by King Ellie
“What’s your name?” He asks me.
“Bambi Laurence-Vasquez,” I reply.
“Nice to meet you, Bambi. Call me Andres.”
I look up at him. “What are you doing here?” I ask.
Andres, his gray eyes seem sort of empty and soulless, but there was a glint of some hope in there too. He buttoned up the dress shirt and made me stand up. “My son, Phoenix told me to come help you.”
“Your son?” I blink. I didn’t understand because Phoenix wasn’t related to Ainslee. I knew him as Ainslee’s father. He is a Founder’s, what the hell is he doing here? And why didn’t Phoenix ever tell me this information.
“Yes,” he gives me a small smile. “He told me I was to help you and I’ll do it. Do you trust Phoenix?” He asks.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Andres Bishops will always have a special place in my heart because he treated me with caution when it could’ve gone worse than that and now, here he is. I can’t move from my seat because the look in his eyes, the sadness, is so profound that it’s suffocating me. “Bambi…” He says my name in such a sad way.
I don’t know why I let my tears flow, but I just do. Something is wrong. He wouldn’t be here. Andres doesn’t seem like he would, or would he? “Please tell me they’re both okay? I can’t handle it if they’re not,” I say.
Andres takes strides towards me in record time, courtesy of his long legs. He crouches down and grabs my chin between his thumb and forefinger. “I came to get you. Phoenix needs you and Bowie is okay, he’s just not in town...”
I sigh a breath of relief, but then my anxiety shoots up again. “What happened? Have you told Bowie yet? I can call him.” I ask in a small voice.
Andres gives me a sad look. “Don’t worry, one of the men told Bowie the situation, but yeah, Nix is in surgery, we went stateside, and something happened.” His face shows the sadness that he was holding back. “He,” Andres shakes his head chuckling mirthlessly. “That fucking cabron put his life before mine.” Andres looks like he’s on the verge of tears but he controls himself and looks away.
“He, he did what? Is he going to make it?” I try to ask calmly, but all I hear is my heart beating over the sound of my voice.
“Dr. Nash is doing his best; he is the best at his job. Trust that nothing will go wrong with Phoenix. He lost a lot of blood, yes, but you know him, he’s too stubborn to die. Let’s go. Orion needs us,” he states.
Andres stands, and he pulls me up with him. When Andres pulls me into his arms, I can’t help it as reality sets in. I may never see Phoenix again if he doesn’t make it. I go numb.
Through the entire car ride to the hospital, I know that Sasha came with us. Andres is sitting with me and Sasha is in the front seat of the GMC SUV. I don’t feel like I’m myself, I just look out the window because I feel like I’m going to break apart.
My phone rings and it’s like I know I answered, but something doesn’t click until I hear his voice. “Baby…” Bowie calls out to me.
“Bow.” I whisper and I feel as the tears fall down my face.
“Don’t cry, he’ll be fine. I know he will.”
I sniffle. “How do you know I’m crying?”
“Some things never change,” he whispers. “Andres told me you’re on your way and so am I.”
“When will you be here?”
He sighs. “I’ll do my best to be there in the next couple of hours. I was in the middle of some stupid set that had me turn my cell off, so I didn’t find out until Andres got a hold of me. Don’t be scared, baby, he’s going to be okay,” he reassures me.
“How do you know?” I say.
“Because he’s my best friend. That fucker never stays down and for once in my life, I’m grateful for knowing that. Plus, he’s a Phoenix, remember? He rises out of the ashes. Be strong and hang in there. I’ll be there soon.”
“I love you, Bowie,” I say.
Bowie groans. “Don’t say it just fucking because you’re scared something is happening to us. I want you to mean that shit, Bams.”
“Bow, I mean it.” I say with conviction.
“Then when you see me, look me in my fucking eyes and say it to me. None of this hiding behind the phone shit.”
“Okay.”
“And Bambi?” He calls out to me.
“Yes, Bowie?”
“I love you too. Now, go make sure our best friend is fine. I’ll kick his ass for making you worry like that.”
