Wrecked (The Blackened Window) Read online

  The clerk blatantly stared at her chest while she was writing and the little fucking pervert even started to bite his lip. When she finished writing, she shifted her hips in my direction and I could appreciate why he was drooling—her T-shirt had a low V and her breasts were pretty much phenomenal, but still, he could’ve had a little class.

  Like me right now? Staring at her ass and dreaming of making her yield? Yep. I’m a huge hypocrite.

  The clerk watched her walk out, but I watched the naked lust on his face as he pulled the clipboard back to himself. When she was out of the library, he looked down and grabbed a piece of paper, copying something from the form.

  I knew I had no focus left for studying and wanted to punch that fucking guy, so I grabbed my stuff and started to leave. But as I passed the counter, I saw him out of the corner of my eye, adjusting his dick. The dude had wood. Before I thought it through, I turned on my heel and went to the counter.

  He was skinny, with stupid thick-rimmed hipster glasses and too-tight jeans. His hair was so intentionally casually bedheaded that I wanted to slap him. He had a tattered messenger bag that he was tucking that piece of paper in and a patched-up Army surplus jacket hung over the back of his chair. The former soldier in me wanted to punch him even harder now.

  “Hey, man. I requested a copy of the new edition of Sabiston’s. Is it in yet?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Xander Stone.”

  He walked to the reserves on the other side of the counter and I leaned forward, grabbing the clipboard and glancing at it. Her name was Leda Collins, and she was signing up for anatomy tutoring. On Thursdays. Fuck.

  The perv-clerk came back. “Not in yet, man.”

  “Okay.” I started to walk away, but turned back, adding, “Dude, just a word of advice. That chick is beyond you, but even if she wasn’t, you were so fucking obvious that I felt molested ten feet away. Your need to work on your game.”

  It wasn’t fair and I knew it. I was probably eight to ten years older than him, had half a foot in height and had a military build to his scrawny emo-kid physique. We both knew I could kick the shit out of him, barely trying.

  He blanched and sputtered. I stood up taller, feeling an awakening in my blood. I smiled as I walked away. These kids who hadn’t lived at all were just so ridiculous, and that the girls their age put up with it just reinforced that kind of behavior. Us older dogs had to educate.

  I heard him mutter, “Fuck you” as I passed through the door and I chuckled as I reached for the second door of the vestibule. But there she was, kneeling next to a bike, yanking at the lock, which seemed stuck. Each time she yanked back on it, her tits would bounce and it made me smile. I was about to go out and offer to help when she got it and fell back on her ass. She was cute as hell.

  She dropped her head in her hands for a second and I thought she was laughing, but when she stood she brushed at her eyes and her lips were pressed in a line. Shit. I wanted to go out and make it better somehow, like she was mine. And I laughed at myself, watching her. She was tough, though, grabbing her things and leaving—riding her bike, in the dark, in the borderline shitty neighborhood the school was in. That shit was gonna change.

  As I pushed through the door finally, I pulled my cell out and dialed.

  “Hey, Dr. Sanderson. It’s Xander Stone. Just looked at my schedule and I can’t tutor on Tuesdays. I actually have Thursdays open.”

  Chapter Two

  Leda

  Krewella, Enjoy the Ride

  I met Xander in the second week of classes. In retrospect, I was floundering. Classes were overwhelming. I felt lost all the time and I was crying myself to sleep almost every night. But there was Xander, sexy as hell and a lifeline of sorts. He was in the class ahead of mine, at the top of his class—rankings were published—and was a tutor for anatomy. But it was more than his achievement. It was him—how he carried himself, how he pulled the world into him, rather than meeting it on its terms. I knew when I met him that he would be a surgeon, the same way I knew I wanted him to touch me. It was in the way he handled things, like they were his, no matter what he was holding.

  I was the first of my classmates to arrive to the first tutoring session, but he was there already, sitting at a table in the back of the small medical library, leaning back in his chair with a long piece of black suture tied through his shoelace. He was practicing two-handed tying and his hands moved so smoothly, the knots lining up perfectly on top of each other. As I approached the table, he looked up, but his hands kept going, only faltering slightly when our eyes met.

