I lost.
Really, it wasn’t fair for him to bicker with me when I was in that condition.
I informed him of this but he just grinned at me.
* * * * *
A couple of days after I was moved from ICU, in the middle of the night I heard weird noises.
Considering hospitals weren’t the most restful places in the world, I suspected some doctor or nurse was there to check up on me. Instead I saw Vance and Hector in a death-lock at the door, torsos together, legs planted. Clearly Hector was trying to get in and just as clearly Vance didn’t feel like allowing that.
“Vance,” I whispered and both men froze in death-lock position and looked at me, “let him in.”
“Princess,” Vance said low.
“Let him in.”
Vance hesitated a moment then stepped out of the death-lock but he didn’t pretend to be happy about it and Hector approached the bed.
“I didn’t know about Shard,” Hector told me the minute he hit my bedside and I noticed he also hadn’t gone to etiquette school to learn you should start a conversation with words like, “hi”, “hello” or “glad to see you aren’t dead”.
“I know,” I told him.
“I thought Roam wouldn’t want one of Lee’s boys saving him from Cordova. Cordova was a moron, Roam would lose face. I thought he’d prefer you to take care of it.”
“I know,” I repeated.
“If I’d have known –”
“I was cocky,” I broke in and my eyes slid to Vance who’d moved to the other side of my bed. I didn’t exactly want him to know this part since it might piss him off. However, I also didn’t want Hector to go on blaming himself for something that was my fault.
I went on. “Earlier that night, I’d had too much to drink and I didn’t tell you that. I walked right in. I didn’t think. I saw Roam and just went in. It wasn’t your fault. It was mine. I didn’t think.”
“I shouldn’t have –” Hector began.
“You did the right thing, I didn’t. Please don’t worry about it. It was my fault.”
He stared at me a beat and I stared back noticing, even though he still was in undercover-disheveled-mode (and seriously needed a haircut but who was I to say all that thick, dark hair needed to be cut, mainly because, longish and messy, it looked hot), he was a seriously good-looking guy. He had Eddie’s edge, the one that made you wonder about him, made you think he could turn to the dark side in a nanosecond.
Eddie had it under control. Hector did not.
After we stared at each other awhile, he nodded and left without even a glance at Vance.
When the door closed behind him, Vance said, “Jules.”
My gaze slid to him, I took one look at his face and then I closed my eyes.
“I need an angel nap,” I said and I wasn’t lying. I did need an angel nap. I also needed an excuse to avoid a Vance Lecture and that’s where angel naps came in handy.
Before I slid into my angel nap, I heard, “Jesus, you’re a pain in the ass.”
* * * * *
Second, Roam was released before I was, for some reason to Shirleen who the hospital thought was his grandmother (a fact that Andy came from the Shelter to confirm, lying like a pig in mud).
The bullet had hit Roam in his right side, luckily missing any vital organs. He was motionless on the floor because on his way down he smashed his head against Cordova’s coffee table and it knocked him out. So not only was he beaten bloody and shot, he also had a serious concussion.
During a visit to me, Sniff explained that Roam didn’t feel much like letting Shirleen mother him during his convalescence at her house. This was mainly because Shirleen wasn’t a motherly-type person who cooed and spoiled and ran herself ragged making certain that Roam had every comfort. Instead, she told Roam what to do, like, a lot. Things like rest and study with Stu (who came over to work with Roam and Sniff) and not to fill his head with too much junk by watching television but instead she gave him books to read. I knew it freaked out Sniff but Roam put up with Shirleen, then again he was probably scared not to.
Where Roam went, Sniff went, so Sniff was staying with Shirleen too.
When Roam was fit enough to take to the streets again, Shirleen told both him and Sniff they were welcome to stay as long as they liked.
They told me since Shirleen lived in “one phat crib” they decided to stay awhile even if staying with her had rules.
It was a long time later that I realized that during all of Roam and Sniff’s visits they never cursed.
Not once.
