Caroline
"Well?" I ask once Afon has hung up.
"There's a place." He keeps both eyes on the road. "Emergency animal hospital. About two hours south, off the highway. Halfway to the city. Lukas knows the man who owns it. He's calling ahead."
"Two hours." I look down at Wolf. His gums are pale. My hands are sticky with his blood, both of them, pressed to the hole in his shoulder. "Afon, two hours…"
"It's the closest one that won't ask questions." His jaw is set. "He'll make it. He's stubborn. Not unlike somebody else I know."
I don't laugh. I can't possibly bear it. I just press down harder and lean over the dog and put my mouth near his ear.
"Hold on," I whisper. "You hear me, buddy? You hold on. We're going somewhere they're gonna fix you up, good as new."
Wolf's tail moves once against the seat. Weak. But it moves.
In the meantime, we drive.
The snow thins out as we drop down off the mountain. The road goes from white to slush to wet black. Afon takes the highway ramp and the truck shudders up to speed. The trees blur by as I keep my hands on the wound and watch the dog breathe.
In and out. In and out.
"Talk to me," I plead.
"About what?"
"Anything. I need noise. If it's quiet, I'm gonna lose it."
He's quiet for a second anyway. Then he says, "I found him in the spring. He was a stray, half-starved, hanging around the edge of the clearing. Wouldn't come near me for weeks."
"What changed?"
"I left food out. Then I left it a little closer. Then a little closer." A muscle twitches in his jaw. "One morning, he was just on the porch. Like he'd always been there. Like he'd decided."
I look down at Wolf. "He's good at that. Deciding things."
"He is." Afon's hand tightens on the wheel. "He decided this morning, too."
Wolf shudders once, hard. I press down and talk to him. Soon, he settles. The blood doesn't pump anymore. It just seeps, slow and warm, and I tell myself what Afon told me, that seeping is better than pumping, that seeping means he's got time.
I check the clock on the dash a hundred times. It barely moves.
We get there a little after one.
It's a squat, brick building off a county road, a gravel lot, a sign that says ANIMAL EMERGENCY in red letters. There's a man waiting at the door before Afon even kills the engine—an older guy in scrubs, with two younger people behind him and a rolling table.
Afon's out of the truck and around to my side before I can get the door open. He scoops Wolf up out of my lap, off the seat, against his chest, and the dog cries out. Afon rumbles a low sound back at him, almost like a word.
"Easy," I think he says. "Easy, boy. I've got you."
The man in scrubs takes one look and says, "Bring him this way." No hello. No paperwork.
Lukas called ahead, alright.
I climb out on legs that don't want to hold me. My hands are red to the wrist. Afon carries Wolf inside and lays him on the table. The people in scrubs close in around him, fast and quiet, hands and gauze and a needle starting in on their bloody work.
"Gunshot?" the older man asks.
"Shoulder," Afon confirms. "About three hours ago."
The man nods and starts feeling Wolf's chest, his belly, peeling back his lip to look at the gums. "Heart rate's up but he's perfusing. Good sign." He glances at the two younger ones. "Let's get a line in and get him back."
They move him onto a gurney. Wolf's head lolls as his eyes begin to cloud over with exhaustion. His eye finds me, then Afon, then me again.
"Go," I tell him. "Go get fixed, you big goof."
Then they wheel him through a set of swinging doors. The doors swing shut, and he's gone.
It's just us now, standing in a little waiting room with plastic chairs and a coffee machine.
Behind us looms a bulletin board full of flyers for lost cats.
Blood pools on the floor where it dripped off Afon's sweater.
There's blood on me, too, his and mine and the dog's all mixed together.
I glance at Afon to see a dark patch where the bullet graze has opened up again. I don't think he's even noticed.
"Sit," the older man instructs, coming back through the doors for a second.
"It'll be a while. Surgery, then recovery.
He's young and he's strong. That's what we want.
" He looks at the two of us, the state of us, and his face softens a little.
"There's a bathroom down the hall. Get cleaned up.
I'll come find you when I know something. "
I don't last long in the waiting room.
