Faith squeezed his hand. “Do you want to go inside? Or find someplace warmer to talk?”

“No. I need to do this here.” He knew she was cold and he was determined to get through the rest quickly so they could go home and he could lose himself inside her warmth. “We tried to talk Levi out of going but he insisted.”

“And you guys weren’t going to let him go alone,” she correctly guessed.

He nodded. “Right. It started with shots. We could deal with shots of vodka, right? The night passed and we drank. And drank. And soon we were all given handles of what we thought was regular vodka. Turns out it was one hundred proof.”

“Crap,” she muttered under her breath.

Although he could describe the paddling and the pain, she didn’t need to hear that any more than he needed to relive it. “They insisted we finish a handle. Levi volunteered to go first.”

Faith winced but remained silent.

“We told him he didn’t have to do it. We each offered to walk out with him and fuck the pledge and the joining, but he was game. He wanted to be accepted so damned badly. So he drank. And drank. Then they put a backpack filled with weights on his back and made him run up and down the basement stairs. He tripped, fell backward, and smacked his head a few times on the way down.” Nausea filled his throat at the memory of the sound of his friend’s head cracking against the stairs.

Faith wrapped her arms around him as he finished the story, and he took comfort from the warmth of her cheek against his.

“I couldn’t call anyone. They’d taken our phones when we arrived and pulled out the landlines ahead of time.” He dropped to his knees, remembering his friend lying lifeless on the floor, blood coming from his head, Landon yelling at his brother to wake up, slapping his face in his attempt.

She lowered herself with him, hanging on to him for dear life.

“Then Vic … Victor Clark, who’d been in charge all along, who put the backpack on Levi and smacked his face when he tripped the first time, called us pussies and demanded we drink next.”

“What did you do?”

His eyes burned with unshed tears and his throat was raw from holding them back. “I… We picked up Levi and walked out of the house. Nobody stopped as we headed for the university hospital until finally a campus van picked us up. Levi was DOA.”

“Oh, God, Jason, I’m sorry.” She clasped her hands against his cheeks and met his gaze. “You all know it wasn’t your fault, right?”

He rolled his shoulders. “To this day, I don’t fucking know. There are so many ifs. If we hadn’t agreed to rush a frat. If we hadn’t agreed to go to the party. If we hadn’t let him drink and just turned around and went home… But none of it matters because it happened and he’s gone. But it’s the lesson I took from it that’s my point of telling you.”