  The thing that drew me to him was intangible. He was attractive, with dark brown hair, cut short, crisp. His eyes, hazel with flecks of orange and gold, were hard, observant, flicking over my face and body as I approached the table. He had a strong angle to his jaw, covered with a day or two of stubble, and his skin didn’t have that newness to it that college boys had. He was a little weathered, tan, with a small scar marring his right eyebrow. He had broad shoulders and his faded black concert T-shirt was just shy of being too tight over his chest and shoulders. He had loose jeans on and old Converse. But none of that was it. The package was gorgeous, but what was arresting about him wasn’t what he looked like. It was how he looked at me. He looked at me the same way he handled the suture—with confidence, unshakable, direct. Almost cocky. We held each other’s gaze for a few beats too long to be entirely normal before I found my voice.

  “Hi, I’m Leda. Are you the anatomy tutor?” I’d like to say that I said it with confidence to match his, but my voice faltered a bit, thinking about studying bodies with him, his confident hands touching me. I held my breath, waiting for his answer, hoping he’d say yes.

  He answered me with a glint in his eyes and a small, suggestive smile on his lips, like he knew where my thoughts had gone. “I’m Xander. Sit down.”

  It was a command, not an invitation, and I moved immediately to sit. He watched me thoughtfully and raised a single eyebrow as I settled myself across from him. He caught himself, clearing his throat and adding, “A few more of your classmates are joining us still.”

  I tossed my bag on the table, then got out my textbook and some pens, mainly looking for something to do with my hands and trying to avoid his gaze, because I had this thrill running through me at the way he moved and looked at me and my response. It felt like I couldn’t quite take a deep enough breath. It was a heady, almost drunk, feeling after the last few weeks of nonstop, sphincter-tightening anxiety.

  “So, Leda, where are you from? What’s your story?” He had stopped tying knots and dropped his foot to the floor. He sat leaning toward me with his elbows on the table, and on anyone else it would have seemed friendly. On him, it seemed aggressive, like he was just holding himself back from coming over the table at me. The gold glint in his eyes flickered, despite the banks of harsh lights overhead and I couldn’t find my voice for a moment.

  “I’m from outside Chicago—grew up there and went to undergrad at the University of Wisconsin.” Since the beginning of school it had been one brief introduction after another. It rolled off my tongue with minimal thought once I started speaking.

  “More.” And I knew that he meant he wanted to know more. He softened the harshness of the single word response with an encouraging smile.

  “I’m the youngest in my family. I have an older brother and an older sister. Luke and Julia. They’re both doctors too.”

  “Okay. Family of doctors, check. But tell me a little about you.” It might have seemed friendly if his tone hadn’t been so demanding. He leaned forward, maintaining eye contact while he spoke, almost staring me down while I answered. Maybe his gaze only felt so intense because I was still avoiding it as much as possible. I felt like I was getting off on the wrong foot, making a bad impression, but then a chord of irritation fired through me at his pressure, his pushiness. I almost immediately second guessed myself, unsure if it was his actual behavior or my response to him.

>   “I don’t know.” I huffed a sigh of annoyance. “I wasn’t intending to go to med school when I started college. I was actually a creative writing major—poetry. Not much of a growth industry. I realized that at best I could get an MFA and teach other people to write angsty poetry, but the reality was that I’d probably be waiting tables at Denny’s. Around the same time, I took a women’s health course and loved it, so I decided to be a doctor. Of course, my family was thrilled—like you said, family of doctors.” It was a quick summary of the last few years, the late night talks with my parents, the shitty conversations with my advisor who didn’t think I could handle med school, my sister vaguely warning me off, while she was working hundred hour weeks.

