by Ranae Rose
“Happy birthday,” Maria echoed.
Her sentiments sounded genuine, but her words still broke the spell Ally’s embrace had cast. Leaning back, Ally gave up the intimate pose and cut him a piece of cake instead.
The dessert was amazing. When he told her so, she actually blushed.
“I’m glad you like it.”
He did. It was rich, sweet against his tongue but not too sweet. He enjoyed it, but with each bite, his happiness faded a little.
No matter how he tried, he couldn’t stop thinking about Manny and what Maria had said. Maybe that was for the best – somebody needed to think about it, because it was a problem. A serious one. The perfect evening Ally had created for him in her home only made the notion of Manny being there seem more wrong. He was a threat, plain and simple. The thought made Ryan’s stomach feel hollow despite everything he’d eaten.
“Is something wrong?” Ally caught his eye and held his gaze from across the table.
“I was thinking about your brother.”
“Sorry about that. My mother can’t help worrying about him, even after all he’s done.”
He shook his head. “No, I understand that. I was thinking about how he’s started coming around here again. I’m afraid he’ll bring that sort of violence to your doorstep.”
A knowing look flashed in her eyes. “That’s why we didn’t want him to come around in the first place. His lifestyle… We know it can be dangerous.”
“But you agreed to be in his wedding.” When he’d heard that, the knowledge had been like a punch to the gut.
“I didn’t know what else to do. He just keeps showing up, you know?”
He leaned across the table, maintaining eye contact. “And you and your mother – you let him in. You agree to be a part of his life. And you endanger yourselves by accepting his presence in yours.” He sounded angrier than he’d meant to, but he couldn’t help it.
“You make it sound simpler than it really is. You don’t know what he’s like. If we didn’t let him in, he’d stand on our doorstep until we did. He wouldn’t just go away. When he wants something, he’s persistent.”
“So? Look, I know he’s put you both in a tough situation, but you can’t just let him endanger you. He showed up at your house this morning with wounds from a knife fight. What if the person who gave him those wounds follows him here next time?”
“His injuries might have been from something else. My mother is just guessing.”
He didn’t drop his gaze – he knew she was smarter than that. She didn’t just assume that the best possible scenario was actually the case. “Why are you defending him? Is this because of what we talked about – is it because you feel guilty over what he claims to have done for you? Because if it is—”
She jerked back, her eyes going wide before she narrowed them in his direction. “Stop it, Ryan. I don’t want to talk about that right now. I just—”
“I’m just worried about you.”
She leaned back further, like she was trying to put more distance between them.
He reached across the table with his good hand and took one of hers, clutching her fingers. He hadn’t meant to hurt her, but how could he get through the conversation without doing so? Manny was a touchy subject. Everything was a touchy subject.
“It’s nice that you care, but what do you want me to do about it? This is my family – this is my life.”
“Come stay at my place,” he said, squeezing her fingers and willing her to agree. The idea of having her safe and sound somewhere where he could protect her and Manny wouldn’t bother her was the only thing that eased his fear. “You’ll be safe there.”
Her eyes widened again, but she didn’t pull her hand out of his. “Stay with you?”
Chapter 19
He nodded. “For however long you need. Permanently, if you want to.”
“I can’t just up and leave my mother to deal with all this on her own.”
“I feel bad about your mother. But hell, Ally… I can’t just go home and leave you here knowing you might be hurt as a result of your brother’s decisions. How am I supposed to sleep at night?” He couldn’t offer much in the way of help to Maria, who seemed to want to see more of Manny. But he could keep Ally safe, if she’d just let him.
“Maybe now you know how I felt when you were participating in Cameron’s events. Every fight was a risk you couldn’t afford to take, but you did it anyway. And you expected me to watch from outside the cage and cheer you on.”
“That was different.”
“Yeah, it was different because your participation in those fights was strictly voluntary. I didn’t sign up for Manny to start coming around again. It just happened, and I’m doing my best to deal with it.”
“I couldn’t just not fight.” He’d needed it like he’d needed his next breath. She didn’t need Manny – she didn’t even want him around.
“Why not?”
“Because… Fighting is the only damn thing I’m still good at. And besides you, it’s the only thing I give a damn about anymore. Giving it up would be like lying down and waiting to die.”
He’d thought she’d understood that on some level. She was a fighter too, and fighting competitively wasn’t something that was done on a whim. The training, the pain, the risks – doing it right required total dedication. How could she be glad that had been taken away from him?
“Never mind that now. You can’t fight with a cast on your arm. The point is, I can’t just leave my mother to stay safe and sound with you, as appealing as that sounds. Sorry.”
“What about tonight? You could stay with me tonight, at least.” He was gripping her hand tightly – more tightly than he’d meant to – but he couldn’t seem to get his fingers to loosen.
“I have work tomorrow morning. And after seeing Manny hurt, I know my mother is upset. I should be with her tonight.”
Her rejection gave him the will to finally let go of her hand. He couldn’t argue with her anymore – not without blowing up and fucking everything up again. So he pushed back his chair instead, sitting up straight, ready to leave.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I would if I could. I don’t take any pleasure in knowing that you’re worried.”
“Going down with the ship.”
“What?”
“That’s what you’re doing. Your family is a sinking ship, and you’re choosing to go down with it. You have a choice; you just won’t consider any other option.” Watching her cling to her loyalty to her family at the expense of her own safety was so fucking hard to watch.
So was the way she stared at him, looking hurt and angry at the same time. Still, he was angry too, and knowing she was in danger and wouldn’t let him protect her hurt like nothing else.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “My family isn’t like yours. Walking away isn’t an option.”
He actually felt a fat vein in the side of his neck throb. “I’m not asking you to walk away. I’m only asking you to stay the night at my place, where you’ll be safe.” One last try.
“I didn’t mean—” She turned, eyes going wide as the angry set of her mouth softened into a frown. “Mamá.”
Maria had appeared at the end of the hall and stood at the edge of the kitchen’s tiled floor. It was impossible to know how much she’d heard.
He pushed back his chair even further and rose. “I was just leaving. Thanks for having me, Mrs. Rivera. Dinner was great.”
Ally stood too, walking close by his side as he made his way toward the door. “How are you going to get home?”
“In my car.”
“But you can’t drive. Do you want me to—”
Her suggestion lent his anger a sharp edge. After all the bullshit she’d given him and the way she’d refused to let him shelter her from life-threatening danger, how could she actually imply that he needed her to drive him around for safety reasons? “I can drive. I don’t need you to chauffer me.”
She lowered her
gaze to his cast. “With your arm—”
A cold blast of evening air rushed in when he pulled the front door open. He wore only a t-shirt, but the frigid blast was a welcome distraction. If only it could cool his anger as quickly as it cooled his skin. “Good night, Ally.”
“Ryan…”
He looked her in the eye and resisted the urge to beg her one last time to come with him. “Thanks for dinner. Goodnight.”
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.”