Rough Around the Edges (34 page)

The door fell shut behind him, aided by another gust of wind. It banged against its frame, echoing his footsteps as he hurried toward the Mustang.

Blood rushed in his ears and was drowned out when he turned the key in the ignition, bringing the engine to life. Driving away was one of the hardest things he’d ever done, but he did it anyway. He couldn’t control Ally, just like he couldn’t control anything else – not even his own mind or body, sometimes.

* * * * *

The flowers had cost him most of what was left in his checking account, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was making things right with Ally. The bouquet rested on the passenger seat, fifteen red blossoms against the black leather.

The red was for love. Yeah, he loved her. How could he not? She was the one bright spot in his life. She was everything he lacked and everything he wanted. Without her, life was just waiting for the next fight.

Which was why he didn’t want to fight with her. The florist had told him that a bouquet of fifteen roses meant ‘I’m sorry’.

And he was sorry – sorry that he’d hurt her, sorry that her family situation sucked so badly. He was still just as determined to work things out – somehow, he had to protect her. Somehow, he also had to pull it off without hurting her.

He took the next turn slowly, careful not to whip around too quickly and send the roses tumbling to the floor mat. He was almost to Ally’s house now. He’d been longing to return ever since their after-dinner argument the night before. Leaving had been necessary, but it hadn’t felt right – not at the time, and not afterward.

Above the peaked roofs of modest one-story houses and the power lines strung between them, the sky was a dusky purple. Ally should just be arriving home from her shift at the salon, if she wasn’t there already.

The Mustang’s engine hummed as he rounded one last corner, making the turn onto her street. A familiar sound rent the air, causing his hand to slip on the wheel.

The car jerked, veering onto the wrong side of the street, but luckily no one was coming from the opposite direction. Head reeling, he managed to steer the car back where it belonged. Still, his hands shook against the wheel.

The sharp noise had risen above the subdued roar of the Mustang’s engine and had gone straight from his ears to his heart. The latter was now lodged in his throat, beating so hard he half expected it to burst inside his mouth and drown him in liquid terror. It wasn’t that he’d never been close to gunfire before – he had, in Afghanistan. Those memories haunted him now, but they weren’t nearly as bad as the
what ifs
his brain presented him with.

The shots had been fired from so close by that his ears still rang. There had been an entire burst, staccato bangs that belonged to something semi-automatic. And there was a car ahead of him, tearing down the street, the tags already fading into the shadows between streetlights.

The car had pulled away from the curb in front of Ally’s house. He was so fucking sure of it that every muscle in his body cramped as he sped toward the same curb.

When he killed the engine, movement flashed from Ally’s front porch. The door was open. As he fumbled with his seatbelt, he couldn’t hear a thing. His ears still rang, and he could smell his own sweat and the overheated desert landscape. He shoved the memories and phantom scents away as he rushed out of the car, grabbing the bouquet off the passenger seat like he might have grabbed his rifle in Afghanistan.

It turned out the roses helped as he hurried across the tiny lawn – the subtle perfume that drifted from their petals cleared his mind, the real aroma replacing the remembered smells that had hotwired his memory and sent him speeding into the past.

“Thank God!” Maria’s voice hit him like a ton of bricks as he climbed the stairs.

She was kneeling on the porch, hunched protectively over Ally’s body.

No, not Ally’s body – Ally. She wasn’t dead. He took a deep breath, willing himself to believe it because it had to be true. “Fuck. Fuck! What happened?”

“She’s been shot! She’s bleeding…” Maria’s words faded to a whine as she looked back down at her daughter, eyes wide.

“Don’t move her. I’m calling 911.” He wasn’t calm at all, but strove to act like it as he dialed emergency services on his cell phone, somehow managing to press his numb fingertips against the right numbers on the touchscreen. 9-1-1-send.

“911. What’s your emergency?”

His lips were numb, too. He forced them to work anyway, telling the dispatcher that Ally had been shot, that she was bleeding on her front porch. No, she wasn’t moving. No, no one else had been hit. No, the people who’d shot her weren’t there anymore. They’d fled down the street after spraying her house with bullets. She needed help, fast. By the time he slipped his phone back into his pocket, his fingers weren’t numb anymore. They were tingling with the urge to do something – anything to help her.

With his sense of touch regained, he was able to feel the sharp prick of a thorn against one finger. He dropped the bouquet and the roses fell to the floorboards. They landed in a pool of blood, and their color remained unchanged.

“Ally!” He dropped to his knees beside her and ran his fingers lightly over her forehead, sweeping a few stray waves out of the way. He knew better than to move her, but surely this couldn’t hurt.

Maria was still leaning over Ally, and the top of her head almost touched Ryan’s. “There was a car,” she said. “Just some car. It pulled up in front of the house and then…”

Ryan nodded. He’d seen. Beneath his fear, there was a simmering rage that he knew would explode when he could afford to think beyond Ally’s immediate safety. The people who’d shot her… He saw red as he remembered the car tearing away, but it wasn’t a hallucination – an ambulance had arrived and was casting red light all over the scene of the crime.

“They’re here.” It was something to be grateful for, though the cold horror running through his veins didn’t ebb. They still had to get her to the hospital, had to find out how badly she was hurt. Her blood covered everything and made it hard for him to tell exactly where she’d been shot, though it was especially concentrated on her left side and arm.