I lightly chuckle. “Okay, Bowie.”
He hangs up just as fast as he called.
Bowie’s call calmed me down some and deep down, I know that he did it on purpose. He called me acting like he isn’t worried and it helped me calm down. Once we get to the hospital we go through a private entrance. Had I been paying attention to I would’ve realized that this isn’t the part of BHM that I’ve ever seen before. I hear our steps and when I see Orion’s back while he stares at something through the glass. He plants his palm on the glass and a small woman is standing next to him but not too close. I don’t know who she is but it makes me wonder if he has a girlfriend or wife now. She looks familiar though. I can feel as Andres brings me closer to the glass. The second I see Phoenix connected to the tubes, all the blood and the doctor doing his job I gasp and my breath comes out rugged.
I don’t know what to say but I can’t move. It’s like my life is now on pause. Nothing is moving forward or backward. Nothing around me makes sense. How can it?
“He lost a lot of blood,” I hear Orion saying. I can’t bring myself to look at him but he continues. “He was doing what he does best, protecting people before himself and now, he’s in there, fighting for his life. When he makes it, I’m going to fucking kill him because he never listens. He never puts himself first!” Orion yells out.
I take a step back away from the glass and then another. Before I know it, I turn. I run away from the beeping of the machines and as I reach a pair of double doors; it opens. I stop in my tracks as I loop up at Bowie, my brows crease, am I hallucinating? He looks at me with worry in his eyes and he eats up the steps left to get to me, then pulls me into his arms. He holds me not saying anything and even though we’re silent, that moment of peace is broken because there’s a beeping sound so loud that anyone could hear it. A beeping that no one in their right mind could ever forget.
It’s the flat beeping showing that someone died. I stop breathing hard, I can feel my universe spinning. Bowie lets me go as if his world just flipped on its axis. I’m not sure which one of us runs towards the room first but we get there at the same time, I slam my palms on the glass. I open my mouth to call his name, but nothing comes out. I hear a doctor yell out. “Get me the crash cart, do everything on my command.”
I release a loud sob, feeling like I’m losing every part of me. This can’t be it. This can’t be happening. Not Phoenix. No, not him. I watch as they use the defibrillator and then the chest compressions. Everything falls away as I slam my hands on the glass. They need to wake him up. “Phoenix! Phoenix!” I yell.
After the third time, the doctor stops his chest compressions. “Call it.” He says to his staff around him. I can’t see his face, but the people around look up at the glass and they are afraid.
“No! No!” I slip away from the glass and I don’t know when I took my heels off, but I do everything against the rules. I run into the operating room and bypass everyone pumping my legs like I’m some kind of track star. Someone grabs me and stops me, but I maneuver my small body out of their hold courtesy of my self-defense training. I want to apologize to the person, but I can’t concentrate past Phoenix. I climb onto the bed, straddle Phoenix’s body, not caring if his blood gets all over my clothes. I give chest compressions.
“You’re not fucking dying, Nix!” I shake my head. “No. No! You big HIJO DE PUTA!” I switch to Spanish. I don’t remember the last time I spoke Spanish. I feel hands trying to pull me away, but I’m not budging. I don’t know
where I gain the strength to not be pulled off from, but it’s here. “I promise, I’ll make your favorite, Arroz con leche and I won’t complain about making it for you. Please don’t be like this.”
“Leave her!” I hear Orion’s voice as he shouts in the operating room. If I wasn’t so focused, I would’ve peed my pants at the authority in the bass of his voice.
I keep pumping, tears taking over, my hands bloodied but I don’t quit. “I will never give up on you, Phoenix. No, not like this. Nixy, you mean the world to me. Come back to us and I’ll marry you guys again. I’ll do it.” I cry out. “I swear it, I’ll do it. I’ll do anything you both ask of me. I love you! You hear me? I LOVE YOU!!! Please! Please! Por Favor! Baby PLEASE!” I scream. I let out a crazy sob. “Get up, Markos!” The beeping starts. The irony doesn’t fail me but I can’t seem to focus on the fact that Phoenix would come back just because I called him Markos instead of Phoenix.