* * * * *
By the way, Roam and I never talked about it, him trying to save my life and me taking two bullets to save his.
However once, while I was still in the hospital, I caught him looking at me funny. I grabbed his hand and mine went tight.
So did his.
For a second.
Then he pulled away.
With a fifteen year old runaway that was all that needed to be said and it was the best he would allow me to give him and it was the best I was going to get.
I was happy with that.
* * * * *
Needless to say I wasn’t pregnant. I’d asked a nurse in a quiet moment and she told me there was bleeding, what kind of bleeding she couldn’t say.
After I got out of the hospital, my periods resumed as normal and I went right on the pill.
My body, the nurse told me, had been through too much trauma not to miscarry.
Whether I had been or hadn’t been, I’d never know.
* * * * *
Third, about four days out of ICU, the girl gang showed up one afternoon with a juicy piece of gossip.
Indy, Ally, Jet, Roxie and Daisy all waltzed in grinning like fools. They hung around my bed as Indy told me that Lee had fired Dawn.
I didn’t gasp because that was a luxury I didn’t have at the time (it hurt like a bitch, so did laughing, moving and breathing). So I just widened my eyes and my mouth dropped open.
“Apparently,” Indy said, loving every minute of this, “Mace and Monty were in the surveillance room and for shits and giggles they flipped on the sound and visual to the reception area. Dawn was on some call to a girlfriend and she was talking about you. I don’t know what she said but Mace and Monty went ballistic. They called Lee and Lee was with Luke.”
Daisy let out a tinkly laugh and rubbed her hands together and I knew that we were getting to a good part.
“Lee and Luke went directly to the offices,” Indy continued, “Lee walked right in and told her to pack up her desk; she was fired.”
“Luke escorted her out of the building,” Roxie threw in, her eyes alight.
“They taped the whole thing,” Jet added.
“Brody even cut it into a music video with some old footage of her scowling and glaring and making catty phone calls. He gave it a soundtrack ‘The Bitch is Back’. It’s fuckin’ righteous! I can’t wait for you to see it,” Ally said, grinning like a loon.
“Yeah, we all went down there and watched it a billion times. Dawn was totally pissed when Lee fired her. It was great!” Indy finished.
Considering the fact that I’d had a near-death experience, I knew I should be a better person, live my life doing good deeds and not be bitchy, even when it was being bitchy about someone who was a bitch. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help being pleased that Dawn had been fired. Especially since everyone seemed so happy about it.
And of course the stupid bitch was talking about me.
* * * * *
Fourth, Luke came to visit me.
I was getting a lot of visitors. The girl gang; Tex and Nancy; Tod and Stevie; Duke and Dolores; Shirleen; Heavy and Zip. May came by all the time, full of stories from the Shelter (and carrying with her purloined pudding cups). Frank slunk in, talked to me for five minutes and slunk out, clearly uncomfortable with sunlight shining on him even through a window. A bunch of my kids came and the Nightingale Men came too, Mace, Ike, Bobby and Monty. Then, of c
ourse, there was Nick and Vance who spent the evenings with me mostly kicked back and boring me to death by watching endless football games, talking about who would win the Heisman Trophy and shit like that, luckily I was drugged out most of the time and slept a lot.
It was awhile before Luke came.
I was sleeping and when I woke up I saw him sitting in a chair pulled up to the bed, his fingers linked and resting on the side of the bed, he was bent forward, his forehead resting on his hands.
I was a little stunned at his posture. It was seriously un-Super-Dude-like.
“Hey,” I said and his head snapped up and he looked at me.
This stunned me too because Luke was not the kind of guy you could take by surprise and he was so lost in thought, I’d done that.
“Hey,” he said, face serious, mouth tight. He sat back and put his forearms to his knees.
“You okay?” I asked.
He stared at me and said, “I’ll be okay when I can close my eyes at night and not see you lyin’ on the floor among a mess of dead bodies and blood.”
