Marc: u haven’t checked in for the morning workouts. everything good?

  Me: busted my leg. can’t run. doctor’s orders

  Marc: WTF

  My phone starts to vibrate in my hand, and I answer with a sigh. I might as well get it over with.

  “What do you mean you busted your leg?”

  His voice is shrill with panic. For some reason, I have to force myself to give a shit that my little brother is upset, and that scares the fuck out of me. Even through the worst of the pain and the bullying, I never lost touch with my emotions. I’m not even sad or angry. I’m just… empty.

  “Slipped on some water making instant noodles on Christmas and cranked my knee pretty bad,” I tell him while it feels like my brain is running through quicksand. “Doc said stay off for a week and then limited lower body for the next four.”

  I can hear the mumbles as Marc talks to Max before coming back on the call.

  “I knew you were spouting bullshit to Mom and Dad when you said you went to Jesse’s. We were at his house and you most definitely were not at his place during the call on Christmas.”

  I mumble something to agree, but turn my attention back to doom scrolling while my brother drones on about how disappointed he is that I lied, got hurt, kept them in the dark, yadda, yadda…

  “Do you even care, Sid? That’s why you ran off to Pennsylvania, isn’t it? You don’t want any kind of reminders of home… not even us.”

  I flinch at his words, but it washes away seconds later. I know that his words should shatter me, but can you shatter when you’re already broken beyond repair?

  “Think what you want, Marc. I need to rest.”

  I disconnect the call before either one of us says something we’re going to regret. I need to figure out how to get my emotions back online because this whole being fucking numb shit is not what I signed up for. Instead of more scrolling, I put on some music and close my eyes.

  What the fuck is wrong with me?

  My brother’s laugh has me opening my eyes, but I’m not in my room at Wrenshaw. For some reason, I’m in the locker room at our high school. Looking around, thankfully, no one is here with me, but I know that will change. If I’m hearing Max, that means this is my sophomore year because the twins both made the U-17 development team when they were sophomores and I rarely saw them at school since.

  Fucking medication.

  It’s obvious that I’m inside of a memory or a mesh of memories fused into a new nightmare. To be honest, there are too many horrible things that happened to me in this locker room for this to be anything other than a nightmare, and sure enough my worst tormenters round the corner from the showers, wearing only towels around their waists.

  “What are you staring at, Piggy?” Simecki taunts while Ryztic and Simmons sneer my way. “Piggy wanna play with us? You don’t have what it takes anymore.”

  Glancing at the mirrors above the sinks, I see myself from years earlier… before the work and effort – and the timely growth spurt. I’m just that fat, pathetic loser who would pray at night for scraps of positive attention from these very guys who used to be my best friends.

  “Best friends… No, BROTHERS forever. Right, Sid?”

  A ghostly image of six year old Paul Ryztic passes behind me and I watch four small boys giggling while trying to come up with a secret handshake. Meanwhile, the teenage counterparts in front of me advance with menace on their faces.

  “I think the fatty is hungry, don’t you guys?” Luke Simmons asks after grabbing my throat to lift me to my feet. “I think he wants something a bit more substantial than those chips he’s been crunching.”

  Simecki moves behind me to push me down to my knees while Paul goes to lock the door. Luke is still holding my throat, making me wheeze as I fight to get air.

  I don’t remember this happening…

  “I’ve seen the way you watch us, Sid,” Luke leans down to whisper in my ear. “I’ll let you have this today because it’s the closest you will ever get to getting laid.”

  Simecki’s grip moves from my shoulders to holding my arms behind my back. I didn’t even notice hm kneeling behind me. Simmons releases my throat and I gasp for air. His grip wasn’t tight enough to really restrict my breathing, but it was enough to make my brain think it was. Instead of fighting back, I try to curl up.

  “Lift his head up,” Luke commands and a hand yanks my head back by the hair. They don’t care that I’m in pain. Luke just covers my mouth to muffle the sound of my scream.