I sit in one of the plastic chairs and Afon sits next to me and we don't talk and the clock on the wall ticks and every tick is a year. I keep seeing it:
The rifle swinging off Afon.
The shot.
The red on the black fur.
Wolf's yelp, that sharp, terrible sound.
"He's going to be okay," I say, mostly to myself.
"We don't know that."
I turn to look at him. "But I'm choosing to believe it. You taught me that. Take the thing that should flatten you and turn it sideways."
He grunts and says nothing else.
We sit. The coffee machine gurgles to itself in a language only it can understand.
Down the hall, behind the doors, there are sounds—a beep, a voice, the squeak of a wheel—and every one of them makes my heart climb into my throat.
What does this one mean? What's two beeps? What's one? Was that another yelp?
After a while, I can't take it.
"I can't sit here," I announce. I'm up before I've decided to be. "I can't just sit and be scared. Looking at that door… I'm gonna come apart."
Afon stands with me. "Where are you going?"
"I don't know. Outside. The truck. Anywhere that isn't this chair."
He follows me out. The lot's empty except for the blue pickup, dark with melt now, the passenger seat a sticky, crimson disaster. The sky's gone gray-white, huddling close to the earth, and the air is so cold that every breath hurts.
I climb into the truck on the driver's side, away from the blood on the bench. Afon comes around and gets in beside me and pulls the door shut.
The world goes quiet. Only our breath remains.
"He shouldn't have done that. It was a stupid thing to do." The tears come up hot and stinging. I scrub at my face with the back of my wrist, but there's blood still on it, so now, there's blood on my cheek, mingling with the tears I can't get to stop.
"Hey." Afon's hand comes up to my face. His thumb wipes under my eye. "Hey. Look at me."
His eyes aren't flat anymore. There's no concrete poured over them. There's just him, looking at me like I'm the only thing in the truck, in the lot, in the world.
"I don't know how to do nothing," I croak. "I've never known how."
He nods.
"How do you do it?" I demand. "How do you just sit in the not-knowing?"
"You do it because there is no other choice," he replies. "There's no trick. You sit in it, and it's awful, and you keep breathing anyway. That's the whole of it."
"That's probably the least comforting bit of advice I've ever heard."
"Baby, it's the only advice I've got." His thumb is on my cheek, dragging through blood and salt water.
A wet laugh tears out of me, ugly and hiccupping. "You're supposed to be comforting me."
"I'm not good at comfort, Caroline. I'm good at three things, and two of them are illegal."
"What's the third?"
His eyes drop to my mouth. "This," he says.
Then he leans across the seat and kisses me.
His hand slides into my hair. Mine go to their familiar spot on the front of his ruined sweater so I can pull him toward me hard.
It's an easy thing to lean into. So long as I'm kissing Afon, the rest of the world ceases to exist. There is no hospital and no Lastochka, no Reznik and no blood in the snow. There are just two pairs of lips, his and mine, and all the other noise no longer seems to matter as much.
So if I'm climbing across the seat into his lap because the steering wheel's in the way and I need to be closer than this, then that's okay.
And if I need to feel something that isn't the inside of that cursed waiting room, then that's okay.
And if his hands on my hips and my heartbeat in my throat and the hardness of him grinding up between my legs all combine to soothe me in a way I've spent three decades on this earth waiting to be soothed, then that's okay, that's okay, that's okay.
"You scared me," I whisper into the hollow of his neck. "I came running out to bring you the phone, and the look in your eyes…"
"You scared me." His arms wrap all the way around me, crushing me to him. "When you came over that rise and I saw you standing in the open, I have never been more afraid of anything in my life, Caroline."
"I'm no coward," I snap. "I wasn't going to crouch behind a duffel bag while they shot at you."
"I know." He says it into my hair. "That's the problem. You won't stay where it's safe. You never have."
"No." I pull back enough to look at him. "Because the safe spot's empty and you're never in it."
He kisses me again, softer and more tenderly than ever before. The world keeps reducing itself down to the bare essentials. His mouth on my throat. My fingers in his hair. The fog on the windows. Electric need pulsing just beneath the surface of my skin.
