He Hates Me In Real Life

chapter 5

I didn’t make it on my own.

When the display shelf collapsed, the edge of the aluminium frame caught me square against the temple and the world dissolved into a sickening blur of red strobe lights and thundering footfalls. The next thing I registered was the cold night air hitting my skin—harsh and shocking against the feverish heat of my face.

“Careful, miss. I’ve got you. Lean on me.”

A theatre employee with a soot-stained vest was hauling me through the emergency exit into the alleyway. Sirens wailed in the distance, their shrieks bouncing off the brick walls. Around us dozens of moviegoers huddled on the curbs, wrapped in foil shock blankets, coughing and weeping. My head throbbed with a dull, nauseating rhythm. I lifted a trembling hand to my hair. When my fingers came away they were sticky and red with blood.

“Quinn! Jesus Christ, Quinn!!”

Aiden’s voice cut through the chaos as he sprinted down the alley toward me. He was heaving, pupils dilated, jacket only half-zipped like he’d run the entire mile from his campus apartment. Shock and terror were written all over his face. He dropped onto his knees on the wet asphalt in front of me, hands hovering over my bloody temple in pure panic.

“What happened? The news said a grease fire started in the kitchen. Why the hell didn’t you call me?”

“My phone fell,” I croaked, voice scraping like sandpaper.

In truth I hadn’t even looked for it. When Dorian walked past me with the brunette cradled against his chest, the small black screen had slipped from my numb fingers and been swallowed by the stampede.

“Damn it.” Aiden cursed under his breath. “We’re going to the ER. Come on. Up you go.”

He hooked his arms under my shoulders and lifted me with the rough, protective gentleness only an older brother could manage.

“I’m gonna kill whoever built those display stands, I swear to God, Quinn. You look like you got thrown through a windshield.”

“That’s dramatic,” I muttered, though the edges of my vision were already starting to gray.

“Shut the hell up,” he shot back, but I could hear the panic and the restrained tears behind his voice.

Ten minutes later I was sitting on the crinkling paper of an exam table in the municipal hospital’s urgent care unit. A young female resident with tired eyes cleaned the gash near my hairline, muttering about mild concussions and prescribing antibiotics while Aiden paced the small curtained cubicle like a caged predator.

“You’re lucky,” the doctor said, tapping a neat square of sterile gauze over the wound. “No skull fracture. Just a nasty laceration. We’ll keep you for observation for two hours to make sure the swelling doesn’t increase.”

“Thank you,” I murmured.

The doctor pulled the curtain back to leave. As the fabric slid along the metal track, my eyes drifted toward the hallway.

And there he was.

Dorian stood under the nurses’ station beneath the glaring white fluorescence. He was still wearing the slate-gray wool coat from the theatre, though the hem was streaked with soot. His hair was dishevelled, falling in messy waves over his forehead. Sitting on a rolling stool beside him was the brunette. She was cradling an ice pack against her right ankle, sniffling softly while Dorian leaned over her, his expression tight with quiet, focused concern as he handed her a small paper cup of water.

“Drink slowly, Clara,” Dorian said, his deep baritone cutting through the sterile hallway. “The doctor said it’s just a grade-one sprain. Uncle Robert is already on his way to pick you up.”

A voice rang from behind them.

“Clara?”

“Uncle Robert?”

Uncle Robert.

The same Uncle Robert whose daughter had just been admitted to the university’s architecture school?

The “cousin” he had told me about last week.

My stomach turned.

Aiden poked his head through the curtain.

“Hey, Dorian!”

Dorian’s head snapped up. When his gaze fell on my brother his shoulders relaxed slightly in recognition—until his eyes tracked downward and landed squarely on me.

On my blood-stained collar.

On the white gauze taped across my temple.

On my bare, soot-smudged hands trembling in my lap.

For half a second the cold, impenetrable marble of Dorian Blake cracked into something utterly grotesque. His pupils contracted into tiny, terrified pinpricks. The paper cup in his hands crumpled under the sudden violent spasm of his fingers. Water spilled over his knuckles and splashed onto the linoleum floor.

