Never Mine (The Never Never Duet #2)

Prologue

“…that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses?” Edgar Allan Poe

Kieran

Claire tells me I have to leave.

I can hear her muffled pleas as my eyes stay fixed on Deirdre.

Lying in this hospital bed, completely unconscious, barely hanging on to the small fray of life that dangles just out of her reach.

Machines breathe for her, IV medication is pumped through her veins to keep her comfortable, they said, and to keep her brain from swelling. To keep her here with me.

I’ve been here for most of the night, waiting on any shred of hope to surface. It doesn’t come. The attack caused a brain bleed, and my futile attempts to save her only caused multiple broken ribs.

I broke her. They say I saved her. But if this is saving, maybe she would have been better off…

Some ICU nurse with a clipped tone and very little pity in her eyes informs me I’m not on any list. Not family. Not legal.

Of course I’m not. She has no family here. Not really, not people she thought to put on a form to make medical decisions on her behalf. I’m just some professor standing vigilant at a bed that they think isn’t mine to guard. I’m not leaving. I can’t. I don’t know what time it is. I don’t care.

“I…I can’t.”

“Kieran, I’ve got her. They’re letting me stay with her. I promise I won’t leave her side, but you need to go. It’s bad enough Sheridan knows you were with her.”

I don’t want to move from this sterile, cold room. Claire’s hair is a mess, falling haphazardly from her messy bun, and her eyes are red and swollen from crying. Gabe is pacing back and forth in the room, wearing a hole in the tile floor.

Sheridan’s name crawls across my skin, making me cringe. When 9-1-1 was called, of course, the President of Cornelia had to see what was tarnishing his precious university. It doesn’t help much that it involved me and Deirdre, again.

The nurse asks me once more to go and begins to usher me out of her room. I look helplessly in Deirdre’s direction; her already pale skin an even more ghostly white, peppered with purple bruises and bloody bandages. My shoulders sag, and I let out a long exhale.

I follow—because making a scene won’t help her. Because I can’t fight this battle for her, no matter how much rage I have simmering beneath my skin.

So I walk blindly out into the bitter December night, blinking against the wind and the hospital’s fluorescent glow.

My hands feel too empty, my coat too heavy draped on my shoulders.

I get into my car and sit there. I mindlessly pull the key from my coat pocket and turn the ignition.

Eyes forward, I sit and stare into the dark abyss before me, engine running, unmoving. I should go home.

But I can’t bring myself to drive back to the house where she isn’t. Where she was supposed to be tonight, lying safely in my arms.

Where the sounds of her pleasure are now embedded in the walls.

Where her scent lingers on my sheets.

Instead, I find myself driving to her dorm.

I don’t remember deciding. My body feels like it moves on autopilot, guided by some feral rage.

I park, kill the lights, and walk around the back of the building to where the entrance to the stairwell is.

The “do not enter” yellow tape the police had used to mark off the entryway has been torn off.

The heavy door creaks open, and I begin to ascend the familiar concrete steps with a leaden weight in my chest. When I pass the wet floor sign lying haphazardly against the wall, the bile rises in my throat, but I keep moving.

With each step bringing me closer to her room, my breaths become ragged as it hits me like a ton of bricks.

The memory.

Her blood. My voice screaming for help. Her body crumpled on the cold, unforgiving floor. That damn word, “Nevermore,” ripping from my throat like an animal. I remember how her bones felt under my hands when I started CPR. How I begged her to breathe.

The burning ache in my chest takes over. I feel like someone is sitting on me, crushing my own bones. I grip the handrail, nearly buckling under the weight of it all. I close my eyes. Instead of fighting it, I let it break me, just for a moment. Let it undo me in the silence where no one can see.

After the waves of anguish wash over me, I painfully climb the steps once more. My legs feel heavy underneath me.

When I reach her dorm, my knuckles brush the door as if I have approached a sacred tomb, hallowed ground. I turn the knob, and when it creaks open, I’m greeted by the stillness of the aftermath. The room is…clean.

Too clean.

Someone’s started to wash away her pain.

The university wasted no time in bringing someone in to erase the evidence of something so violent happening at their precious campus.