  “Do it again, but let me get ready first,” he orders Simecki. “I wanna feel him scream while I’m down his throat.”

  This isn’t right. This didn’t happen. Why is this happening?

  Fingers force my jaw open before he starts pushing his cock past my teeth. I want to bite down. I want to fucking destroy him.

  This never fucking happened!

  Tears are falling and my entire body is shaking from the effort I’m making to just stay conscious from the fear. He keeps pushing forward, and I gag. I can feel the bile rising up, but he keeps pushing.

  “You puke on my dick, and I’ll make you eat it from the floor,” he growls out and slaps the side of my head.

  He’s made me eat much worse things, so I try my hardest to stop gagging and swallowing it back down. Somehow, Luke found the sweet spot between my throat spasming and forces himself down my throat.

  It hurts. It fucking hurts. This isn’t what I want. This isn’t something I like.

  I’m sobbing and screaming while he rams his cock into the back of my throat over and over again. Only a quarter of his thrusts seem to actually go down instead of just crashing into my soft tissue. When he manages to force himself down to the point my face is smashed into his pubic hair, he grips the back of my head and pulls my face even tighter against his body.

  I can’t breathe. This didn’t happen.

  This never fucking happened!

  Ryznic comes around the corner right before the blackness takes over my vision completely.

  I lean over the edge of my bed and empty the contents of my stomach onto the tile floor. I can still hear the echoes of my brothers laughing from the hallway…

  Fucking painkillers.

  Thank goodness I’m done with the strong stuff now.

  But that dream didn’t feel like a dream – well, outside of the ghostly kids, anyways. It felt… real. My brain is still fuzzy as all hell, but there was something that makes me wonder if it really happened. Or, at least that maybe something similar happened. I stopped changing in the locker room at some point, but I could never remember why. If this actually happened…

  Yeah, it would make sense.

  “Woah, are you alright?”

  Jesse’s voice has me almost falling out of bed into the pile of vomit because he is the last person I want to see me like this. I’m drenched in sweat, shivering with aftershocks of the fear, and just puked up some of the best fucking salmon I’ve ever had.

  No, it does not taste good on the way back out.

  “What are you even doing here? I thought you were going to be home for the whole break?” I ask while I toss a towel onto the mess next to my bed.

  “I should be asking you that,” he grumbles and grabs the box of kitty litter we keep on hand for spills from under his desk. “Shouldn’t you be in another time zone for another few days?”

  I lay back down while he lifts the towel and dumps a scoop or two on the mess before replacing it. I’ll get rid of the mess in a little bit… once my heart stops thinking now is a great time to run a marathon. Whatever numbness took hold of me earlier is creeping back in and that scares me more than my fucking dream-slash-memory did.

  They broke me…

  JESSE’S DIARY

  IT’S A CRIME OF PASSION

  Happy fucking New Year to me. I thought I was going to be coming back to an empty room and have a couple of days to get my head on straight. But NOOOOO. Instead, I was greeted with the man I love – fuck it, I’m saying it – puking his guts out on the floor. He says he wasn’t sick, which okay I did take his temperature like 70 times, but he was shaky and sweating. So sue me.

  It wasn’t until after I got all of the vomit cleaned up that I noticed the crutches propped up against his desk and the bandage on his arm. I don’t know what the hell happened to him over the last week and a half, but I’m pissed as fuck that he didn’t reach out to me at all to help him.

  I mean, yeah. I’m also mad that he lied to me and made me believe he would be going home for the holidays. I did NOT need to be coming back to see that after the shit show back home with Roger. It was either him or me leaving, and I wasn’t going to put Mom through the pain of her stepson putting her son in the fucking hospital. The bastard somehow got his hands on one of my mother’s journals and had the fucking audacity to start talking shit about her.

  That woman was an angel come to earth. Even Mom has never had a bad word to say about the woman who gave birth to me and my sisters. And Roger started to say there must have been something wrong with her and that she took the easy way out because who would want three brats like us.

