by Tracy Deebs
It makes me walk faster even though it means hurrying the Lone Ranger along. He doesn’t complain—just bites the bullet and does what has to be done. He must have seen the looks too, even though we’re all trying hard to keep our heads down.
But fast is relative, because even though we’re hurrying, Silver Spoon and Snow White still manage to catch us before we make it to the tower elevator.
“Sorry,” Silver Spoon says as he presses the button, and it’s gratifying to see that he’s the one out of breath for once. “I forgot about the overpass.”
“Obviously.”
“How are they doing?” he asks, but he’s looking only at Buffy when he asks it. Which, of course. I definitely saw that coming.…
“We’re fine,” she answers him as the elevator doors slide open. Two people step out, and they look absolutely horrified as they try their best not to bump into us.
Then we’re in the elevator, Silver Spoon inserting the card into a slot in the button panel before pressing 22. I guess it’s a good thing he caught up with us, because I never would have known to do that.
Finally, finally, we make it to the suite. Silver Spoon opens it, and we all just kind of fall in the door. I can’t remember ever being this exhausted in my life, so I can only imagine how Buffy and the Lone Ranger are feeling.…
“What do we do first?” Snow White asks as soon as the door is closed.
“Get Owen to the bathroom,” Mad Max says. “We’re going to need towels and hot water and a floor he can bleed on.”
“The main bathroom is through here,” Silver Spoon says, leading us through the lavish suite to an even more lavish bedroom and bathroom. “I’ll call down to the front desk and tell them we’re here—and also that we’ll need a lot more towels.”
Then he turns to Snow White. “Why don’t you take Issa to the other bathroom and start cleaning up her arms while I do that?”
Suddenly the bathroom’s a lot less crowded, but I’m so focused on the Lone Ranger—and on what I’m going to have to do—that I barely notice.
“Before we start, we should get out everything we’re going to need,” Mad Max says, gesturing to the bags Snow White left behind.
“Yeah, okay. Why don’t you do that while I help the Lone Ranger here out of his shirt?”
“Is that my nickname?” he asks as I unwrap my blood-soaked hoodie from around his arm.
“It was that or Desperado. I took a risk,” I say as I begin unbuttoning his shirt.
“I like it,” he says, but he stiffens as I start pulling his shirt away from his arm. “Though I have to say, this is the first time I haven’t enjoyed a girl undressing me. No offense.”
“None taken,” I answer drily. “Believe me, there are about three thousand, two hundred twenty-seven things I’d rather be doing right now.”
“Really? That many?” At my urging, he sits down on the closed toilet seat.
“Probably more. I was rounding down, trying to be nice.” I start to poke at his side, then realize I need to wash up first—and, hopefully, put on a pair of gloves, if Snow White thought to buy them.
Turns out she did, because by the time I’m done washing my hands, Mad Max has a pair of gloves on and is holding out another pair to me. I slip them on, then press gently on the Lone Ranger’s side as I try to estimate how deep the wound is.
“Owww!” he yells, his whole body tightening up like I just electrocuted him.
“Don’t be such a baby,” I tell him as I crouch down to get a better look. “It’s barely a scratch.”
“Made by a bullet,” he says sulkily.
“Bullet shmullet. Man up.” As I stand back up, I tell him, “Turn to the side a little. I want to see your arm now.”
“I’m sure it’s just a scratch too,” he replies.
“Awww, did I hurt your feelings?” I ask as I poke at the wound.
I take the fact that he doesn’t immediately swear at me as a bad sign. Sure enough, a glance at his face shows that he’s gone pale and clammy and that he’s grinding his teeth together hard enough to permanently damage his molars.
Not that I blame him. His side wound was just a graze, but this is something different. It’s still a flesh wound, I think, but the bullet passed clean through, leaving a jagged hole on both sides of the Lone Ranger’s biceps. A hole that continues to seep blood.