After that, there's no more talking.
I'll be honest: It's not the best sex of my life.
The truck is too small, and both Afon and I are too hurt and weary and cold to be particularly limber.
It smells like blood, gasoline, and hospital antiseptic.
I literally still have tears drying on my face, for God's sake, and nothing is truly solved.
But we make do.
Because if you have this thing—this unnamed thing between us that I cannot and will not call "love," not yet, maybe not ever—then all the rest of it is merely unnecessary detail.
I free him from his jeans, perform a Cirque du Soleil shimmy out of my own pants, and then I sink down onto his lap while he cradles me in his embrace.
We move together, herky-jerky and awkward, slow and then not slow.
The windows fog all the way to opaque, like we're in our own little snow globe, filled with pants and whispered murmurs and praise flowing from Afon's beautiful, filthy mouth without a single pause.
You ride me so fucking good, baby.
No one can take me like you.
No one can own me like you.
You're so pretty. So pretty. So pretty…
In here, neither death nor the cold can touch us. He tells me I'm beautiful, that I'm his, that I was made for this, made for him, and I believe every word, all of it, even the things he hasn't said yet, even the things that are going to break my heart one day, maybe even one day soon.
It's not an eruption of an orgasm. It's water reaching a boil. Nothing happens for a long time until suddenly, it's happening, bubbling through me, hurting so good. Afon's is quiet, too. A few grunts, he spills everywhere, and I want to burrow inside of him and never come out ever again.
"That was probably very irresponsible," I whisper finally, once it's all over. "Someone could be watching."
I feel him laugh. "Ask me if I give a fuck."
I press my face into his shoulder and breathe him in and feel, for the first time in what feels like a thousand years, almost okay. Not safe—we're not safe, we won't be safe for a while yet. But not alone.
Whatever happens next, I won't be doing it alone.
We get cleaned up as best we can. He helps me sort myself out, and I check the wound at his hip—it's oozing again, the gauze gone, but it'll hold a little longer. I press my palm flat to it anyway, like I can keep him together by hand.
"We should go back in," I say. "In case there's news."
He nods. But he doesn't move right away. He just looks at me, in the white light filtering through the fogged glass, and smiles.
"What?" I ask.
"Nothing." He brushes a strand of hair off my face. "You've got blood on your cheek."
He wipes it away with his thumb, gentle, and kisses the spot where it was.
Then he opens the door and the cold rushes back in.
We're sitting in the plastic chairs again, his arm around me, my head on his shoulder, when the doors swing open.
The older man in scrubs comes through, pulling a mask down off his face. But I can't read his expression, not at all.
"He's a fighter," the man says.
I emit a tiny, scared whimper.
"The bullet missed the joint and all the big vessels.
It tore up some muscle and cracked the edge of the scapula, but nothing he won't heal from.
" The vet wipes his hands on a towel. "He lost a fair amount of blood, but he was stable through the whole thing.
We've got him on fluids and pain meds. He's going to be groggy for a day or two and he's going to need to take it easy for a few weeks, which—" He glances at Wolf's bloody pawprints all over the both of us.
"—I get the sense will be the hard part. "
"But he's okay," Afon concludes. I'm stunned to hear a wobble in his voice. "My boy is going to be okay?"
"He's going to be okay." The man smiles. "You can see him in a little while, once he's up from the anesthesia. He'll be happy you're here. The good ones always are."
And then he goes back through the doors, and it's just us again. I only get turned around halfway before Afon engulfs me in a hug so huge and relieved that he lifts my feet clean off the floor.
He's shaking. The big, stone, terrifying man is shaking, holding me in the middle of a vet's waiting room, his face pressed into my hair, and I'm laughing and crying at the same time and so, I think, is he, though he'd never admit it and I'll never tell.
"Stupid, brave idiot," he says, muffled in my hair.
"Which one of you?" I ask.
He sets me down. He looks at me, wrecked, wet-eyed, and wide open, and for once, there's no wall at all, nothing held back, nothing hidden.
"All three of us," he says.
Goddammit, he's right.