“Dude, are you okay? Are you hearing me?”
“I hear you,” I grind out, staring down at him with a look that I hope communicates exactly how much I hate his ass right now.
I don’t, actually, hate Cal. It’s just that he has a tendency to do this—getting in the way of things. Cal lost his parents when we were young and adopted my father as the stand in for his own. Which would have been just fine, except for the grating and impossible ways Cal twists his own life to try and best me.
Of course, we both decided to go into medicine. And after I announced I’d be focusing on cardiology, Cal quickly declared he’d be specializing in neurosurgery, just like Frank.
It’s hard to hate someone who has to do so much boot-licking just to feel loved.
So, I may not hate him, but I’m damn close to laying him out right now.
“Okay, but you’re not reallylookingat me, so?—”
“Move.” I put my hands on his chest and sort of help him step to the side, and he gapes at me, shaking his head as I stride past him. Right now, I’m beyond caring.
I step back into the ballroom, every red mask catching my eye until I realize it’s not her. Moving through the room with a focused level of anti-social energy that makes most people shy away from me, I seek her out. I even check on the other balconies.
Only after the search is over do I realize with a sinking feeling that Ruby isn’t here. That the game between us surely ended the moment she pushed through this party, walked through the lobby, and slipped out into the night.
And I’m not entirely sure which of us won.
Chapter 4
Jules
Five Years Later
“Gus,” I say, but my voice is muffled through the plastic mask that’s been shoved over my face. It blows gentle, clean air into my nose and mouth, but the smell of it is making me sick.
Blinking hard against a headache that butts up against the back of my brain, I stare up at the swirling fluorescent lights above me. I’ve always gotten motion sickness easily, and this wholebeing wheeled aroundthing is not helping matters.
I’m clearly in a hospital, having come through large sliding doors in awhoosh, plunged into the rapid beeping and blinking and the sharp, astringent smell of bleach and antiseptic.
There’s a gloved blue hand on the railing, pushing my stretcher along, and I turn to it, finding it attached to a woman—a girl?—who looks like she must be easily ten years younger than me. Do they allow twenty-two-year-olds to work in hospitals? Wheel people into the emergency room against their will?
I stare at her, try to speak again, but she either doesn’t hear me, or pretends not to. Stretching the elastic of the masks, Ipull it away from my nose and mouth and try to sit up. When I speak, my voice comes out rough and thick through mucus in my throat. “Where is Augustus?”
She glances down at me, looking exhausted and weathered, and it’s only—well it must still be some time in the morning. It can’t have been that long since I first saw the flashing lights of the ambulance.
Reaching for the mask and trying to put it back in place, she says, “Ma’am, please don’t touch the oxygen, you need?—”
I push it away again, knocking her hand to the side and fully sit up on the stretcher, which only makes me feel more nauseous. If they just stopped pushing me around the room, I could take a breath and get my bearings andnotvomit up my iced coffee.
It was the one I allow myself per week, and this morning I made the mistake of going to Dunkin,’ only to find the shaken espresso latte completely different from the last time I had it.
Thinking about that coffee is only making me sicker, but I still don’t want to waste the seven dollars by throwing it up now.
“Ma’am,” she says, and finally, mercifully, the stretcher—gurney?—stops moving. “Please, just leave the mask on, and we’ll?—”
“I need to find Gus.”
“Who is Gus?—?”
I shouldn’t even be in the emergency room. What aboutI’m finedon’t these people understand? And, knowing that Gus is here somewhere, surely scared and asking for me, I definitely should not be on this hellish carnival ride, rolling around the room, and not without him.
Raising my voice, looking around the chaotic emergency room, my gaze catching on more and more people in scrubs pouring into the area, I ask again, “Where is my son?”
The last I saw of him was when they were pulling him from the car.
