a number for a cab.
“I’ll see you down there,” I rush, stepping out into the hallway. I didn’t take the call, so it wasn’t me who heard the tone of her voice, but I could tell by the blood running from Aaron’s face and how his posture changed said to me that it was an emergency.
Once down in the garage, I check over my Honda for signs of it being tampered with or a warning note left. Out on the road, I’m immediately frustrated by the Saturday afternoon traffic, which is the downside to living in the city center. I’ve yet to discover a good side. Fear shivers down my back as unwanted thoughts of what might’ve happened to Xavier invade my mind. I’m glad Emaline is okay, but if something terrible happened to Xavier, there’d be fucking hell to pay. It’s one thing to smash up someone’s precious vehicle, but it’s another thing to hurt a brother.
With my butt off the seat so I can see above the long line of traffic and strategically weave through the numerous vehicles as some of the angry drivers jump on their horns and bellow obscenities. Luckily, I have selective hearing when I’m in an emergency.
Approximately 30 minutes later, I arrive at the hospital, and as I search for a park close to the entrance, I spot a nervous little figure hunkering down in her jacket from the cold. I ignore the elation stirring in my gut by seeing her for multiple reasons. I still can’t articulate why that little nerdy chick lights my wick so much, considering there’s nothing sexy or alluring about her apart from being a sweet-natured book lover with hope behind those glasses.
She hasn’t noticed me because I bet she’s expecting Aaron to turn up in his SUV. Nope, little lady, it’s me, the last person you want to see.
Even as I take my helmet off and stride toward her, she still hasn’t noticed me. Instead, she turns her head both ways, searching anxiously for Aaron’s arrival, then gazes behind her through the foyer windows of the hospital. Where the fuck is my brother?
Not until I’m about ten feet away from her does she notice me and startles, stumbling backward. I didn’t think I was that terrifying, but hey, maybe it was because she was expecting someone else.
“Where is he?” I ask, cutting to the chase and walking quickly past her to the hospital entrance as her little strides trot behind me.
“I don’t know. There were two men in the elevator-”
I stop dead and stand over her. “Two men?”
“Bad men. Um, I think they’re involved in my sister’s disappearance. Is Aaron coming?” she asks, obviously knowing nothing about his precious SUV getting done over. Maybe Xavier didn’t get the chance to tell her before two men jumped him.
“Yeah, in a cab. He’ll be here soon.” I point to the elevator area on the ground floor. “Which one?”
She points her little finger at the third one. “Two of them and one of him. And they started hitting each other. Xavier threw the first punch.” Even though I find her language use and little air punch endearing, I keep the expression on my face deliberately solemn.
“Huh? In the elevator? Strange place to have a brawl,” I say casually, even though it concerns me that Xave is outnumbered, but I’m still proud of him for initiating a king hit. The dude usually prefers to avoid fights unless it’s against the Huntsmans then he’d go hard.
The doors of the second lift open, and a police officer steps out, looking concerned. He locks his gaze onto the lantern of the third elevator.
“Have you seen him?” Emaline gasps anxiously, clasping her hands together as her brow furrows, making her look so cute. As she pushes her glasses against her button nose, a nervous flex, I ignore the stirring of jealousy in my gut at how concerned she is about my brother. I’d love a girl to care that much about me, but maybe I have to give a shit about them first and do nice things like buy flowers and open doors. Xave is good at that romantic stuff, whereas I took for granted, being a Leroux, that women are easy to get and discard.
And where has that got me? Hungering over Velma Dinkley on the ground floor of fucking the hospital instead of looking for my brother.
The officer shakes his head and then looks me up and down, frowning.
“This is Austin, Xavier’s twin brother,” Emaline quickly informs him.
“I hope you’re not here to start any trouble,” the officer tells me warningly.
“I’m here to do what I need to,” I reply flatly, and if that includes beating the living shit out of some dude with a chip on his shoulder, then that’s what I’ll do. Addressing Emaline, “Did you get a good look at them?”
She bites her bottom lip and nods. Jeezus, fuck, I want to kiss her. “Shades and suits. Dark hair. Smells bad.”
My hands clenched into angry fists at how similar her description was to the heavies that arrived at my work in the bone gallery. “Suits? On a Saturday? What were they doing in the hospital?”
She swallows and glances at me shyly behind her glasses, the first time she’s looked me in the eye since I arrived. It’s evident that my presence makes her uncomfortable.
“I’m going to run up to the next floor and wait by the elevator,” I tell the officer, and he shakes his head.