I exchange a worried look with Mad Max, who starts lining up all kinds of first-aid supplies on the ledge of the bathtub… including a surgical suturing kit.
I do my best not to look at it as I grab the box of Advil Snow White bought and start peeling it open. “So, do you want the good news or the bad news?” I ask.
“Is there any good news when it comes to getting shot?” the Lone Ranger replies.
“The bullet passed straight through your biceps, so it’s not like we have to dig for it.”
“Well, thank God for that.” He glances at the bathtub and—if possible—turns even paler. “I’m assuming the bad news is that we need to stitch this thing up?”
I swallow and try really hard not to puke. “Yeah. I think so.”
“Awesome.” His tone says it’s anything but.
“I think you should probably take some Advil,” I tell him, holding out three of the pills. “And maybe some Tylenol too.”
“Great. This is going to be freaking awesome.” He tosses the pills in his mouth, swallowing them dry before I even get him a glass of water. Mad Max hands him two extra-strength Tylenol, and he swallows them too. “Let’s get this over with, huh?”
I nod, even though my stomach is churning. “We need to clean it first,” I say, and at this point I’m not sure whom I’m talking to. The Lone Ranger, Mad Max, or myself.
I guess it doesn’t really matter, though Mad Max hands me a can of sterile saline wound cleanser. “I think you start with this,” he says. “To clean off all the blood and wash out the wound. Then we use peroxide and Betadine to kill bacteria before we stitch him up.”
“Right. Sure. Of course.” I swallow hard. Then again and again.
“Hey,” the Lone Ranger asks suddenly, “you okay, Harper?”
“Great. I’m… great. Better than you, anyway.”
He laughs. “Yeah, well, you’re looking pretty pale there, girl. Don’t want you to pass out on us.”
“I’ve never passed out in my life,” I tell him. “And I have no intention of starting now.”
Still, it takes every ounce of courage I’ve got to spray his arm with the wound cleaner. He doesn’t flinch, but I can tell it hurts from the way he goes silent—and from the drops of sweat that suddenly pop out on his forehead.
After I finish dousing the cut with saline and patting away the blood with sterile gauze, Mad Max hands me a bottle of alcohol, top already removed.
“I’m sorry,” I say, but the Lone Ranger just shakes his head.
“Not your fault. I appreciate you doing it—I know you don’t want to.”
“Yeah, well, we don’t always get what we want, do we?”
“Guess not.”
“So, here goes nothing,” I say, holding his arm out and positioning the bottle above the wound. His jaw is so tight that I’m afraid he’s going to break a tooth.
“Hey!” Mad Max interrupts. “Why are ghosts such bad liars?”
“What?” The Lone Ranger looks at him like he’s crazy.
“Because you can see right through them. What do you call a pig that does karate?”
“I have no— Son of a bitch!” the Lone Ranger yells as I pour pretty much the entire bottle of alcohol over and around his wound.
“A pork chop!” Mad Max finishes.
For a second, there’s absolute silence. Then all three of us start to laugh… a little hysterically, mind you, but it’s a million times better than crying.
I reach for the Betadine next, and just as Mad Max asks, “Why do bees have sticky hair?” I squirt a liberal amount over the wound.
“I have no freaking idea,�
�� the Lone Ranger answers hoarsely. He’s shaking now, his whole body trembling as I dry off the area around the injury with more gauze.
“Because they have honeycombs.”
The Lone Ranger closes his eyes, kind of slumps against the wall. “When we manage to get the hell out of this mess, I’m totally going to buy you a new joke book.”
“I’ll take you up on that.” Mad Max finishes threading the needle, but when I start to take it from him, he shakes his head. “I think you might be shaking worse than Owen,” he murmurs softly.
I look down at my hands and realize he’s right. There’s no way I’ll be able to even attempt stitches in this state.
“So, how about this?” Mad Max proposes as he uses one of the clamps from the surgical kit to hold the edges of the wound together. “Owen keeps his eyes closed, I keep my eyes open, and you let him squeeze your hand as hard as he wants while I get this done.”
