Chapter 15 #2
Still, Yasmine pressed her in close. Outside of her newborn son, she’d never held anything tighter as she shoveled through the sweaty crowds. It felt like bursting out of a smoking oven when she was finally greeted by the glittering lights of sleeping Manhattan.
Thankfully, her people spotted her immediately. Rebecca gave a signal out of her car window, and a white van pulled up behind her, its back doors lurching open.
It probably looked a lot like a kidnapping, which is why it necessitated the third element: Yasmine’s security team, a neat escort of five men in very convincing NYPD costumes.
They blockaded the street, letting Yasmine slip behind them.
A gaggle of college students stopped to watch, one even got their phone out, but Yasmine was already in the van when she heard it shatter against the pavement.
Dr. Larson’s car was essentially an ambulance wearing camouflage. The outside looked like nothing more than a moving van, but inside it was equipped with enough technology to power a rural hospital.
The man himself, a solemn sixty-two year old Swede with the disposition of a dry boulder, climbed out of the driver’s seat just as Rebecca climbed in.
Rebecca jerked the clutch, the wheels started moving, and Yasmine laid Bella out carefully on the gurney, holding the back of her head gently as she pressed her down.
“Yasmine,” Bella coughed, keeping a weak grip on Yasmine’s arm, even once she was fully disattached from her. “I don’t need a doctor. I need the cream.”
“No offense, but we can let the doctor decide if you need a doctor,” Yasmine said. She looked up towards the doctor. “Start an IV.”
Dr. Larson gave her one solemn nod. Unlike Rebecca, Larson wasn’t mouthy. Yasmine knew more about medicine than most people holding advanced medical degrees, so she just needed someone who would follow orders, dispose of bodies, and, on the rare occasion, keep people alive.
This was his opportunity to prove he could do the latter.
While Larson set up the IV, Yasmine dug through her purse, producing the small tube and unscrewing it. It was definitely not enough cream to cover Bella’s whole body. It was barely enough for the length of her arm.
Yasmine looked at it in disbelief. How the hell was it supposed to help with bruising? Internal bleeding? If Sephora had invented a foundation that could substitute for surgery, Yasmine sure as hell would have heard of it.
“What does this do?” Yasmine asked, then realized this was not the time for being nosy about details. She shook her head. “Where do I put it?”
“Vitals aren’t looking good,” Larson interjected, nudging the blood pressure cuff he’d attached to Bella’s arm. “She’s hypotensive, heart rate elevated. Could be internal bleeding or acute anemia.”
“Respectfully,” Bella coughed, looking at Larson, then back at Yasmine. “Please get this man out of here, and put the cream on my chest.” Bella lifted a shaking finger to the space right above her collarbones. “Before I actually die.”
It pissed Yasmine off that Bella managed to sound in control of the situation even when she was literally lying on a stretcher. Yasmine glanced up at Larson. He just shrugged and said, “Your call.”
“Just go sit in the front,” Yasmine commanded after a moment, and Larson nodded.
As he re-opened the latch to join Rebecca in the front seat, Yasmine lingered over Bella, her fingers flexing on the gurney. The woman’s lips were parted, her breathing shallow. A butterfly rash sat over her nose and danced onto her cheeks.
It was unfathomably more painful than Yasmine expected to see Bella like this, defenseless and weak; this strongwilled woman reduced to a shaking mess.
It was almost like Yasmine had forgotten she was mortal. How naive of her. Humans were like cattle; they could die from a few too many flies in the feed. She needed to remember that. She needed to remember Bella was no different.
“I’m going to take off your turtleneck,” Yasmine whispered, not sure why she was narrating.
They’d had sex twice now, but it occurred to Yasmine then that it was always Bella touching her, always Bella pulling off her shirt, kissing down her neck. She’d never even gotten to take Bella’s jacket off. She’d never seen an inch of her.
Was that on purpose? Has she been hiding herself?
As if sensing her thoughts, Bella’s eyes drifted open. Her mouth quivered; she looked nervous, almost embarrassed?
“Don’t be scared,” Bella coughed, but it sounded less like a warning, and more like a plea. “It’s not always this bad.”
Yasmine took a shallow breath in when she saw what Bella meant. Her stomach was a warzone. Haphazard streaks of blue and brown lay like soldiers’ footsteps over her navel, dragging loudly across her ribcage.
Undeterred, Yasmine kept going. She gently pulled the sweater over Bella’s black lace bra, and then up to her neck. She noticed that her hands, even as light as they touched, left pink streaks on Bella’s skin that didn’t fade.
“Skin writing,” Yasmine said to herself. An odd symptom. Then her eyes drifted to the pink pattern on Bella’s face—the butterfly. That was a malar rash. “Is this autoimmune? Lupus?”
Bella didn’t reply; Yasmine carefully pulled the sweater all the way over her neck, adjusting her head so it didn’t thump on the gurney. Then she reached for the bottle, uncapped it, and squeezed out the lotion onto Bella’s chest.
Tentatively, Yasmine began to massage it over the bruised skin. Bella winced immediately, but didn’t make a noise to stop her, so she continued.
The lotion smelled waxy and plastic, like some kind of cheap soap.
Yasmine was starting to wonder if Bella’s fixation on it was a complete fluke.
If maybe her thinking wasn’t clear, and it was the first thing she could think of to help, like how she put on her lipstick when Yasmine had woken her up back at the cafe.
That memory felt like a knife dragged across her stomach. The rope was back around Yasmine’s lungs as she counted Bella’s breaths, tracking every time her mouth parted. Watching the mortal coil twist and twist.
Yasmine wasn’t sure when Bella’s eyes had opened, but suddenly they were alive and vibrant again, big and beautiful with that deep scathing blue, and Bella’s hand was gripping around Yasmine’s wrist. “Hey,” Bella said. “Breathe. It’s okay. You’re done. At this point, you’re just feeling me up.”
Yasmine’s hands tensed. Looking down, she saw Bella’s point; she’d drawn her fingers so many times over Bella’s skin that her chest looked like ski tracks on a mountain slope. There was no cream left, she’d blended it to infinity.
“Do you actually… feel better?” Yasmine said, voice shaking again.
Bella nodded, then with a groan, she actually managed to sit herself up on the gurney, its wheels screeching against the van floor.
Yasmine reached for her back to help her up, not ready to let her do it alone yet. Bella gave her a shy smile in return.
“Like a hundred bucks,” Bella said, then looked down at her bare stomach. “I’m going to need to buy a lot of concealer before I head to the beach next weekend, though. I look like someone gave a toddler a blank wall and a paint bucket.”
Yasmine let out a humorless laugh. She couldn’t do anything else, couldn’t say anything else.
She was absolutely reeling. Looking at the gorgeous, ridiculous, half-naked woman in front of her, Yasmine could only think one thing: she was alive.
She was alive, and worse yet, Yasmine was so happy she was.
Oh. Yasmine's face fell. Oh god.
It was obvious, laid as bare as a Roman statue: the thing Yasmine was so terrified of happening had already happened.
She had become attached—deeply attached—to a human being.
There was only one thing to do about that, then.
Deal with it later.
Yasmine sucked a breath in. She rolled out the small stool that was sitting under Larson’s desk, and sat on it. Then she leaned forward, perching her elbows on her knees.
“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she said quietly. “Really glad. But I do have one quick question, if you’re feeling good enough to answer it.”
Bella’s eyebrows raised at Yasmine’s cool tone, clearly reading it for the warning it was. Her cheeks colored a bit red.
“Shoot.”
Yasmine nodded a few times to herself, trying to find the correct words to address it. How could she put this politely…
“What the hell is wrong with you?”