Hate To Love You

I looked, my face burning, and I saw the bottom of their shoes before everything went black.

Three seconds.

That was all it took.





The smell woke me up.

It was foul and metallic, but then the sounds were next. Like an ambulance’s siren. It was looping around and around, and it was so loud. It was becoming louder. I wanted to cover my ears. It hurt. I wanted the ambulance to go past me, but it never did. It kept coming. It kept getting louder and louder, shrieking incessantly, and then I heard the voices.

A male and a female.

I felt two fingers pressing into my wrist.

That hurt, too. I wanted to tell them to stop, but I couldn’t.

I wanted to wake up and move, but I couldn’t do anything. I was trapped.

“BP is—”

More beeps and alarms sounded. I couldn’t hear what the female was saying. The guy asked, “Pulse?”

She said something again.

I could open my eyes. I looked up—the ceiling was white. I shook. No, I was in a vehicle, and that shook. I couldn’t move. My neck felt like it was on fire, and it was constricted. My arms, hands, legs. I was strapped to a bed, a stretcher.

I was in an ambulance.

“Miss.” The female bent over me. “Miss, we called your family. Your brother is meeting us at the hospital.”

But . . .

I tried to speak. My mouth couldn’t move. What was going on?

Then my eyelids were growing heavy again, really heavy, and I fell asleep wondering one thing: Why was I going to the hospital?





A low and steady beeping woke me first.

The pain really woke me next. I opened my eyes, and it was a different ceiling. This one was bare. There were silver creases. I followed one and saw some curtains hanging from it attached by wheels. This time I could open my mouth. I could turn my head. I wasn’t strapped down anymore, and I looked over, my entire body screaming for me not to move.

I did anyway.

Gage sat in the chair beside me, his head propped up by his hand. His chest rose and a deep breath came out. I didn’t say anything, not at first. My mouth hurt, but Gage didn’t look okay. He was pale, there were purple smudges under his eyes, and strained wrinkles around his mouth. Those showed whenever he was under stress.

“You’re awake?”

I looked the other way. Slowly. God, it hurt.

A nurse approached the bed, a clipboard in hand, whispering, “There’s been quite some activity around here because of you.”

I glanced again to see if Gage woke, but he hadn’t.

The nurse touched the inside of my wrist, watching her clock.

I asked, my voice so hoarse, “I’m in a hospital?”

She nodded, counting under breath, “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .” Once she finished, she wrote a number on her clipboard. “Yeah. Do you know what happened?”

There was pain. Fog. An image of a silhouette, then something big by it.

I winced as I tried to remember. “No.”

“Are you in pain?”

I nodded. “Yes.” Another croak from me.

She reached for an IV and pressed some buttons on a little box hanging from it. “Your morphine must be low. I started another dose.” She reached for a black arm cuff. “I need to take your blood pressure. Are you okay with that?”

I lifted my arm as much as I could, and she applied it. She pressed a button above me, and the cuff tightened until it felt as if it would cut off my whole arm.

She murmured, watching the numbers, “What do you remember?”

I told her as a machine beeped, and those numbers were written down, too. She stared at me a moment. I was waiting for her to fill in the gaps, to explain everything to me, but she didn’t.

“Wh— Hey!”

Gage woke, surging upright. His hand reached for me, and he half-rose out of his seat. “You’re okay?” He searched my face.

“Yeah.”

“Her vitals are all normal.” The nurse gave us both a cheerful grin. “I’m going to let the doctor know you’re awake. He’ll want to talk to you.”

“You’re in pain?” Gage asked once she pulled the door shut behind her.

“She started morphine or something.” I frowned. The headache was still there, and I could not wait for it to go away. “Gage, what happened?”

“What do you remember?”

I told him the same, and like the nurse, there was a baited moment of silence.

“What?” The silhouette, the dark thing by it. Why was it flashing in my memory? “Gage. Tell me. Please.” Fear started to bloom under my ribs, spreading all over.

He just stared at me before squeezing his eyes shut. He let out a pocket of air, and his shoulders dropped dramatically. He nodded. “Okay.” His hand went to the bedrail by me, and his fingers curled around it. “You were attacked—”

As he spoke, the silhouette became one.

“—Matt Carruthers and another guy waited for you to leave the library—”

It was dark. After midnight. There was no one else around.

“—The other guy hit you with a bat—”

The bat swung, and I jerked in the bed as if it hit me once again. I could feel it.

“—then Carruthers kicked you—”

In the face.

I looked up, and a foot was lifted.

I couldn’t move. I was reliving the entire thing. A droplet landed on my hand, and I glanced down. I was crying. I had no idea.

Gage paused, but I gutted out, “Tell me the rest.”

“There isn’t much after that.”

“What?”

He lifted a shoulder. “One of the librarians was leaving and saw the whole thing. She yelled and called 9-1-1 right away. They took off, but campus cameras caught them. They know it was them. I talked to the security officer, but since Dulane doesn’t have its own campus police, the city police is going to be charging them. The one detective stopped by this morning. He said they probably had enough evidence so you wouldn’t have to testify, plus the whole video from before clearly shows Carruthers advancing on you first. It was self-defense, though the cop said you went a little far with it.” A half-grin cracked the heavy mask of exhaustion. He raked a hand over his face. “Shit, Kenz. I was so worried about you. Everyone was.”

I sat there. The whole thing was unbelievable, but I remembered it.

The fear was still there, and I waited. I wasn’t one to be afraid. The anger would be coming, but after another minute’s wait, I frowned. It wasn’t there. It was just fear.

“Kenz?”

Gage was watching me. He tilted his head to the side, his fingers uncurling from around the rail so he could reach toward me. “What’s going on in there?”

I shook my head.

A lump was in my throat.

I didn’t want to be scared.

I didn’t want to be anything.

I shoved it down.

Maybe it was the morphine. Maybe it was me, but I didn’t feel. I was numb, and I smiled at my brother. “I’m fine.”