“There’s no point,” he states. “The elevator is going up and down like a yoyo from the top floor to the ground floor, and they’re not letting anyone on.”
Now, it’s starting to get real. If Xave is stuck in that box with two men, it won’t end well for him, especially if they’re armed. “I need to get in there,” I say urgently to the officer. “There must be emergency access for when the lift breaks down.”
“I’ve called for backup, and if we need to, we’ll climb up there, but for now, we should wait because it’s going to be damn hard climbing inside an elevator when the three men in that tiny space don’t want us in there. I don’t want anyone else to be endangered,” the officer states evenly, trying to calm me down and talk some sense into me.
I understand what he’s saying, but I don’t have the patience to stand around hoping that the elevator might drop back down with my brother in one piece.
My phone beeps, and there’s a message from Aaron saying that he’s about twenty minutes away so that he won’t be of any use to me. Ignoring the officer, I start prising open the elevator doors with my fingers just as the unit starts dropping back down. It stops at a floor for a few seconds as the shouting echoes travel down the hoistway before moving downwards again.
“It’s coming down,” the officer states the obvious. “What are you planning?”
“Jumping in to join my brother,” I answer flatly, “as if I have a fucking choice.” I step back to let the unit while forcibly keeping the doors open, and the unit drops along the cable until it’s at our level and stops dead. There’s only one body inside, lying on the floor, and he’s not in good shape.
A guy in a suit looked dangerously like one of those heavies who visited me at work with a bloodied face and swollen eyes. But to be sure, I point to the half-dead man, knocked unconscious. “Is that one of the men you saw?” I ask Emaline.
She nods as the color seems to drain from her already pale face. “There were two men. Where’s the other one?” her voice is croaky and strained under stress.
The officer checks his vitals as the half-dead heavy murmurs and rolls his head about. “What happened to the other men?” the officers ask him as he checks his pockets for ID, and the nurses bring a stretcher to put him on. The guy groans something incoherent, and the officer looks back at me and shakes his head.
“I’m heading up,” I tell the officer, pointing to the stairwell, then turn to address Emaline. “You stay here with the police where you’re safer.”
There was an ounce of warmth in her eyes, a softening at me caring about her welfare, but I would’ve said that to anyone, so she shouldn’t take it personally.
Flinging the door open, I leap up the stairs three steps at a time and freeze when I spot a body lying on the landing floor, but his back is propped up against the wall.
“Xave,” I race up as panic runs through me, and as I get closer to him, reality hits me hard. His nose is bleeding, but worse of all, his sweater is covered in blood, and he’s hugging his left side.
“Bro?” he says, reasonably alert. “He stabbed me.”
“I’ll get a medic,” I promise him as I carefully move his arm to find blood pouring from an open wound. He’s losing a shitload of blood, so I immediately pull off my sweater, bundle it up and press it against the wound to halt the blood flow. “Where’s the other guy, Xave? We’ve got one guy bloodied and bruised on the ground floor, and Emaline said there’s a second one. Where’s he?”
He points a bloodied finger skyward. “Next floor up. I fell out of the elevator when I pushed him out.” I suspect by ‘fell out,’ he grew weak from the blood loss and lost his balance, and that’s clear by the blood trail leading up to the next floor.
“Don’t fucking move, bro. I’m getting help,” I tell him, keeping my tone calm and controlled.
As I turn my back on him to run down the stairs to the ground floor, he groans, “Emaline? Where is she?”
I pause to glance back up at him. “She’s fine, Xave, thanks to you. She’s on the ground floor with the police.”
“Good,” I think he says, although it’s hard to tell what that grunt was, and I have more to worry about than him strung up over a bookhugger.
As soon as I’m out on the ground floor, a large crowd has gathered, and I can’t see where Emaline has gone. I grab the first nurse I see, and she hollas for a second nurse. They run up the stairs to examine Xave’s wounds.
“Em,” Xavier groans. “Where’s Em?”
“I told you she’s fine,” I assure him. Even though I don’t know where she is now, I’m not leaving his side to find out. Or should I? Jeezus, she might be in danger. Fuck. Resigning to this irritating urge to ensure the book nerd is okay, I announce to Xave that I’ll check on her. I’m better out of the way while nurses do their job tending to my brother, so I run back down the stairs to the ground floor.
