บททั้งหมดของ A Deal With The College Playboy: บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 25

ELLIEThe Martian was Aunt Carol's favourite movie , and she never missed an opportunity to make me watch it. Which meant I'd spent two hours on the couch watching Matt Damon grow potatoes on Mars while she cried at every emotional scene like she hadn't already seen it four times."He's just so lonely," she said, pressing a tissue to her nose as the credits rolled."Aunt Carol, he’s not a real person," I said."He might as well be," she said. “Imagine being left behind on another planet all by yourself. That must be terrifying. I would never wish that on my worst enemy.”I thought about telling her that I wouldn’t mind being alone on Mars, but I held my tongue. There was no need for me to always bring down the mood of every conversation. So I just sat silently and watched the movie. After the movie ended (I may or may not have cried when the crew rescued him), I gathered the bowls from the coffee table and took them to the kitchen, rinsing them out while Aunt Carol channel-surfed in

ELLIEI read the email a third time, just to make sure I hadn't imagined it.‘Stay away from Beck Ryder. He's not who you think he is’. That was it. There was no signature, no explanation, and no follow up. Just that one sentence, which made my stomach growl and my head spin. My first instinct was to screenshot it and text it to Beck immediately. My second instinct was that that was insane, and I needed to think properly before I did anything. I put my phone face down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling for a minute, trying to be rational about this.Okay, let’s start with the facts. Someone had gone out of their way to get my email address, which wasn't exactly public information. They'd created a throwaway account specifically to send me one anonymous message, which meant they either didn't want to be identified or they wanted me to be paranoid about who it could be. And the timing was interesting, because of what happened last night, and how this morning he'd kissed me on m

ELLIEThe ambulance took eleven minutes to arrive, which I knew because I counted. My brain needed something to do that wasn't looking at my ankle, which had swollen to roughly the size of a grapefruit and was slowly getting bigger with each passing second. The woman who'd called the ambulance stayed with me. Her name was Patricia, she was about sixty years old. She held my hand without asking if I wanted her to, which I did, and she talked to me about nothing in particular, like her sister's garden, a documentary she'd watched last night, the general unreliability of scooter riders, and I let her voice wash over me and focused on breathing through the pain.Someone had collected my pharmacy bag from the kerb and set it beside me, which I'd noted but I didn’t have the capacity to deal with.When the ambulance, arrived the paramedics were efficient and calm and they asked me a series of questions I answered on autopilot. Name, age, what happened, does this hurt, on a scale of one to t