“We’ve got a pulse!” Someone yells from behind me. “Ma’am, please stop pumping, let us do our jobs now.”
I stop pumping but turn towards the doctor, he must be the doctor Nash that Andres was talking about. I look him up and down, glaring. “Vete al infierno! Your job?” I say. “Your job! Vete al coño! If you were doing your job, he would’ve never fucking died. Hijo de puta!” I’m so angry that for the first time in my life, I want to swing on someone. “My husband died! He fucking died! Cabron! HE DIED! Fuck your job! Fuck your hospital! Fuck your position! Hijo de puta!”
The doctor just sort of stares at me like he’s stuck between taking me seriously and laughing. I must look crazy because I feel crazy.
I feel an arm wrap around me and scoop me up like I weigh nothing, but I don’t stop raging. “How dare you try to call it? How! Are you fucking crazy? If he would’ve died, I would’ve killed every single person in this room! Don’t you dare fail him again!”
The man who’s holding me moves us back to a corner and we sink to the floor.
“Thank you.” I hear Orion’s voice in my ear, and I sob loudly as he holds me. I hear sniffling and I know Orion is also crying.
There’s no way I’m ever letting Phoenix go now. No one can ever take him from me again.
Bowie
I watched everything happen from our Bambi saving Phoenix’s life to her cursing the doctor out. I’ve never really seen that side of her much, but I love it. I love how protective she is, or rather that she’s become like. I couldn’t move my legs to go into the room. It’s like everything in me is locked up. I haven’t been the same since my biological mother passed away from loneliness. Although I never really understood what it was like to lose a mother, I didn’t get the chance to know it still affected me. Sort of stunted me in a way. That impromptu trip that my father and his wife, who I learned to call mother, made me take was for her funeral preparations.
My father lied and told me she died from the sickle cell anemia that she had but Mother told me it was from that and a mixture of loneliness. Her words were always “you see Bowie, dear. No one on this planet is meant to be alone. You may come into this world and leave alone, but it doesn't mean you live it alone. You need someone, anyone to numb the ache. I have your father but you, you’ll have no one. Just like your mother, you tried to take what was mine, I took what was hers. Now, you’ll both always suffer with the loneliness eating away at you.”
She was right, because when I came back, it ripped apart my world. I didn’t know how to mend the relationships that were broken so I ran away instead of facing it head on. I ran away from the skeletons in my closet, from everything and now, here I am, having to face one head-on. The moment I heard the machine flat-lining, I couldn’t think for myself. I ran towards the glass with Bambi but I wasn’t myself. I was on autopilot. I prayed for the first time in my life for my best friend to come back. For the first person who made the loneliness less lonely and much bearable. For the person who introduced me to two different loves the love of friendship and brotherhood and the love of my life. A love so profound, so deep, so worth risking everything. He deserved to live. He deserves everything. It doesn’t even matter what it is. “Open your eyes, Nix. Come on, brother. You can’t die like this. Not like this man,” I whisper. I shut my eyes and lay my forehead on the glass, feeling the tears I’ve never truly produced leave my eyes. My mind goes dark. It goes somewhere that I’ve never wanted it to go after I gave up fighting. All of my fights come back to me like some scenery and I relish in the pain that showed only through the bruises on my body. I grit my teeth as if I’m there. The hits that made me feel alive, that made me feel human again and then after, when I knocked the other one out. My best friend, my brother would come sometimes and each time, he gave me a smile that reached his eyes. One that people who don’t know him think is not genuine. The ones who judge him by his condition. They know nothing because they never give him a chance. How can someone who doesn’t feel teach me the meaning of Philia love and again, lead me towards the woman that shows me what true Eros love is like? I feel a small hand slip into mine.
“He’s breathing…” Guinevere’s voice breaks through my dark moments and I let go of a breath I didn’t know I was holding in.
I feel a firm hand on my back, “it’s not like before, Bow, I know you know what I’m talking about. My son is strong, and this will never happen to him again,” Andres says.
