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Oh, for fuck’s sake. What now?
I burst through the door, expecting blood and gore, only to find Hugo standing at his locker. He had his back to me and clearly hadn’t heard me come in, as he continued with his task of calmly shifting, one by one, an enormous number of things from his locker into a bin bag.
“Hugo?”
He jumped out of his skin. I opened my mouth to apologise, but then he turned around, and I almost choked on my tongue. He was wearing dirty joggers, a hoodie, filthy socks, no shoes.
And yes, I was an idiot who had spent far too much time with Mark because my skills in the personal-space department were sorely lacking, as without thinking, I crowded Hugo and lifted his chin with my finger. His face was smashed to pieces. Blood caked in his nostrils then smeared across his swollen cheeks. He’d done a crap job of trying to clean up in the sink on the wall, which was splattered with watery blood.
I was no stranger to injuries, but this? This was horrific. Fuck. FUCK!
“What happened?” I asked, my voice shaking with shock, fear, rage, I wasn’t sure what.
He twitched uncomfortably and tried to turn back towards his locker, but, of course, I wouldn’t let him, and the yelp that came from him as I grabbed his arm was awful. He was shielding it, supporting it with his hand, and he was breathing too fast and too loud. Wheezing, actually. I backed offslightly, and he gingerly resumed his locker clearing. Grabbed a pile of papers.
“Hugo…”
Shoved them into a bin liner.
“Hugo, stop,” I pleaded.
He sighed, his breath catching because it must’ve hurt him.
“Come sit,” I suggested, trying to be gentle but firm.
“Can’t,” he said. “Don’t ask. I can’t…talk about…not now. I need to get out of here.”
“Why?”
“There’s a train in the morning. Tell Finn I’m sorry.”
“Hugo.” Fuck this. I wished I was more like my mother. She would have known what to say, what to do. Or that Mabel had been here because they would have taken Hugo into their arms and made everything make sense. Me? I had no clue. I was tempted to shout for Al to come back and rescue me and tell me on that app of his what the hell I should do. And where the hell were security when you needed them? How the hell was Hugo standing here like this and nobody had noticed? We had CCTV, for bloody fuck’s sake!
“Who did this to you?” I growled.
I was so angry. How could the world let people like Hugo, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, get beaten up like this? I couldn’t even describe what his face looked like, and his arm—was it broken? I couldn’t tell, but the more Ilooked at him, the more I saw. The wetness of his joggers, the blood down the inside of his leg…
I could have panicked, but I didn’t. If I had been throwing myself a pity party earlier, the state of the man in front of me had brought it to a very sobering end.
“Don’t hate me,” he said. “Please don’t hate me.”
“Nobody hates you, Hugo. This was not your fault. Just hold on, let me ring for an ambulance? You need to get checked over.”
“No!” he said, his head jerking as he glanced, terrified, over his shoulder.
Someone was coming.
Footsteps. Clinking of metal as the door to the changing rooms opened. Someone opened a locker behind us. Hugo flinched and gripped my sleeve, shaking his head, imploring me not to call an ambulance.
Fuck. Fuck everything!
The locker closed, and the footsteps moved away. The door slammed again.
“Don’t let him find me,” he whispered, his eyes wide with fear. “I don’t want this. I didn’t ask for this.”
I nodded. “Please sit?” I begged. I didn’t dare touch him, and he was in no state to leave, but I didn’t want to corner him by blocking his exit, so I sat—and exhaled quietly in relief when he half flopped down on the bench next to me, the bin liner between us as a shield. He was still cradling his arm. I decided to change tactics.
“Where are you going? In the morning?”