  With humor reaching his eyes, he smiled, wide and wild. He opened his mouth to say something else, but the other students started showing up and he cut himself off. I didn’t know what to think about him. Something about the way he talked to me irritated me, but also sent a hum zinging through my chest. Everything he did triggered some kind of reaction in me, like my first crush. There was nothing he did that was just neutral—the set of his shoulders, the humor he used to teach, his knowledge base. But by the end of the tutoring session, the constant low grade panic that I had felt since starting the semester had eased a little and did a little more every time his gaze landed on me.

  We spent two hours covering the structures of the neck. Xander took his time, walking us through the muscles, making us memorize them before moving deeper to the arteries, veins and nerves. As we reviewed the innervation of the sternocleidomastoid, he’d pause and turn to one of us with a question from something earlier in the session. The first time he did it, my classmate blanched at being called out, but he warned us to get used to getting ‘pimped’ like that. That our professors and, later Attendings at the hospital, would drop questions on us and expect us to answer, under pressure, with everyone watching us.

  His eyes crinkled as he smiled and told us to never give them the satisfaction of stumping us, because, he said, “Fuck them.” I liked that about him—the smile and the warning and the ‘Don’t let them keep you down’ attitude.

  At ten p.m. when we finished, my own neck ached and I was exhausted. But it was Thursday night. I relished that there was only one more day of classes this week. I could rest over the weekend, but I wasn’t planning to leave the library yet because I wanted to pre-read my notes for lectures the next day. So, I didn’t pack my things up at the end of the study session, despite my fatigue. The other students all left relatively quickly. I pulled out my notes to review and Xander paused what he was doing. He was much taller than I’d expected once he stood.

  “No. You’re not staying to study more.” His voice sounded too loud in the hush of the nearly empty library. “I can see it in your eyes. You’re wrecked. You need to go home and sleep, or at least go home and do something to take your mind off of all this shit for a while.”

  His bossiness kind of pissed me off a little, but this guy was tutoring me—for free—and I didn’t want to be too bitchy, so I schooled my snippy response and smiled. “You know how it is. I just want to get a leg up on lectures tomorrow. Thanks for the help tonight. See you next week.”

  Clearly dismissing him… Or, not so much. His eyes flashed and his jaw hardened for a moment.

  “Leda.” His voice was lower, almost growling for a minute. He cleared his throat again and looked up at the ceiling, rubbing the back of his neck. “Leda,” he said in a more normal voice, “you cannot spend all day in lecture and all night studying, nonstop, for all of medical school. There are studies that show that after a certain amount of time, usually no more than two hours, your brain needs a break—you stop absorbing the information. So, put your book away and let me walk you to your car.”

  “I’m all right.” Ease up, dick.

  “No.” He leaned over me, a hand on the back of my chair as he crowded into my space and took my book out of my hands, shoved it into my bag, maybe a little more roughly than was necessary. He stood up, picking my bag up with him. “Now.” He extended his other hand to me.

  And, with the book out of my hand, with the momentary loss of focus, I realized he was right. I didn’t really remember much of what I had read, my neck was killing me and I was tired. No, I was exhausted. It was time to go home and sleep. I gave in and took his hand to stand up. His touch was exactly like I’d expected, warm, but solid, strong, not giving at all. He held my fingers tightly and pulled my hand up to him as I stood. I expected him to let go of my hand right away, but he held it for a few seconds longer than was platonic. I pulled it away to grab my bag from him, but he stopped me. “I’ve got it. I can tell your neck is bothering you.”

  “Oh, um, thanks. It’s my new bed and all this studying. It’s killing my neck.”

  He answered with a flat tone, “You’ll adapt.”

  I repeat… Dick.

  He added, “I mean your body becomes accustomed to it. That…or maybe you just stop noticing.” He chuckled a bit at the end of his sentence as we left the library. He held the door for me and his soft hand gently ushering me on the small of my back left me with a breathless feeling.

  We walked out of the library toward the parking lot and my thoughts started churning with horrible college date-rape stories. This isn’t a date. “Here I am,” I said, as we got to the bike racks.

  “Let me drive you home. You can get your bike tomorrow when you’ll be leaving campus before dark.”

