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I put my hand on his leg, the same one that was up in traction the last time I was here. Leaning forward, I push hard enough that most of my weight rests on the injured bone. “How about now?”
“Ow, fuck. Get off me. I’m going to call the nurse, you asshole!” His breath comes in ragged gasps as he tries to shove me away. “What the actual fuck, dude? What is wrong with you?”
I let up the pressure and lean back as I glare at him. “Evangeline Pratt is what’s wrong with me.”
Vaughn’s eyes flare wide enough that the shock in his gaze is unmistakable. “Who?”
“Don’t give me that shit. Not now.” My hand hovers over his leg again. I am absolutely willing to hurt him as badly as it takes and that certainty must be obvious on my face. “I just want the truth.”
“I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The heart rate monitor makes frantic sounds, the beep beep rhythm coming faster than it did when I was hurting him. Nobody’s heart races like that when they’re telling the truth.
Anger makes me see red. It’s bad enough that we’re in this mess, but now he can’t even be honest with me about it. “I’m going to put your face up against the wheel of my bike with the engine revving if you don’t tell me the fucking truth. Right now.”
He visibly deflates. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” I reply, voice clipped.
Vaughn sighs as he collapses back onto the bed. “Like from the beginning? Because it’s a long story.”
I force myself to settle back in the chair when all I really want to do is wring his neck. “I’ve got all the time in the world.”
His eyes close, pain and fatigue written into the lines of his face. “I don’t know where to start.”
“You knew Olivia,” I prompt him. “You knew her well enough that there are pictures of her in your phone from last year.”
He shifts uncomfortably in the bed. “I guess you could say that we were dating for a while.”
“And you never told anyone?” I ask incredulously, still finding it more than a little hard to believe. Olivia was a pretty girl. It doesn’t make any sense that he would have kept her a secret. “Help me understand why you would hide the relationship from us.”
“I wasn’t hiding it from you,” he groans.
“What does that mean?”
Vaughn gives a heavy sigh. “The thing with Olivia started out as just casual. She was a cool girl once you got her talking and more laid-back than most of the other chicks around St. Bart’s. I liked spending time with her. It wasn’t supposed to be anything more than that.”
“And then it got serious?” I guess.
The punchline to this particular joke is coming from about a mile away.
Vaughn winces. “It did. I kept her out of the Havoc House shit for her own sake. But also because I figured it would be better to keep my family from finding out, when I knew they wouldn’t approve. You know how my dad can get.”
The fact that I had no idea any of this was going on at all is more than a little surprising. But I know exactly how Mr. Ashbridge can get. That guy even scares me a little bit.
“So what happened?”
“One of my brothers…you remember Ethan, right? He found out about us. He graduated like five years ago, but he was a senior when Brady and those guys were freshman. One of them saw me and Olivia hanging out under the bleachers after a game and told Ethan.”
“Then Ethan told your father.”
Vaughn tries to roll his eyes, but then grimaces in pain. “I’ve spent my entire life hearing all about how the Ashbridges have a name to protect. My dad still sees marriage in the same way that feudal lords did. It’s about alliances, not love. Olivia might be well off, but her family is from the kind of gaudy, new money that my father hates. He would never approve of our relationship.”
As someone who has spent way too long currying favor from a father who will never truly provide it, I understand where Vaughn is coming from. But I’m a lot less sympathetic than I used to be. “So you broke up with Olivia to please your daddy.”
“He was going to cut me off if I didn’t break up with her,” he insists, as if that makes his decision entirely understandable. “I told her that I couldn’t make her any promises and…she didn’t take it well. She stopped speaking to me. The next thing I know, she’s showing up wasted at Havoc parties and throwing herself at the seniors like all the other attention-starved girls do. I figured she was trying to make me jealous or get back at me.”
I’m pissed that he didn’t tell me any of this a long time ago. We’re supposed to be best friends.