  Honestly, it was either him in a body bag or me in the dorm room. And funerals are fucking expensive.

  Now, I’m laying here in my bed, listening to Sid whimpering and crying in his sleep while the seconds tick down to the start of another year. I can only hope that murder isn’t on the itinerary for the next year of my life because if it’s not Roger, I have the feeling that whoever is upsetting my man will end up six feet under.

  CHAPTER 16

  SOOO NOT A PARTY ANIMAL

  Two weeks into the new semester, and I’m ready to throw this damn knee brace in a dumpster. Nothing screams pound my ass into next week like an accident prone loser, and that is exactly what this brace gives off. Every single time a guy shows even the slightest interest, they run away as soon as the brace comes into view. I wish I could wear it underneath my jeans, but it’s already a bitch to get anything more substantial than sweats on to begin with. Trying to wrestle the denim over a brace is not an experience I want to have. I don’t want any reason to go back on the painkillers – they make the nightmares worse.

  “Wanna go to a party, Sid?”

  Toby comes bounding up to me while I’m grabbing a fresh bag of arabica beans from storage. The guy seems to be extra happy since the new year started, and it is starting to get on my nerves. It almost feels like all of the extra joy in him was what was sucked out of me.

  “Not really a party kind of guy, Toby.”

  All I want to do is work my shifts, go to my classes, and get through each day as it comes. My family is on my ass about being antisocial. Jesse is even reporting back to my brothers on things. I don’t even know why he cares. Next year, we will have new dorm assignments and will probably never interact again – not that we really interact that much to begin with.

  I thought things would change between us after Thanksgiving. And they did for a while. But then the holiday break came and when he was suddenly back on New Year’s morning, things had changed again. He keeps treating me like I’m breakable.

  No… He’s treating me like I’m broken – all because my clumsy ass slipped while making fucking instant noodles.

  “…Spencer vouches for them which is good enough for Don. With his history, ya know. Anyways, will you please come? Owner says I can’t go unless I know at least five people at a party that he can trust me with. Plus, they’re all excited for Stan and his budding office romance to want to hang out with us young people.”

  “Fine,” I snap and limp my way back to the front of the shop.

  If it shuts him up, I can go to a fucking party. It’s not like the reminder that my chance with Stan flew out the window before I could even glimpse it again is needed. Between my injury and his mystery man at work, that door has closed. The only reason I didn’t try to pursue anything else the last few months is because I thought I had a sure thing to look forward to.

  My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I pull it out after dropping the bag where Sylvie can start grinding to refill the cannisters.

  Toby: Omega Sigma Chi house 9pm

  My phone goes back in my pocket, and I lean over the counter to finish re-working the schedule for the next week now that one of our townie part timers isn’t coming back. We thought they decided to no-show after the holiday break. Don finally got in touch with them a few days ago, and it turns out they had informed Jessica back at the beginning of the fall semester that they were accepted to start at their dream school in Boston for the spring semester, and she never put it in the books.

  The bitch could have said something…

  Honestly, I feel like the reason she didn’t was for this exact situation to come up. I only worked with her for a couple of weeks, but she was constantly manipulating situations to make herself look better to Don. To be honest, I don’t know if he’s gay or bi or pan, but that’s not my business. All I know is that the man is damn near obsessively in love with Shiloh and Toby both.

  Before I realize it, Sylvie is locking the front door and starts stacking the chairs so that the robot mop can get the whole floor better. For Christmas, some of their friends gifted Don with the funds he needs for the full renovation of the coffee shop to turn it into a legit café. While the actual construction will take place during the summer while campus is mostly deserted, Eric thought that we all deserved an easier time of things and bought the shop a robot vacuum and mop combination. It does a decent enough job, but I still make sure to manually sweep and mop on Sundays to make sure to catch anything that it might miss.

