Chapter 18 Savannah
Chapter Eighteen: Savannah
He walks in with blood running down his arm and a grin on his face, and I want to kill him more than whoever shot him.
"What the FUCK happened to your arm?"
"Slight disagreement with a bullet. The bullet won.
" He leans against the doorframe with his good shoulder, and his left arm is wrapped in a belt that's soaked through dark red, and his face is pale under the tan, but the grin is there, the stupid fucking grin.
Carmelo is standing behind him with blood on his knuckles and an expression that says the other guys look worse.
"Get in here." I grab his good arm and pull him toward the bar because it's the closest room with a counter and a first aid kit and enough light to see what I'm working with. "Sit down."
"I can just call Russo—"
"You can get your ass to that stool. Sit. The. Fuck. Down."
He sits. The grin fades when the movement jolts his arm and pain flashes across his face, fast, gone before he thinks I catch it. I catch everything. That's my whole problem. I catch every wince and every flinch and every time this man tries to hide the fact that he's hurting.
Carmelo stands in the doorway. He looks at me and I look at him. I nod at the unspoken understanding of two people who both care about the idiot on the stool and are both furious at him for different reasons.
"Go clean up," I tell Carmelo. "I've got him."
“I’ll call Russo.” Carmelo nods and disappears down the corridor. His boots are heavy and even and there's blood on them that doesn't belong to Emilio, which means whatever happened in that parking garage ended badly for the people who started it.
I pull the first aid kit from under the counter and set it on the bar.
My hands are shaking. I can see the tremor in my fingers as I open the case and pull out gauze and antiseptic and the medical tape.
I hate my hands for shaking because I am not the woman who falls apart when a man gets hurt.
I am the woman who holds the bottle and lets other people fall apart.
But my hands are shaking and the blood is dripping down his arm, the belt wrapped above the wound is soaked and his face is pale and the bottle cap in my pocket is pressing against my thigh and I want to hold it but both hands are busy trying not to drop the antiseptic.
"I need to take the belt off.” My voice comes out normal, which is a lie my mouth is telling my brain. "It's going to bleed again."
"I know."
"This is going to hurt."
"Also know that."
I unwrap the belt. He was right, through and through, the entry wound in the front of his bicep is a neat hole about the size of my thumbnail, and the exit in the back is ragged and bigger and uglier.
The bleeding restarts when the pressure comes off, not gushing but trickling, and I press gauze against both sides and hold.
"Press here." I put his good hand on the gauze. "Hard. Don't let up."
He presses. I wet a cloth with antiseptic and start cleaning around the wound, wiping the dried blood off his skin, working outward from the edges.
His arm is warm under my hands and the muscle twitches when the antiseptic hits raw skin, but he doesn't make a sound, which pisses me off more than the wound itself.
Making a sound would mean acknowledging that this hurts and God forbid Emilio Di-fucking-Angelo acknowledge anything that isn't a joke.
"You promised one piece," I say.
"This is one piece. Just with a hole in it, kind of like a vase or something."
"That's not funny."
"You're cleaning my bullet wound in a bar with a first aid kit.
Nothing about this is funny, but if I don't make jokes I'm going to think about how close that round was to the bone and the bone is connected to the artery and the artery is connected to the part of me that stays alive, and I'd rather make jokes. "
I stop cleaning to glare at him. His face is doing the thing it does when the joking is covering something real, the grin still there but his eyes not participating.
"How close was it?"
"Couple inches from the brachial artery, if the angle was right. Russo will tell me for sure when he looks at it, but I can still feel my fingers and the bleeding isn't arterial, so I got lucky."
"Lucky." The word comes out flat and I mean it to. "You got lucky. That's your assessment. You walked into a parking garage and got ambushed and shot and you're sitting on a stool in my bar bleeding through gauze and your assessment is lucky."
"What do you want me to say?"
"I want you to say you're not going to do this again. I want you to say you're going to stop walking into situations where people shoot at you. I want you to say that the man who told me he loves me twelve hours ago is going to be around long enough for that to mean something."
My voice cracks on the last word. I didn't plan for it to crack.