I can’t see her anywhere. The foyer and reception area are massive, with a pharmacy and florist store and large crowds of people coming and going. I search for that little figure in large glasses, hiding a terrified face, long chocolate hair, unfashionable clothes, and a hand-knitted scarf. An accidental uniqueness. Xave is going to be fucked off if I lose her, and yet I can’t ignore the fear in my stomach, not of fear of Xave’s retribution, but of life without her in it. If she’s lost for good or if one of those heavies got her, I’ll kill them.
Even though I’ve only been wearing a T-shirt since I gave my sweater to Xave, sweat pours from my brow as my temperature soars. Walking quickly through the crowd, I step into the florist and don’t see her behind tall bouquets of daffodils. I move on to the pharmacy and can’t find her. The reception area has a line of about ten people, and none of them are her. I walk back to the elevator area where Xavier is being carried out on a stretcher and follow behind.
“How deep is that wound?” I ask the nurse, gazing down at my brother’s pale face. He’s awake, but only just.
“He’ll need stitches,” she informs me without giving too much away.
“Where’s Em?” he asks.
“Jeez, fuck, dude,” I grunt comically. “Don’t you care about anyone apart from her?”
“Wait,” he winces as they carry him into a surgical area. “Where is she?”
“She’s nearby,” I promise him, even though I can’t find her. “Don’t worry. Aaron is on his way in about ten minutes. He had to take a cab.”
“Where is she? Where is she, Austin?” he panics as they place him on a bed. “They might get her.”
As the nurses start cutting his clothes to tend to the wound, I step back so I don’t get in their way and find myself back in the corridor outside. I had to find her and head back into the foyer again to inspect the crowd to see if she was there, and I missed her. The area has been cleared of people, and the heavy in a suit has been taken away somewhere as hospital cleaners arrive with mops and buckets to clean up the blood.
Running my fingers through my hair, feeling the stress of the missing girl, I walk back up to the front windows that overlook the parking lot and stand there trying to spot her. Did she drive here in her van? If so, that old dumpster would be easy to find, so I could wait until she turns up.
No. Wait. She went to the hospital straight from the party, and that was in her friend’s hatchback. Or maybe she went home and came back in the van. Fuck, I don’t know. This is doing my fucking head in.
Maybe she’s gone up to the ICU where her sister is, so I inspect the giant sign on the wall with the wards and floor numbers. That doesn’t make sense either because she would’ve gone up in the elevator where the second heavy in a suit may have found her or up the stairs and walked past me. I don’t know if she would be that stupid.
There’s a narrow alleyway between the glass walls of the floristry and a small travel agency, which is a strange place to have one, but perhaps people seek out escapism when they’re in a hospital. Jutting out on the shiny floor, I spot a pair of brown sneakers that only someone who has no interest in fashion would wear.
As I walk around the bend, a dark-haired girl sits alone on a bench, hands placed on her knees, a multi-colored hand-knitted scarf wrapped warmly around her neck, staring at the floor.
I say nothing and sit beside her, wondering what’s so interesting about that particular spot on the floor. She doesn’t move, barely flinches, but when a sigh is released from her lips, I have to hold back from kissing her.
“He’s in the surgical ward getting stitched up,” I finally say after several seconds of silence.
She nods, still saying nothing.
“He’s asking for you,” I add, hoping my words will pull her out of this weird little spell. “He was worried that those men grabbed you.”
“I better go and see him,” she says quietly, adjusting her glasses on the bridge of her nose. It’s a nervous tick, as her glasses seem pretty fixed on that cute face.
She rises to her feet and walks away from me, and every cell in my body longs to tell her how worried I am about her. But I can’t. I don’t have it in me.
My eyes find a spot on the floor to stare at as the space between us lengthens as inner conflict causes hell. The further she walks away from me, the more the pain swells, growing larger by the second.
“Was it you?” her voice is distant and trembles, close to breaking.
I look up to find that her back is to me, dangerously close to turning around the bend where she’ll disappear from view unless I chase her down. Yeah, I’m not going to do that. “What do you mean?” I ask, assuming she’s talking about me finding Xavier, but I have to ask for clarification.
“The flowers,” she explains. “My grandma said one of the Leroux twins left flowers at our house. Was it you?”
That plan didn’t go how I wanted it to, and if it wasn’t Xavier, it’s obvious it was me. “I, ah, just found some in a field. It’s not a big deal.”
Her head bows gracefully, and nothing is said for a few seconds before she moves on, dragging my heart with her. I drop my face into my hands and comb my fingers through my hair, feeling the weight of the moment.
I can distance myself from her and convince everyone around me that I don’t care, but the truth is, I do. Too much.
The truth is…I’m falling for that girl and unsure what to do about it.