  “Hey, man—I appreciate your concern, but I can get myself home.” My Windy City toughness, do-not-fucking-try-to-push-me-around attitude surfaced a bit.

  “No, Leda. You’re going to have to start listening better.” He had a matching don’t-push-me-back attitude that I appreciated. He was vaguely condescending now, pedantic. When he spoke again, it was a little slower, like he was spelling something out to a child. “I am driving you home. This area of town isn’t completely safe for a single woman at night with only a bike to get her out of a bad situation.” He paused again, features softening and his voice changed some, became a sexy, hard purr as he looked squarely into my eyes. “Please? I’m gonna worry about you if I don’t know you got home safely. I can pick you up in the morning if you want, so you don’t have to drive in and deal with getting your bike home.”

  I had that feeling in my chest again. I looked up at him, feeling like I wasn’t breathing right, starting to feel an awareness of my skin, my throat. My mouth was dry and my eyes felt big and wide. I shrank under his gaze. His eyes were warm and hard at the same time. And my mind flashed to fantasy images of him touching me, his skin golden in low light, his hands running over my nakedness, my hips, my mouth open, fingertips at my jaw, stroking down my throat. His hand snaking around to the back of my neck and grasping me there, holding me in place.

  “Let’s go,” he said, pulling me along by my hand again. Of course, he had a cool car, something black, deep tint on the windows, leather seats, but not stupid and flashy. He tossed my bag in the trunk and opened the door for me, offering a hand I didn’t take as I got in. When he started the engine, some loud music was blaring, heavy with raw sounding guitar and sexy, drawling vocals. He immediately turned it down, looking almost a little embarrassed. There was an awkward silence for a few seconds.

  “So, what’s your story? I told you all my secrets, now it’s your turn.” I smiled while saying it, conscious of my not very subtle flirting.

  “You hardly told me secrets, Leda,” he said, a sort of dark mirth coloring his voice as he put the car in gear and backed out. There was a pause in conversation as he navigated through the parking lot and onto the city streets. I watched him as he drove and that steady confidence was there again. He seemed more relaxed and settled into himself.

  “Turn left up here on Second Street, and let’s start simple. Where are you from?”

  “I grew up in Maryland, outside DC. My parents still live there, but I don’t really want to talk about my family. Do you want to get
a drink before you go home?”

  “Weren’t you the one just telling me to go home and rest?” I smiled again.

  “Well, kinda.” He drew the words out, a fake whine. “You need to take a break from studying, fo’ sho’.” He was actually a little silly for a minute. “Let’s get a beer. I know a place.”

  “Another night, okay? You were right. I’m just really exhausted and want to go home, take a shower and get in bed.”

  “Oh. Well, I guess we could do that instead.” He smiled with a laugh in his eyes.

  I just gave him the look, the flirty, I-can’t-believe-you-said-that-but-I-kinda-love-that-you-did look and the thought of him in my bed put a flutter in my stomach. I laughed, “Maybe next time, Boss.” He stilled for a second and smiled, as I added, “This next building is mine.”

  He pulled to the curb in front of my building and turned the car off, getting out. As I fumbled in my purse for my keys, he got my bag out of the trunk and came around to my side of the car, holding his hand out for me. I took it this time, but he didn’t let go once I was standing and he walked me to my door, holding my hand.

  “Thanks for the ride home. I’ll see you next week for tutoring,” I said, feeling awkward again. I didn’t really want to invite him up. It wasn’t a date, but it was hanging in the air—the atmosphere of expectation, of more pending, the feeling of ‘What’s next’? Will he ask me out?

  “No, you’ll see me in the morning for a ride to school.” He handed me my bag, and when I took it, he brushed some of my hair out of my eyes. “Your eyes are a perfect steel gray, with bits of white and silver. I’ve never seen that color before. Very pretty.” He wrapped the tendril of my hair around his fingers, with just a touch of tension pulling at my scalp. I stood still under his touch and gaze, holding my breath, aware of his hand, of how close he was. He pulled my hair just a little as it ran through his fingers, letting his fingertips trace my jaw to my chin.