“I’m okay,” the Lone Ranger says. Of course he does. And a few weeks ago—hell, a few days ago—I’d have taken him at his word. But if these last couple of days have taught me anything, it’s that friendship comes in all forms. It’s okay to need someone—and to let someone need you.
So I sit down on the side of the tub closest to the Lone Ranger, and I slide my palm across his. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even look at me, but when his fingers close around mine, I know I’ve done the right thing.
For both of us.
And if I end up losing a few fingers from lack of circulation… well, at least they’ve made great strides in vocal recognition software lately.
28
Issa
(Pr1m4 D0nn4)
I can hear Ezra prowling around the sitting room, and it makes me nervous. I don’t know why, since he’s been nothing but gentle with me since this mess happened. But there’s something in his voice, something in the way he can’t sit still that sets me on edge. That has me thinking something’s really wrong… besides the obvious, I mean.
In the ten minutes we’ve been in this insane suite, he’s called the front desk to let them know we’re here and to ask for more towels, room service to order enough food to feed a professional sports team, and his parents—presumably to explain this mess, but Alika and I can’t tell for sure because his voice is muffled.
I wince as Alika picks another piece of glass out of my forearm with the huge surgical tweezers she bought at CVS. It’s not the glass removal that hurts so much, but that she sterilized the tweezers by soaking them in alcohol for five minutes before she was willing to put them anywhere near my skin.
“I’m sorry,” she says for what feels like the hundredth time. “Your one arm isn’t too bad, and I’m almost done with your hand. It’s your left arm I’m worried about. There are some really deep gashes. I’m sure I got out all the glass at least, but these cuts must hurt like hell.”
“It’s okay. It really doesn’t hurt that bad. Not like, say, a gunshot wound.”
Not for the first time, she glances out the door like she expects Owen to just appear in front of her. “It’s totally okay if you want to go check on him,” I tell her. “I’d like to know how he’s doing too.” Plus, I could really use a break. It’s taking all my energy to keep up the cheerful front when I’m exhausted—from the pain, the blood loss, and the whole disaster that was today.
“No.” She shakes her head firmly. “We’re almost finished here. I think there’s only a few slivers left, then we’ll clean and bandage you up, and you’ll be good to go. Well, as good to go as you can be.”
She says it with all the sympathy in the world in her voice, and I try not to think about how bad a mess my left arm is… or how long the deep, jagged cuts will take to heal. Just like I try not to think about how I’m supposed to code or change Chloe’s diaper or cook dinner or do my schoolwork with only one good hand—especially when that hand is attached to a forearm that’s been cut to hell.
It all seems so impossible right now.
But at least I wasn’t shot, I remind myself. At least I’m not lying dead on Ezra’s floor because some assholes decided they want to rule the world. That has to count for something. Not much, at this point, but something.
“Okay, brace yourself,” Alika tells me as she digs for a particularly deep shard of glass. “I think this one is going to hurt.”
She’s right, it does. And even though I steel myself, I still end up whimpering a little as the sting turns into full-blown pain.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” she says again.
Again, I assure her that it’s all right.
But then Ezra’s there in the doorway, looking more disheveled than I’ve ever seen him. “Are you okay?” he demands, gaze hot and voice guttural.
“I’m fine.”
He studies me with narrowed eyes, like he’s trying to decide if I’m telling the truth, before turning to Alika, like she’s more reliable, even though I’m the one in pain. “How’s it going?”
“I’m on the last one, I think. I need to wash her wounds off again and check when they’re clean, but I really do think this is it,” she says as she triumphantly brandishes a thick, half-inch-long piece of glass. One that hurt like hell to have taken out, though I didn’t make a sound this time.
“I can help her wash up,” Ezra says as Alika drops the last piece of glass in the trash can at her feet. “If you want to go check on Owen or something.”
