His eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “What? Oh shit, Ellie. I’m sorry.” Dax’s face and neck turn red with embarrassment when he realizes that he frightened me.
“So…” I twitch nervously, “what do you want?”
“Oh, I uh…” Dax runs a large hand through his very short brown hair and looks around us nervously, not meeting my stare until he speaks again. “Can you come with me?”
I narrow my eyes and look up at him. “I think I’ve learned my lesson about going off with boys I don’t know. And why weren’t you and Adam in school today?” I’m acting somewhat braver than I probably should feel. Dax is absolutely massive, easily well over six feet tall and fourteen stone. His fist is probably as big as my head.
Dax turns and takes a few steps away from me, hands laced on the back of his neck, obviously struggling with what to say next. “Crap, Ellie.” He spins back to face m
e, his handsome features twisted up into a grimace and his brown eyes urging me to trust him. “You can’t go home alone, okay? Adam didn’t want me to tell you, but he’s been following you every day to make sure that Callum and Ryan don’t try anything and he can’t be here today. He… he asked me to bring you to his place.”
My fragile heart soars at the news that Adam has been looking out for me all these weeks. All that time I thought he was ignoring me, watching girls throw themselves at him as I sat nearby, and he was actually worrying about my safety. As Dax’s words sink in, I become confused and frown. “Why can’t he be here? And why can’t you just walk me home?”
Dax huffs impatiently, waving his arms around as if he can’t speak without them moving. “Adam will explain it all when you see him. He really wants to see you Ellie, and he … he’s not in any condition to leave his flat.”
What?
Swallowing loudly, I decide to go along with his instructions and save all of my questions for Adam. “Okay Dax, take me to see him.”
It’s only about a ten-minute walk to Adam’s flat, but it feels much longer. I thought my street was bad, but it has nothing on Adam’s. Graffiti covers the abandoned properties, broken glass crunches under our feet, metal shells that used to be cars are left to rust alongside the curb, and everything smells like rubbish. It’s positively depressing.
Neither of us says anything, and Dax only speaks right before he opens the door to Adam’s rundown flat, hand hovering over the handle.
“Ellie, don’t freak out, okay?”
The hair on the back of my neck stands up in fear, and my heart begins to pound against my chest again. At this rate I’ll have a heart attack by the time I’m twenty. “Freak out about what?”
“Adam, he… well, he got hurt,” Dax explains, a pained look in his eyes.
“Is it… is he okay?” I choke down the overwhelming feeling of terror that washes over me.
“Yeah, he’ll be okay. Just… just don’t baby him. He’ll act like everything is fine, and you need to go along with it. He doesn’t like pity.” Dax studies me intently, looking down, making sure I can handle this.
Not able to find my voice, I nod instead and wipe my sweaty palms on my jeans. Dax inhales deeply and pushes open the door. I can’t help the gasp that escapes as I take in Adam’s home, if you can even call it a home.
There’s hardly any furniture in the small, square space, just a crumbling couch and a shoddy table with two metal folding chairs. A crooked wooden unit holds a tiny television in one corner. Clothes, rubbish, and other random stuff are scattered around the room, obviously left where they landed and quickly forgotten.
I reach over and squeeze Dax’s hand. Adam lives here? He glances down at me and presses his mouth into a tight line. “C’mon, in here.” He points with his chin and leads me to a door off of the main room.
I’m not sure what I expected to see, exactly, but it certainly isn’t the sight in front of me. My hand flies up to cover my mouth, squelching the cry that threatens to tear from my throat. I have to physically swallow down the bile that churns painfully in my stomach.
“Ellie?” Adam grunts as his head rolls to look at me from where he’s sitting on a dingy mattress all twisted up in the sheets, his back propped against the wall. “You came.”
“Yeah,” I manage to croak as I move to sit beside him on the mattress on the floor of his tiny room. Taking his clammy hand in both of mine, I clasp it tightly and hold back the tears I feel welling up behind my eyes. “What happened?” I caress his hand gently, loving the excuse to touch him, even as the horror of the situation sinks in.
Be strong Ellie. Screaming would not be helpful right now.
He attempts a smile, but hisses in pain and grimaces, his normally pale skin even whiter than usual. “Nothing, don’t worry about me.” His eyelids are heavy and he’s having a difficult time keeping them open.
My eyebrows rise in disbelief. Don’t worry? How can he expect me not to worry considering he looks like he was run over by a train?
I quietly take in every injury on his beautiful body, carefully cataloguing each one. His gorgeous face is black and blue and swollen, and there’s a deep cut on his lip that threatens to crack and bleed at any moment. He’s wearing only a loose pair of navy blue athletic shorts, so I can see that he has more dark bruises covering his ribcage on both sides. Scratches appear haphazardly across his chest, arms, and knees, some shallow and some deep.
Those injuries are minor, however, because what makes my stomach twist is the giant, dirty bandage across his abdomen that has a large, wet splotch of blood seeping through it.
“Adam, you need to go to hospital,” I encourage soothingly, flicking my eyes over to Dax who is leaning his large body against the doorframe, looking much, much older than seventeen. “Dax, tell him. He needs a doctor.”
“Ellie,” Dax says quietly, his eyes plagued with guilt, “we can’t. The police will get involved if we do and then a stab wound won’t be the worst thing that happens to him.”