Yikes.
Not, I feared, a visual that led to sweet dreams.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered and wished there was something better to say.
There wasn’t.
He kept staring at me but didn’t say anything. Then with a voice low and quiet, he said, “You killed a man.”
I nodded.
Shard was dead. I shot him in the head. The police waited until I was out of ICU and with Vance standing next to me holding my hand, I’d made my statement. Roam and Sniff had made theirs too. The police were not going to press charges as obviously I’d done it in self-defense. Shard had killed Cordova, shot me and Roam. They were more than happy to close the case on him.
For my part, I was trying not to think about it.
“You gonna be able to live with that?” Luke asked.
I nodded again. “I don’t have much choice.”
Luke kept staring at me so I kept talking.
“It’s the difference between him being here and Roam and me being here. I picked Roam and me. I think that was the right decision.”
“It was. It’s still gonna fuck with your head,” Luke told me.
I had no doubt he was right.
“It starts fuckin’ with your head, you talk to Vance,” Luke went on. “You can’t get to Vance then me, Lee, Monty, Mace, Ike. Any of us’ll listen and we’ll know where your head will be at.”
It was my turn to stare at him. If I was reading his underlying message, he was telling me they all had killed someone.
“Now I’m really one of the boys,” I said softly, testing out my theory.
“Welcome to the club,” he affirmed my guess and said this in jest but he wasn’t amused and neither of us laughed.
“I was stupid. I shouldn’t have –” I started but he got up suddenly and leaned into me.
Then he stunned me again by kissing me. Not a Luke, teasing, sexy kiss but he put his hand to the side of my head and touched his lips to mine then pulled back a couple of inches and stared me in the eyes.
“You can go over it again and again, relive it a million different ways; it isn’t going to change anything. You saved your boy and you both are breathing. The end,” he said.
He stayed where he was for so long I felt the need to respond.
“Okay,” I said, but it was kind of shaky.
“You start relivin’ it, you talk to Vance or me or any of the boys. Don’t hold it inside. Again, we’ll listen.”
I nodded and was finding it hard to breathe and not because I’d been shot in the chest but because Luke was a great guy. Looking at Luke, hanging with Luke, you’d never know Luke could be like this. His face was hard but he was close and I saw the soft concern in his eyes and it made a normally fucking handsome guy look downright, knock-your-socks-off beautiful.
He trailed his thumb slowly across my cheekbone, his eyes never leaving mine.
Then he took his hand away, touched my nose, gave me a sexy half-grin and he was gone.
* * * * *
Fifth, I didn’t get Thanksgiving with just Vance, Nick and me. The Rock Chicks had a huge, Thanksgiving bash in my hospital room.
They brought the whole meal and all the fixin’s and stood or sat around, carting in chairs from other places, eating and chatting. All the women played a massive, marathon game of Trivial Pursuit while the men watched football.
Of course I had to suck my meal through a straw and eventually the nurses had to come around and tell them they had to go but still, it was fun.
* * * * *
Sixth, Martin and Curtis had come to visit me.
The whole time they were there, they didn’t cuss either.
Instead they told me why they were on the street. I’d been working with them for months and I had to get shot for them to open up to me.
I didn’t complain.
Instead, once they left, I called Shirleen and we had a chat.
Then I called Andy and told him Martin and Curtis were ready for a reunion with their Mom. She had a new boyfriend they didn’t like. They had reason not to like him, a really fucking good reason, and Andy knew what to do.
Martin and Curtis’s Mom either dumped a boyfriend that was abusive to her boys or her boys were moving in with Shirleen.
Their Mom dumped her boyfriend.
Then she pressed charges.
With what he did, her ex wouldn’t have much fun in prison.
* * * * *
They released me after a few weeks and I went to Vance’s cabin.
Vance and I bickered about this. Nick and I bickered about it too. They didn’t want me sleeping on my couch nor climbing up to the bed platform.