For a moment, Alika looks like she’s going to argue. But something changes her mind because suddenly she’s stripping off her gloves and sending me a reassuring smile before slipping out the door.
Then Ezra is taking her place, cradling my hand in his palms as he studies the damage for several long, silent seconds. And I don’t know why I feel the need to reassure him when I’m the injured one, but I do.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I whisper as his thumbs stroke the area that isn’t cut.
“You don’t have to lie to me,” he answers, his voice all low and gravelly and too sexy for my own good. “I know what I did to you, and I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry, Issa.”
“You saved my life. That’s not exactly something you need to apologize for.”
“I sent you crashing to the floor in the middle of all that glass. This happened because of me.” He looks so tortured that part of me wants to kiss him again and part of me wants to smack him upside the head.
Considering the shape I’m in, I decide to go for something in the middle—namely a firm verbal slapping that might bring him back to reality from whatever guilt-ridden angst he’s currently languishing in. “And if you hadn’t done it, I might have a bullet between my eyes right now. Given those two options, I’d much rather deal with some cuts. Cuts will heal. So stop beating yourself up and making this all about you, for God’s sake. It could have been so much worse—for all of us.”
He still looks upset, but at least now he’s smiling a little too. “You have a really low tolerance for drama, you know that?”
“I take care of five siblings, including two toddlers and a baby. Believe me when I tell you they give me all the drama I could ever want or need.”
“I can imagine. I’m an only child, but in my family, my mom brings just about all the drama I can handle. She can be very… passionate about certain things, and she makes sure my father and I know it.”
I wonder if one of those things is the revolving door on his bedroom, as documented by the gossip press, but I’m nowhere near brave enough to ask. Especially not when he gently tugs me over to the sink and starts running warm water over my hand.
The second the water hits my palm, pain explodes along my nerve endings. Involuntarily, I jerk my hand back, but Ezra holds on to my wrist and keeps me in place as water cascades across my palm and between my fingers before slowly making its way down the drain.
“Lo siento,” he murmurs to me in Spanish, along with a bunch of other words I don’t recognize that somehow calm me down anyway.
“What’s that
mean?” I ask, when he repeats something melodious sounding a few times in a row.
He looks up from the sink, curious. “Are you telling me you don’t speak Spanish, Miss Torres?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you! I didn’t grow up speaking Spanish in my house, and I’ll have you know that I took French in school.”
He chuckles softly. “Okay, then. What didn’t you understand? Dulzura?”
“Yes.”
He ducks his head a little, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think he was blushing. “It just means you’re sweet.”
It’s my turn to narrow my eyes at him. “Are you sure that’s all it means?”
He doesn’t answer me. Instead, he makes a show of checking out my thoroughly rinsed hand and finally, finally, letting me take it out from under the water. I breathe a sigh of relief as the stinging stops, but seconds later he wraps his hand around my left wrist and pulls my forearm under the water to clean it as well. The pain starts all over again, as does the softly murmured Spanish.
When it’s finally over, when he’s turned off the water and is slowly, gently, carefully patting my hand and arms dry with the fluffiest towel I’ve ever seen, I finally say what’s been on my mind for a while.
“You know, you’re different than I thought you were going to be.”
He stops what he’s doing long enough to look up at me with one raised brow. “Different how?”
“When we first met in L.A., you didn’t seem to care about anything but yourself, anything but winning. I misjudged you.”
“No, you didn’t.” He grins for the first time since this whole nightmare began. But it’s not a warm grin, not the grin I’ve grown used to these last couple of days. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m more than I am. Just because I got involved in this crazy scheme with you doesn’t mean you were wrong about me.”
He says it so flippantly, so matter-of-factly, that I might actually believe him. If he wasn’t simultaneously smoothing antibiotic ointment over my cuts with the softest hands imaginable, taking great care to make sure every inch—every millimeter—of my raw, hurt skin is covered.