“Aiden.” Dorian’s voice didn’t sound like him. It was thin, ragged, stripped of all its polished composure and arrogance. “What… what happened to her?”

Aiden scoffed, stepping into the corridor with his hands on his hips. “Some i***t panicked during the theatre stampede and shoved her into a metal display. She cracked her head open. I told you, man—that place is a death trap.”

Dorian didn’t blink. He stared at the white bandage on my forehead as if someone had driven a railroad spike between his eyes.

“The theatre,” he whispered. His throat bobbed in a hard, dry swallow. “She… she was at the theatre.”

“Yeah, where else?” Aiden sighed, oblivious to the storm brewing in the air. “She went to see that dumb indie flick. I was studying at the library when she called.”

Dorian took a stumbling step forward. The smooth athletic grace that usually defined him was gone, replaced by a strange, almost drunken unsteadiness.

“You—” He looked at me, lips parting, chest heaving under the wool coat. “You were the one on the floor?”

I didn’t answer.

I looked at him with eyes as dead and flat as stagnant pond water. There was no anger left in me. No desire to call him out. No urge to click my tongue and watch him jump like an obedient hound. The cruel, mocking smirk he had worn twenty minutes earlier when he called me desperate and obsessive was burned into the inside of my eyelids.

“Aiden,” I said softly, turning my face toward the white wall. “I want to go home. My head hurts.”

“Yeah. Sure, sure, kiddo. Let me go settle the copay.”

Aiden patted my shoulder and jogged down the hall toward the billing desk.

The curtain remained half-drawn.

Dorian took another long step toward the cubicle. His long, slender fingers trembled as he reached out toward the aluminium frame.

“Quinn,” he breathed.

He used my real name for the very first time in his life. Not obsessive fangirl. Not desperate little sister. My actual name.

I turned my head and met his gaze through the gap in the curtain.

“Don’t come in here,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper yet colder than the night breeze outside. “I don’t know you, Mister Blake. And I don’t talk to men who are taken.”

Dorian froze.

His hands hung suspended in the air, pale and shaking. The gold chain beneath his collar gleamed under the harsh neon lights.

Just then Iris arrived, looking dishevelled and utterly out of breath. The second her eyes landed on me the tears that had been threatening to fall streamed down her face in waves.

“Quinn,” she whispered, rushing forward. “I shouldn’t have left you. I’m so sorry.”

She dropped to her knees beside the exam table, hands fluttering uselessly over my arms, my shoulders, the edge of the gauze as if she were afraid to touch me and make it worse. Her blue eyes were glassy and red-rimmed. She kept wiping at her cheeks with the sleeve of her jacket, only for fresh tears to replace the ones she had just cleared away. Her voice cracked every time she tried to speak.

“I saw the news on my phone and I just— I ran the whole way. God, there’s so much blood on your shirt. Does it hurt? Of course it hurts. I’m the worst friend. I left you there alone and—”

“Why the waterworks?” I asked quietly, managing a weak, crooked smile for her. “It’s just a cut. Stop crying before you short-circuit.”

Iris let out a wet, broken laugh that turned into another sob. She pressed her forehead lightly against my knee for a second, still sniffling.

Across the small space, Dorian hadn’t moved.

He stood frozen just outside the curtain, staring at the white bandage on my temple like it had personally betrayed him. The crumpled paper cup lay forgotten at his feet. Water still dripped from his fingers onto the linoleum. His face was pale under the fluorescent lights, the arrogant mask completely gone, replaced by something raw and stunned and horribly, painfully human.

He looked like a man who had just realized the girl he stepped over on the floor was the same one he had been begging not to leave him only hours earlier.

I turned my face away from him and let Iris keep fussing.

My head throbbed.

And somewhere under the gauze, the place where the aluminium had split my skin pulsed in time with every beat of my heart.