As soon as the police department cleared the scene, a cleaning crew came through here to scrub away the blood and make it neat again, like nothing ever happened.

It feels obscene somehow. Like painting over a wound.

Her throw blanket is folded. Her desk is organized.

There’s no sign of the horror that happened here, no trace of the chaos that shattered our world.

The room smells like disinfecting wipes and multipurpose cleaner.

The furniture has been pushed back into place.

There’s a new lamp on the table replacing the one that got knocked over.

A carpet shampooer is plugged into an outlet, and the carpet is damp where the blood splatter has left a slight pink stain, and as a ‘just in case’, there’s a new rug rolled up waiting to be placed over the spot.

I stand in the doorway, jaw clenched so tight it aches.

They’re trying to erase her.

To scrub away what happened. To make this place presentable again. As if her body wasn’t broken just a few floors below, soaked in blood and cloaked in silence.

God forbid, Sheridan let anything tarnish his university’s pristine name. As if he forgets I know more about him than he wants the public to know.

It makes me sick.

I step inside, my shoes dragging against the old carpet.

My body feels weighed down with emotion and exhaustion.

My gaze roves over everything—every object, every trace of her.

The mug on her desk. The half-open nail polish bottle on the nightstand near the bed.

The pillow she used to hug when she couldn’t sleep.

I pause when something catches my eye.

Lying on the floor, half-tucked beneath her bed, as if it had been knocked over in the chaos, is the black journal.

The one I gave her after our first night together.

Her journal. Our journal.

I freeze. For a long moment, I just stare at it. The battered leather cover, the broken spine. My fingers tremble as I start to lean down and reach for it, my breath catching in my throat.

It’s her.

I crouch warily, scooping it into my hands like it’s something sacred.

I hold it to my chest, gripping it too tightly.

My eyes sting, but I don’t let the tears fall.

Not here. Not where they have already tried to wipe her away.

I close my eyes, clutching the book to my chest, as memories of her invade my mind.

It is as if I can feel her in my hands again, beneath me, calling to me.

I shake my head, only to open my eyes to the reality that lies before me.

She’s not here. She’s lying in the damn hospital bed, fighting for her life.

Looking down at the book in my hands, my fingers tremble as I open it. Flipping to the last page, my breath catches when I see her handwriting. My heart begins to thud in my chest when I realize she wrote an entry after mine.

My mouth goes dry when I see the date of the entry.

Today at seven this morning. The day everything changed.

She wrote this just hours before and meant to give it to me tonight.

Tonight, maybe after she had eaten the dinner I planned to cook, or after I had professed my love to her in my bed.

Tonight would have changed everything between us, and in a way, everything has changed, just not exactly how I envisioned it.

The tears that have been threatening to fall blur my vision as I begin to read.

When I saw you at Salvation, I tried to avoid you.

After waiting on you, every part of me screamed to stay away from you.

You came off arrogant, yet brilliant in your own right, and then of course, insufferable.

When I walked into your class that first day, I was drowning.

Drowning in the sorrow and pain that I had been running from for so long.

And somehow, without even knowing, you pulled me to shore.

I thought I hid it well, but as the days and weeks wore on, you saw straight through me.

I didn’t know then what this was between us, but I do know now that it is real and it is mine.

I am finally safe.

Sometimes I think you know me better than I know myself.

Sometimes I wonder if you were sent to find me, like some cruel twist of fate, sending me someone I shouldn’t want.

But whatever the reason, I don’t care anymore.

Because when you touch me, I remember who I am.

I remember that I’m still here and I am alive. You, Kieran, make me feel alive again.

“For passionate love is still divine.” Tamerlane - Edgar Allan Poe

Eternally yours,

Deirdre

My breaths falter, and I sit back on my heels.

Her words hit like a freight train, leveling me. I press my lips to the page. The silence in the room is so deafening that my ears begin to ring.

My heart begins to race as I clutch the journal to my chest. The irony of her words and what she was about to endure leaves me breathless. Fate really is cruel.

But more than that, this girl, this woman, she loved me.

She loves me.

Despite the rules. Despite the fear. Despite everything we shouldn’t be.

And I never told her. Not out loud. Not in the way she deserves.

Without thinking, I slide it into my coat pocket.