How Sinners Fight (Sinners of Hawthorne University 2)

Do I remember?

I wrack my brain for something, anything, but I come up empty. The only party I can think of is the party where I put Gray’s little game to an end, where I stripped in front of the entire fucking school, but that can’t be what he’s talking about. That was weeks ago.

Is he talking about the night I kissed Elias after the football game?

But I didn’t fall down any stairs there either. Life went on afterward.

Goddammit. What is he talking about? Why don’t I remember?

“No,” I rasp. “I… fell?”

Something shifts in Gray’s blue-green eyes, and his jaw tightens a little. Declan’s grip on my hand is on the verge of cutting off my circulation.

Elias opens his mouth to say something, but he’s interrupted by a crisp knock on the door. A middle-aged man in a white coat opens the door a second later and steps inside. He’s clean cut, accessorized with a silver Rolex that glints in the sunlight, flashing little light bubbles on the ceiling.

“Ah. I’m glad to see that you’re awake, Ms. Wright.”

The doctor sets down a slim laptop on the small desk along one wall before coming over to the bed.

The guys take a small step back to give him room, but their stances remain protective as the doctor takes my vitals. He returns to his laptop and checks something on the screen before typing out a few notes. Then he looks up at me.

“How are you feeling?”

How am I feeling? How am I fucking feeling? What sort of question is that?

I want to say something rude. Want to ask him if he thinks I feel good about falling down a flight of stairs that I

don’t even remember.

The man, whose name tag reads Doctor Cohen, purses his lips when I don’t say anything.

“You fell down a flight of stairs, Sophie,” he says, dropping the formalities and telling me what I already know. “It’s likely that you’ll have short-term memory loss from the head injury you sustained. When we did a brain scan, we saw signs of previous trauma, so frankly, I’m glad to see that you don’t have more side effects. How are you feeling?” He repeats the question.

“I’m…” My voice is still rough. Low and throaty. “I feel… all right. A little sore.”

The doctor seems content with that answer. For now. He gives me a small smile over the glow of the laptop. “Good. You also sprained your ankle, not to mention the bruises you have. The worst damage was to your head, but luckily you seem to have taken that like a soldier.” He glances down at his screen again. “Which is no surprise, considering the injuries you’ve already received,” he adds on an exhale.

A familiar prickle of annoyance and embarrassment crawls up my spine as he begins to read off my charts, as if I’ve somehow forgotten about the damage my body has sustained. As if I could forget about the other head injury or the small scars that decorate my body alongside the tattoos I’ve collected over the years.

I shove the prickling discomfort down, refusing to let it fuck me up in the head. I know for a fucking fact that I had a rough childhood. I don’t need to be reminded of it by this asshole.

If I could forget it, I would, trust me.

Well, that’s not exactly true. I don’t remember much at all about my life before the age of eleven, and I’ve always wondered what I’m missing from my past. The social workers’ best guess was that my mom was a drug addict, which would account for both the scars on my body and the previous brain injury. They think she might’ve dropped me on my head at some point, and that eventually, she either abandoned me or I ran away.

Super. Thanks a lot, Mom.

The doctor goes on, but I tune him out, wrapped in a bubble of numbness that I force myself into.

Short-term memory loss, he said.

Did I really have to lose more? Really?

As if I haven’t already lost enough. Just my luck to fall down a fucking flight of stairs and lose another chunk of information. It pisses the shit out of me, more than it should, knowing that my brain has locked away all of those memories, protecting me from whatever shit I’ve been through.

I’m a fighter though. I don’t need to be protected. I’d rather know what I’ve been through and face it like a soldier, as the doctor so generously put it, than just have these blank spots, these gaps.

“The good news is, it’ll probably come back,” Doctor Cohen concludes, just as I shake myself out of my dark thoughts and tune back in. “The brain does funny things, Sophie. It could be a random moment. Maybe walking to class, you’ll see something, hear something, even smell something, and it’ll all click back into place. Just one little trigger, and it’ll come rushing back to you. Short-term memories are much easier to recover than long-term ones, so don’t give up hope that they’ll come back.”