I planned to stay angry because angry is easier and safer and anger doesn't make my chest feel like someone is sitting on it.
But the crack happens and once it happens the rest follows, now I'm standing behind the bar with bloody gauze in my hands and tears on my face and I'm furious at myself for crying because I do not cry over men.
Except this one.
This one, I cry over.
"Hey." His good hand comes off the gauze and reaches for my face. "Hey, come here."
"You're bleeding, keep pressure on it—"
"Come here, Savannah."
I lean into his hand. His palm is warm against my cheek, and his thumb wipes a tear off my face and smears blood across my skin in the process, his blood on my face, and the intimacy of that is so fucked up and so us that it almost makes me laugh through the tears.
"I can't lose you," I say, and my voice is small in a way I don't recognize.
I do loud and sharp and profane. I throw lamps and punch arms and tell men exactly what I think of them in words that would strip paint off a bumper.
But right now my voice is small because the fear is bigger than the anger and the fear is this: everyone I love leaves.
Gigi died while I was buying a Sprite. My mother walked out before I could form a memory of her face.
Every man I ever let close enough to matter turned out to be temporary, and now the one who matters most is sitting on a stool with a hole in his arm and a grin that's trying to convince me everything's fine.
"You're not going to lose me."
"You don't know that."
"I know that I just got shot and Carmelo drove twenty minutes back to this compound and all I did was think about one thing.
Not the bullet. Not Ferrara. Not Matteo or the Castillos or any of it.
You. I was thinking about your face and your voice and the way you said I love you last night, and I was thinking that I'd take a bullet every day for the rest of my life if it meant coming home to you. "
"That's the dumbest thing you've ever said, and you've said some truly historic dumb shit."
"It's also true."
"Stop talking and let me finish cleaning this."
He lets me work. I clean the wound properly, disinfect both sides, pack fresh gauze, tape it down tight enough to hold until Russo can come in and stitch it.
My hands stop shaking somewhere around the third piece of tape, not because the fear is gone but because the work takes over.
Hands doing a job, the way Gigi taught me.
When the world gets loud, make your hands useful. The rest will follow.
When I'm done, his arm is wrapped in white gauze from elbow to mid-bicep, taped down, clean. Not pretty, not medical-grade, but solid. It'll hold until the actual doctor gets his hands on it.
"You need stitches," I say. "Where’s Russo?"
"Sometimes he takes a bit, relax. He’s our on-call, but he also has an actual job. I’ll go check after this."
"After what?"
He reaches out with his good hand and pulls me in by the waist. I step between his knees, and his forehead drops against my chest. His arm wraps around me and holds on, and the man who was making jokes thirty seconds ago is quiet.
Not performing. Not deflecting. Just holding me with his face against my sternum, his breathing uneven, his body doing the shaking his mouth wouldn't let him do in front of Carmelo.
He's scared. Not of the bullet, not of the men who shot at him. Scared of the same thing I'm scared of.
That the thing we found, the thing that started with a lamp, then a diner, almost-sex in a gym, and real sex in the bar and an I love you whispered in the dark.
It is fragile enough that a bullet can end it.
Love doesn't make you bulletproof, but it proves that the people who matter most are the ones you can't protect.
I put my hands in his hair and we both hold each other, trying not to let our emotions override us all the while knowing that love has made things so much more complicated than they were before.
"Hey, asshole, it’s okay… I've got you," I say. "I'm right here."
He nods against my chest and pulls me into him. “And I’ve got you, little vixen. As long as you’ll have me.”
An hour later Russo shows up, looking dishevelled. Apparently he was in surgery when we called.
He stitches the wound and tells Emilio to keep it dry for a week and avoid strenuous activity, and the look Emilio gives me when Russo says strenuous activity tells me the doctor's advice has a shelf life of approximately four hours.
It lasts three.
As soon as he’s done, we rush to his room.
He's on the bed, shirtless because shirts and bandages don't coexist, propped up on pillows with his bad arm resting on a folded towel.
The stitches are neat, Russo's work is clean even if his bedside manner is garbage, and the bandage wrapping is fresh and white and tight.