  But for today, I’m glad Eric thought to buy the damn thing. I am exhausted thanks to the lack of sleep from nightmares and the fucking pain in my legs.

  “Yuki is doing his thing, so I’m gonna take off,” Sylvie calls over to me after grabbing her coat and purse from the breakroom. “Need me for anything else?”

  I wave her off and listen for the beep from the back door telling me it’s secured. After Shiloh’s brother and the thing with Simecki, Don put an audible alarm on the back door so that we can hear when it is opened and closed from the front of the shop or even the top of the stairs outside of their apartment.

  A shudder runs through me when I think about Simecki. It has been happening off and on for a few weeks, but I’ve mostly written it off as a delayed reaction to that asshole resurfacing after thinking I was free from all of them and their shit. His appearance was just another reminder that nothing has changed.

  Nothing…

  Maybe a party isn’t a bad idea after all. I mean, I haven’t really had much luck when it comes to trying to find someone so far. All of the romance movies and books make it look so easy to find someone. They show up in coffee shops in droves, but so far the only guy who has managed to ask me out is the fucker who ditched me for a quickie in the backseat of his Camry and left me with the bill.

  Four hours later, I’m standing on the lawn of what appears to be some sort of attempt to recreate the movie Animal House – a poor attempt. The music is too loud with no discernable method to it. If the intent is to get people to dance, this ain’t gonna do it. I shouldn’t have even bothered to show up. It’s not like I’m actually going to know anyone here. Fuck it. I’m going back.

  “Sid!”

  Toby’s voice somehow manages to be louder than the music and I have to resist the urge to pretend I didn’t hear him. He is one of the few friends my antisocial ass has managed to make here and I really don’t want to risk losing my job if something gets back to Don that I abandoned his boyfriend at a frat party. Counting to ten, I manage to paste a fake-ass smile on my face before turning to face my friend and the others who have come with him. I don’t recognize any of them, but that isn’t unusual for me. Outside of the guys who come into the shop, I don’t really pay attention anymore.

  “I thought you were gonna bail on me,” Toby wheezes out after running over to where I am at the curb. “Most of my friends are too old for college parties and Owner would totally make me come home if you didn’t show. These are some guys from my classes: Sean, Jake, Eddie, and Mike. Guys, this is Sid.”

  The four guys give me basic greetings which I force myself to return. At least two of the guys are on the hockey team judging by the letterman jackets they’ve chosen to wear tonight. I know that I shouldn’t judge all hockey players based on my past – especially considering all of my siblings love and play the game – but I still have to force myself to not recoil when they reach out to shake my hand.

  How in the fuck is Don okay with Toby coming out with these guys? Part of the reason the boss and I get along so well is that I share his aversion to hockey players. Granted, it’s for totally different reasons, but it has worked well in my favor.

  “… just keep to those rules and my boyfriends might actually let me out again,” Toby laughs before leading us all to the house.

  We have to paint a humorous picture – five athletic looking guys over six foot trailing behind this tiny little blond twink into a house party that will likely be shut down by the cops within an hour. I feel the corner of my mouth creep up as the levity of the situation breaks through the funk I’ve been stuck in since before the break. Maybe letting loose is just what I need.

  It doesn’t take long for the crowd inside to pull our group in different directions. I tried to keep close to Toby, but the little shit can move through crowds like magic. By the time I reached the kitchen while attempting to follow him, he was gone into the crowd. Of course, it didn’t help that I couldn’t walk more than two feet without some random drunk girl throwing herself at me.

  “Wish I had your game, Sid.”

  I turn to find Mike standing next to me holding out a red cup to me. I grab it and take a sniff only to reel back at the burning sensation in my nostrils. Toby knows I’m only nineteen, but I’m pretty certain he forgot to share that information with his friends tonight. Despite knowing I shouldn’t, I force myself to take a swig of whatever hellish liquid Mike put in the cup. Maybe alcohol will make this night bearable for me.