Truth was, he didn’t want to look away from her face. Though her lids were heavy, her eyes were open. Her gaze was unfocused, but he looked into her eyes anyway. Any semblance of a connection with her was something he couldn’t let slip away. As the paramedics hurried up the stairs, he touched her cheek lightly.

“It’s going to be okay,” Maria said, speaking so fervently she might as well have been praying. Maybe she was.

Aching to maintain contact, he removed his fingers from Ally’s face and backed away just enough to give the paramedics space. Everything was red – the lights, Ally’s blood, the roses that were now a part of a crime scene. When he blinked, even the backs of his eyelids were crimson. The color triggered a memory, this time of a certain dream – the one where he’d lost Ally. The same despair that had swallowed him then plagued him as she was carried down the steps on a stretcher and loaded into the ambulance.

The nightmare had become reality.

* * * * *

The police were gone. They’d left a while ago, and the hours since had gone by both unbearably slowly and way too quickly. Slow because seeing Ally in pain was a sort of torture and too quickly because every minute was another minute that the people who’d shot her spent free, unlikely to ever be punished, or even identified.

It was hell to remember them tearing away from the curb. A fresh wave of sick anger crept through his veins like a drug, but he’d already overdosed on it. The lighting inside the hospital room was crisp and white, but he was still seeing red. Now that Ally had been stabilized and was expected to make a full recovery from the two gunshot wounds she’d sustained to her left shoulder and bicep, all he could think about were the people who’d shot her. People who were still out there on the streets – her street, maybe.

Ally and Maria hadn’t said anything to the police about Manny, but he had to be the root of the problem – the fact that Manny was surely involved somehow sat in Ryan’s gut like a rock, weighing him down.

It didn’t matter that they hadn’t mentioned Manny to the police – Ryan knew damn well that the crime wasn’t likely to be solved by local law enforcement. The shooting had been fast, seemingly random. Even he hadn’t managed to read the shooters’ vehicle’s tags – a fact that made him want to kick his own ass.

“I feel like such a baby.” Ally’s voice drifted from the center of the semi-reclined bed, where she sat propped up by a stack of pillows.

If only she’d sleep. She’d been in the hospital for nearly twenty-four hours and had slept some at first, but had been awake for a long time. She’d insisted on staying up throughout most of the day and had stayed alert, if not clear-eyed, during the police officers’ visit.

It was obvious what she was doing – she wanted to be there for Maria, and probably for him. She’d been shot – twice – and refused to sleep so that she could provide moral support and reassurance for her mother and her boyfriend. It was so ridiculous he almost wanted to ask a nurse if there was anything they could give her to
make
her sleep. An IV was running into her uninjured arm, but she continued to defy the drugs in her system.

“You’re
not
a baby. You were shot.” He leaned forward in his seat, fixing her with a look that would hopefully make her believe him. “And you’re not getting out of here early. I’ll tie you down to that bed if I have to. Just sit back and relax.”

“Yeah, but my injuries aren’t that serious. And everyone’s acting like I’m some sort of saint on her death bed. It makes me feel like a drama queen.”

“Your injuries are serious.” He pressed a hand to his face and rubbed his forehead, willing the tension there to go away as he closed his eyes, shutting out the sight of the vibrantly-colored flowers her friends and family had filled her room with. The bright colors made Ally look pale in comparison, and it pissed him off to see plants looking livelier and healthier than she did. “And we’re lucky they weren’t worse. So damn lucky.”

Immediately after the shooting and during the ambulance ride, he’d worried he’d lose her, like in his dream. He’d tried not to, but there had been so much blood, all over everything. And beneath the red stains, her normally caramel-tan skin had looked so white. The contrast had been terrifying.

At the hospital, they’d given her a transfusion. She still lacked her usual color, but it had obviously done her good.

“Are you getting a headache?”

There she went again, worrying about someone else when she was lying in a hospital with a stranger’s blood running through her veins and two bullet holes in her body. “No. I’m just so pissed it hurts.”

Quiet minutes ticked by, but when he raised his head, she was still awake and gazing in his direction. “How’s your arm?”

“Better. Hurts, but not that bad. I was lucky.”

She was probably in more pain than she let on, even with the drugs. Still, she was right – she
had
been lucky. The bullet that had hit her upper arm had gone through skin and muscle, but it hadn’t touched bone. The doctor claimed that if it had hit a fraction of an inch to the side, it would’ve struck her axillary artery, which probably would’ve resulted in her bleeding to death on her front porch. The thought made Ryan’s stomach ball up hard, forcing bile into his throat.

He swallowed it. “And your shoulder?” He pulled his hand from his face, eyes searching hers. That wound hadn’t been as bad – the bullet had grazed her, really.

“I can hardly even feel any pain right now.”

“That’s good.” He wasn’t going to argue with her. Not when something else was weighing on him. “Look, about when I showed up at your house, just before you were shot… I was coming to apologize. Brought you flowers.”

The thought of them still on the porch, withering in a pool of her blood, filled him with a sense of urgency. He’d almost lost the chance to apologize, ever. All the more reason to say it now. “I felt bad about what I said about your family. I—”

The room’s door swung inward with a faint creak.

Ryan willed it to be a nurse – one who would be gone in a few minutes, leaving them alone again.

It was Maria.

“How was dinner?” Ally asked.

“It was fine.” Maria resumed her post by Ally’s bedside. She and Ryan had agreed to take turns getting something to eat so that Ally wouldn’t be left alone.