They ganged up on me. It was clear they had made the decision without my input before I was released and I had no choice. This I found alarming as it might not bode well for my future.
My head crackin’ mamma jamma was still with me, however my strength had leaked out onto the floor of Sal Cordova’s living room and it was going to take a little while longer for me to get fighting fit.
So I gave in.
Vance took me to his place, driving a new, black, GMC Sierra that Ally told me that Indy told her that Lee told her that Vance bought because he didn’t want me riding around in his rickety old truck and I was certainly in no shape to ride on the Harley.
Daisy and Roxie had packed up a bunch of my clothes and Nick had packed up Boo, his litter, food, treats and toys and Nick took my cat and stuff Vance’s cabin.
Unfortunately for Vance and Nick (it was fortunately for me, I thought it was hilarious), the cabin wasn’t nearly as restful as they thought it would be namely because everyone came with great regularity, and stayed for great lengths of time. Tod and Stevie set up an ongoing Yahtzee tournament that lasted for weeks (Jet won). Heavy even brought a punching bag there, set it up in Vance’s second bedroom and when I was up and around he sat eating Ding Dongs and Oreos and other chocolate-flavored snacks with dubious cream-like filling and drilled me relentlessly.
* * * * *
Vance worked through my recovery, though Lee never assigned him to anything that would take him out of town. He also was never given night shifts in the surveillance room. This meant Vance was home by eight o’clock, usually earlier, every night.
* * * * *
In late December, close to Christmas when I was still recovering but getting stronger all the time, I stood in Vance’s bathroom, wearing nothing but lacy, pink hipsters and staring into the mirror at my red, ugly, puckering, very, very slowly fading scars.
They would fade but they’d never go away and they were not at all attractive.
I put on a t-shirt of Vance’s. I’d not worn a sexy nightie since getting shot, the bodice of all of the ones I had showed the scar. I knew this because I tried them all on and checked. Then I walked to the bedroom.
Vance was lying in bed, chest bare, sheet to his waist, naked under the sheet (I knew
this because Vance slept naked not that I’d acquired x-ray vision during my recent trauma). He was reading.
Boo was on his belly, eyes closed but his was head up.
I rounded the bed, flicked back the covers and lay down, pulling the covers up to my neck.
It was safe to say that multiple gunshot wounds put a serious crimp in your sex life. A crimp I wasn’t all fired up to iron out.
In fact, I didn’t think I ever wanted Vance to see me naked again.
“I think we should break up,” I blurted to the ceiling and then closed my eyes tight when I felt his mood change and fill the room with dangerous white-hot electricity.
“Sorry?” he asked.
I opened my eyes and looked at him. I shouldn’t have. He was looking at me, his brows were knit and his eyes were narrowed and I’d learned that was not a good combo with Vance.
“I think we should break up,” I told him.
“Jesus, you’re a pain in the ass,” he muttered and went back to his book.
“Seriously, Vance.”
“Shut up, Jules,” he said without taking his eyes from his book.
I rolled to my side, reached out and pushed his book down. His eyes cut to me and with one look in them I rethought my actions but it was too late.
“Crowe –” I started but Vance turned, Boo flew off his belly and he put his book to the nightstand. Then he came back to me and rolled toward me, arm going around my waist, he pulled me to him. He did this gently, how he’d been touching me for weeks, but this time it had meaning.
“What’s in that fucking head of yours?” he asked when we were lying side-by-side, face-to-face, our bodies touching.
“I… you… well…” I stopped then started again, “it’s pretty clear you’re the kind of guy who has to have sex, um… a lot of it and, um… we can’t have sex anymore.”
“Why can’t we have sex anymore?”
“Well,” I started and halted. Did I really have to explain it?
I looked at him. He was glaring at me.
I guessed I did.
“I’m kind of gross,” I finished.
“Gross?”
“Yes, gross.”
“How are you gross?”
Now I was getting pissed. “I can’t believe you’re gonna make me spell it out for you,” I snapped.