I don’t know what causes me to break down and sob. I don’t move and neither do they. I’ve always searched for a family never having my own and now, it’s so clear, it almost knocks the breath out of me. I have a family. I have my two best friends: My wife and Phoenix. I have my brother, Orion, my cousin Jagger and the sister-in-law I never knew I needed, Ainslee, a new friend, Guinevere and a father, one that won’t put others before me. One who won’t make me feel less than because I broke down when my biological mother, the woman who gave birth to me yet couldn’t see me died because she missed me too much. Because she never got to hold me in her arms. I was snatched from her the second I was born but I will always love her even though I don’t know her. She would be proud of my new father. A father who would do anything to protect his family and the lost kid who fought in his underground fight club. He didn’t kick me out or make me tell him my story but he sat with me after every fight; he soothed my wounds. Not just the ones you could see but the ones that no one else bothered to look at. He made me do my homework, told me to be proud of who I was despite the asshole who stepped out on his wife because he couldn’t keep it in his pants. I am better. I am a Hanlon but I’m going to kick Phoenix's ass for scaring all of us and making me cry like I’m his bitch. Stupid asshole.
Chapter 12
Phoenix
I hear voices talking around me. I want to open my eyes, but something is preventing me. I try my best to open, but nothing. I feel like I’m underwater and just as quickly as I hear the voices, I’m out of it again.
Something isn’t right… I look out the window of the restaurant as a navigator pulls up and the car window rolls down. I take a deep breath and before I know it, my body jumps into action as I push Andres away and we both dodge the bullet that would’ve killed him instantly. I don’t think these idiots were out right aiming for us but someone knew this was going to happen. I don’t believe in coincidences in my line of work. I shield Andres as he tries to push me off so he could shield me instead. That won’t be happening soon, I’ll lose my life before he does if this is how it’s going down. The men we came with open fire and I do my best to get out of the restaurant. I lock eyes with a girl I’ve seen somewhere before but I can’t remember where. Her down-turned brown eyes and that submissive nature she radiates triggers a memory. I’ve seen her before, in Quebec, at Stannis’s nightclub. What is his niece doing here? I don’t need to help because someone is protecting her. This seems aimed for her and Andres is just a bonus.
I shake my head, not having time to think about all that. I rush out of there before someone gets an idea to do some dumb shit. We rush
through the kitchen and when we get outside, my fight or flight must’ve kicked in even more adrenaline because I don’t feel the knife. Not the first time, nor the second time. This man is fast and the only thing I can think about is saving my father. I don’t feel it even when Andres pulls out a gun tucked in his back and he shoots the masked man right in the head. He doesn’t focus on him or pull his mask off as he assesses what’s going on. He goes to pull the knife out of my gut but I stop him. “I don’t feel it, which means it’s poisoned, don’t pull it out,” I say through clenched teeth.
Andres catches me before I fall, not even sure when that happened. I hear him yelling at the men who are finally outside. I can feel it as the darkness takes over.
Something brings me back, and it feels like time has gone by and this time, I hear two voices I haven’t heard in a while.
“Daddy, daddy, is uncle Nix okay?” My nephew, Kal asks.
“He better be okay,” my oldest brother, Ares says. “You know your uncle, he loves the dramatic and flair, but I’ll kick his ass if he doesn’t wake up soon.”
“You’re the worst,” I groan. I open my eyes and stare into light brown eyes with specks of green. “Water,” I say.
Ares narrows his eyes at me but then gets me water. He doesn’t speak as he puts the straw to my mouth, and I empty the water. After the second round of drinking water, he slams the empty cup down.
Ares is staring at me like he wants to kill me. “You really want me to kill you, huh?” He threatens. His name fits him from the angry way he looks at me.
I snort and wince at the pain. “Your gray hairs are showing,” I tease, my voice still hoarse.
His dark hair filled with gray on the sides makes him look good for his age. He doesn’t really look like he’s 40, but then again that’s the Moralis gene. We have a shitty father, but at least he gave me two older brothers. That dumb fuck.