Surrendering Series Box Set

“Yeah. He wouldn’t let me give him any money to get a better place. This was all he could afford.” I would have given him money if he would have taken it, but Ryder was too proud and too stubborn. Must be that red hair.

The door was wide open and there wasn’t even an intercom. Lucah led us up a set of dark and rickety steps that creaked. I set my feet tentatively so I didn’t fall through the rotting wood. There was also a weird smell that all shitty apartments had. This one was especially bad. Someone on the first floor definitely smoked a lot of weed.

Ryder was on the third floor, and Lucah banged on the door. No one answered.

“Ryder?!” He banged again, and Rory tried to unlock the door with the keys Lucah had gotten from Ryder when he’d first moved in. The door swung open, and there was a strange guy standing on the other side.

“Heeeyyyyyy,” he said, looking at the three of us. “Can I help you?”

“Where’s my brother?” Lucah asked, pushing past the guy. He stumbled and was clearly stoned or on something, or both.

“Whoa, chill man. Let’s calm down for a minute.” Lucah barreled through the small apartment, which was really only three rooms. He found Ryder passed out in the bedroom.

“Someone call 911,” he said, his voice eerily calm.

Fifteen

Lucah started slapping Ryder’s face to get him to wake up, but it didn’t work. Rory ended up calling the paramedics as I helped Lucah drag Ryder into the shower and turned the cold water on.

Nothing was working. Ryder was still breathing, but he was unconscious. The guy who’d let us in hovered in the bathroom doorway as if the proceedings bored him.

“What did you do to him?” I screamed.

“Whoa, ease up,” he said, his voice slow and drawling. I wanted to smash his fucking head into the wall.

I’d known there was something wrong.

“How much longer?” Lucah asked as he took Ryder’s pulse again.

“I don’t know,” Rory said as she handed Lucah towels to wipe Ryder off. His skin was a scary pale that I’d seen before when he was in the hospital.

I listened as hard as I could for the sirens. After what felt like years, I heard them in the distance.

“Why don’t you go and meet them downstairs?” Lucah said to Rory, and she ran out of the room.

“I knew this was going to happen,” Lucah muttered as he lay with Ryder on the bathroom floor, his clothes and hair soaked from the shower. I wasn’t going to let myself cry or break down. I didn’t know what to think. A part of me believed that this was some sort of dream, that it wasn’t really happening. Couldn’t be happening.

The paramedics stormed in, and I was forced to move aside to let them by. What happened next was a lot of yelling and people and noise and chaos. Lucah told them about Ryder, and they asked what he’d taken.

“I don’t know!” The guy who’d been there had vanished, the fucker, so we couldn’t ask him. A few of the EMTs went through the apartment and found a bottle of pills and some pot.

Ryder still wasn’t conscious when they loaded him onto a stretcher and carried him down three flights of stairs. They only had room for one in the ambulance, and obviously that was going to be Lucah.

“We’ll meet you there,” Rory said, giving him a quick kiss before he dove into the back of the ambulance, and they shut the doors on us.

“I knew it,” I said. I couldn’t shake my feeling of unreality.

Rory hailed a cab and told him she’d tip him a hundred extra if he could get us to the hospital as fast as possible. We were headed back to Mass Gen.

“This feels a little bit like déjà vu, doesn’t it?” Rory said. I’d tried to forget that moment when she called me and told me Ryder was in the hospital. There were a few moments in my life that stood out as the worst, and that was one of them. I’d been convinced I was going to lose him that night.

I hadn’t, but here we were again.

“Yeah,” I said, my knees jiggling up and down as I willed the cab to drive faster.

“What is taking so long?” I asked, looking through the windshield. Damn. Mother fucking traffic. Didn’t they understand this was an emergency? If I could, I’d grow wings and fly.

Rory took my hand and gave me something to hold on to. Something to ground me. I realized this was indeed happening and it was not good.