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 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 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 kicked onto the tracks in the tube and run over by the train?
I quietly take in every injury on his beautiful body, 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 with 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 whispers, 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.”
“Stab wound!” I leap off of the mattress in astonishment. “What the hell? Who stabbed you Adam? Why would someone do that?”
Adam’s gaze drops to the bed, either unable or unwilling to meet mine. I turn to Dax again, hoping he’ll give me some answers, but Dax is gone.
Turning back to Adam, I sit down and lift my trembling hand to his uninjured cheek. My fingers skim along the rough stubble, fluttering gently down to his swollen lips.
“Adam,” I breathe, “who did this?”
He closes his eyes and almost imperceptibly leans into my touch, like a kitten would when you reach down to scratch its ear. “I don’t want to drag you into it, Ellie.”
“Then why am I here?” I ask, still gliding my hand over any bit of undamaged flesh that I can find, skimming over small freckles, a day’s worth of beard, the thrumming pulse at his neck.
Adam’s eyes open and I’m captivated by the intense combination of brown, slate gray, and green that seems to penetrate right through me. “Because I missed you,” he whispers, lifting his hand to drag his fingers across my lips.
I watch as Adam leans in, angling his head toward mine. He winces and I realize that he can’t bend any further because of the pain. Even though I’m worried about him, I can’t help but smile at his efforts. I shift forward to press my lips to his, giving him what he wants. What I want.
He moves his mouth slowly, the pressure so faint that I can hardly feel it. My body and my racing heart are urging me to deepen the kiss, but I don’t, terrified of hurting him. A warm, tingling sensation spreads from my scalp down to my toes and I decide that I never want this glorious feeling to end.
Exhausted from the small effort, Adam breaks the kiss first, slumping back against the wall in the same half-sitting position he was in when I got here. My entire body is tense and crackling with a strange combination of fear and desire. Struggling to control it, I let myself study Adam as he rests.
His eyes are closed again, one lid is swollen and almost black. Down the same side of his face is a large purple stain with a shallow scrape in the middle of it. Adam’s beautiful lips are slightly parted and still damp from our kiss, his lower one cracked and puffy in the center.
My gaze
drops down to his torso, which is lean and sculpted like the body of a swimmer or a runner. Cautiously, I touch the corner of his tattered bandage, tugging gradually to try and see the damage.