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But before he could say what he meant, Jack suddenly grabbed his smoothie and dumped it over his head.
Wet, Harry thought, quickly followed by cold. Then, lagging in third place, What the fuck?
“Jack!” Mia exclaimed, jumping to her feet and grabbing a paltry paper serviette to hold out to Harry as though it would make any difference at all. “Oh my God! Harry!” Then, again, she shouted, “Jack!”
Harry was aware of other people in the courtyard laughing and pointing. He was pretty sure some of them had their phones out as he stood there with pink smoothie sliding through his hair and dripping down his face and shirt.
“That’s for being an arsehole to my sister,” Jack said, “and for dumping water on my dad.”
“Oh,” said Harry faintly. He swallowed and tasted strawberries. “Oh, no.”
He was growing dizzy and lightheaded. His throat itched. His tongue…
“My backpack,” he said around the sudden swelling. His heart skipped several beats as sudden, sharp fear, colder than the smoothie, flooded him. “Need…” He was slurring his words, and Mia was still holding the serviette out to him, her face creased with confusion. “Strawb’ries. Need—EpiPen.”
Harry had a moment to enjoy the sudden look of unmasked horror on Jack’s face before he stumbled to the ground, and everything went black.
Chapter Two
Jack sat in the waiting room of the Royal Prince Albert Hospital, Harry’s backpack wedged between his feet. He’d run all the way here after the ambulance had taken Harry, which sounded a lot more gruelling than it had actually been, since the university was literally right behind the hospital, and it had taken him all of seven minutes. He felt awful. From what Mia had managed to yell at him while they were waiting for the ambulance—the empty EpiPen still held in his shaky hand—he’d picked up that she and Harry hadn’t actually been dating, and that he’d very nearly killed a guy who’d been doing his sister a favour.
Well. Paid favour. But still. That wasn’t the point. The point was that he wasn’t the arsehole Jack had thought he was, and now he was in hospital. Jack wondered briefly if anyone had ever been charged with manslaughter by smoothie. Probably not, but there was a first time for everything. It would be yet another thing for his parents to be disappointed in him about—though their reaction to inadvertent murder would probably be a hell of a lot stronger than disappointment, to be honest.
He shook himself mentally. Harry would be fine. It’d be fine. Nobody was dying or getting arrested.
The kid sitting in the seat next to him sneezed into his already-snotty tissue.
He wasn’t going to get arrested, but he was probably going to catch something.
He looked up as Mia walked through the doors. She stomped over to him, looked at the kid, and took a step back. “I have a tutorial I can’t miss. Have you heard anything yet?”
“No.” He’d told the nurse he had Harry’s bag, but she hadn’t been inclined to tell him anything since he definitely wasn’t a relative—he couldn’t even tell her Harry’s last name, and a search of the bag had only revealed a few textbooks, a coffee scroll, some flyers and a really ugly shirt.
Mia sighed and rubbed her forehead. It was a nervous gesture that she’d inherited from their dad, and it made his gut lurch anxiously. Not that he didn’t get on with his dad… he’d just seen that same gesture an awful lot recently, whenever they’d caught up. It usually came right before the ‘You’ve thrown away your entire future’ speech. “Well, let me know, okay? Like I said, I can’t miss this tutorial. And it’s not like you have classes.”
Ouch. He decided to let the barb go unanswered and chalk it up to stress. He knew Mia supported his decision to quit uni and become an apprentice mechanic, even if it did mean defending him to his parents, who were more baffled by his choice than anything.
“So you hired this guy?” he asked. “You actually hired someone to pretend to be a horrible boyfriend? That’s insane.”
She snorted. “Please. If there was someone you could have hired to make Mum and Dad fall over themselves to support you, you’d have done it too.”
Yeah, probably. And Mum and Dad did love Mia’s boyfriend Tate, even though they hadn’t been sold on him at all the first time she’d mentioned the guy. They’d got stuck on the fact he worked as a tattoo artist. But once they’d met Harry, suddenly the sun shone out of Tate’s ink-embossed arse, didn’t it? It was kind of genius, actually.
“Right,” he said. “I should hire someone to pretend to be a bad university professor, and then they’ll love the idea that I want to be a mechanic.”
Mia rolled her eyes and shoved his shoulder. “Idiot. But my point stands. Harry’s a decent guy, and you nearly killed him. And now he’ll have an ambulance bill as well.”
Great. Something else to feel guilty about. “Maybe he has private cover?” Jack said, but even as the words left his mouth, he knew how unlikely that was. Things like private health and ambulance cover weren’t necessarily something that existed in the budget of a uni student. Mia arched an eyebrow at him in a way that indicated she wasn’t any more convinced than he was. “Shit.” Jack sighed. “Maybe I can offer to help pay?”
“On that generous apprentice wage you’re pulling in?” Mia asked, but she sounded sympathetic.
“I have savings.” Not a lot, but enough to ease his conscience at least.
“Is Dad still holding out on you?”
“I’m twenty-four. He’s supposed to be holding out on me. The deal was we got an allowance while we were at uni. And I’m not at uni.”
“Listen, you know I support you, right?” She waited until he nodded. “But, Jack, you only had half a semester to go until you graduated. Why’d you drop out then? It’s not like you were even failing or anything.”
