Once I finished recounting what I dared to remember of the terror, the detective filed my paperwork away with a promise to contact me. The problem, the man told me, lay in the high-profile nature of the man I accused. It was easy enough to cry foul for the sheer intent to extort some form of monetary compensation from a man of his stature.
Ethan’s warnings reeled through my head again. Damn the consequences. Ethan didn’t have that power over me. I would make certain of it. Noah’s fiery message to his brother didn’t prompt any retaliation thus far. None I saw, anyway. What he did or didn’t do to Noah in my absence was still a giant question mark. Neither Howard nor Charlie mentioned the arson investigation coming anywhere close to us when I spoke to them over the course of those weeks. A gasoline fire is one of the simplest things to see in a case of arson. No detectives had shown up at my apartment, though, and the detective also failed to question me about it when I gave my statement. Perhaps he’d not gotten word of it yet.
Small favors.
As messed up as I was, I grew to miss Noah. His parting words to me, that he wasn’t his brother, kept playing on loop during the moments when my head wasn’t occupied with trying to get back into a typical schedule. He was right of course. My life and outlook on the world changed for the better since I met him. Introvert turned extrovert. He brought out the best in me when we were together. It pained me to even think about leaving him behind. Or compare him to his brother for that matter.
I shot him a text for the first time in months one Friday evening asking if I could come over to talk. I was finally ready for that, at least. He replied almost immediately.
Noah: Is that even a question? The answer is always yes, love.
I wondered how he was managing with his business under the circumstances, if Ethan ever came back from his convenient last-minute business trip immediately before his house burnt to the ground, and if their entire structure would fall to pieces now that they were at each other’s throats. Why that, of all things, plagued my thoughts was beyond me.
It rained off and on the past week now that the seasons were finally showing their little bits of change. Drizzle slicked the streets that evening, then stopped, then returned in an annoying cycle. With the exception of the occasional errand and my trips to visit the new therapist, I hadn’t left my apartment most days. Every time I did I felt like an animal on alert, complete with watchful eyes for the threat of being followed. Today was no exception. Each dark car or unmarked van appeared to me like it harbored the potential to be an agent of Ethan’s. The fucker still had me scared shitless, which only pissed me off. For this reason I called a cab instead of driving. I was still far too jumpy to trust myself behind the wheel of any vehicle. One wrong judgment and I’d wind up dead in a ditch.
I paid the cabbie at Noah’s building and glanced around for one car I could’ve sworn had really been following me that time. Determined it was my overly-worried brain playing tricks on me, I shook it off and smiled at the doorman as he let me in.
All I knew, as I walked through the lobby toward the elevators, was that I wanted to see Noah. I had no clue what, exactly, I’d say, how awkward the conversation would be, or even if seeing him would sway my choice to go back to New York one way or the other. I stopped inside the lobby and sat in the lounge area with its post modern furniture and took my time rolling through the plethora of choices of topic; certain he’d either laugh at me or get all serious and say I was being evasive if I brought up small talk. Until I stepped inside the building I was sure I wanted to talk, but now every topic escaped or frightened me.
Suck it up, Piper.
I finally did. After a ten minute long stint staring at polished granite tiles on the floor through a glass coffee table, I made my way to the elevators once more. A couple got in beside me, and we rode up together in classic awkwardly silent fashion until they exited on the seventeenth floor and left me to ride to the top alone.
The elevator dinged. The doors slid open. I exited the elevator and turned left towards Noah’s apartment. Not two steps out of the elevator, I saw his door was open. He stood in the frame with his hands on either side of it with, wonder of wonders, Selene standing at the threshold in the hallway. My heart plummeted all forty-some-odd floors to the base of the building. There had to be a mistake. Her fingers were entwined in the fabric of his shirt as she had him pulled in for a deep kiss.
The chime of the elevator doors closing alerted them to my presence. Flustered, among a throng of other emotions swimming up from the depths in my brain, I caught the door before it closed without pulling my gaze away from them. I averted my eyes at the same time Noah looked at me.
My choice was made for me in that instant.
I slipped back into the elevator, never saying a word even though he quickly retracted his lips from hers to call after me. I pressed the L button on the panel in equal silence. Aside from Ethan, Selene was the absolute last person on the planet I wanted to lay eyes on for the remainder of my life. The last thing in the world I expected was to witness the heartless bitch shoving her tongue down Noah’s throat and Noah not possessing the wherewithal to push her away.
As the doors closed, Noah’s accusatory voice shot into the hall, though I didn’t hear his exact words over the blood throttling through my head. Then he was at the elevator doors too late. They sealed shut on his expression of shocked defeat.
My new phone started ringing almost immediately. I didn’t reach in my purse to check it. The ringing stopped half way out of the building. I refused to cry. Not in the elevator, not in the lobby, and I certainly wouldn’t cry in the cab home.
How dare she! How dare HE!
Fuck everything.
Out on the street, I took a right and walked. I just walked. I had no destination in mind, only the avid desire to be blocks and blocks away before I stopped to wave down a taxi. A handful of other people walked along the sidewalk in a staggered pattern around me; one couple here, a man on his phone there, an older woman moving at the speed of molasses on a winter’s night. I tried to weave between them as I walked my vehemence off at a near jog.
The ringing started up again. I let it. By then I found myself far enough away on a street with a much, much thinner crowd. I stepped into an alley to take a breather and collect myself.
I deflated against the red brick of an Italian restaurant for a few minutes, running my hands through my hair and pacing to keep the tears at bay. There was an explanation. There had to be. Noah would never, in a hundred lifetimes, willingly be in Selene’s general vicinity, let alone kiss her again after all she put him through.
Then why was he?
My father always taught me: never ask a question you weren’t prepared to have answered. This happened to be one of those questions I immediately regretted throwing out into the world. Crossing the street and headed in my direction was the muscle-bound member of Ethan’s entourage I dubbed Burly upon our last meeting. We locked eyes and, before I got the chance to backpedal too far into the dim alley in retreat, he pulled his tan jacket back to flash the gun on his hip at me.
I should have chosen a busier street to turn onto.
Burly casually snatched me by my arm and pulled me away from the main street, deeper into the darkness of the alley. When he stopped me we were half way in. Off to one side sat a pair of dumpsters, slick with water and muck putrefying the air with the tang of left-over grease and God knew what else.
“You know why I’m here,” he said as easily as if he were asking for the time.
I swallowed hard. The gun on his hip was pulled free. It took all of my will to not bolt straight away. The fact that he’d most certainly shoot me dead before I got ten feet from him somehow didn’t faze me in the slightest.
“I can guess.” My not leaving, my talking to the cops, my going back to Noah. Any or all of the above.
He backed me against the grime of the wall, gun secured in his grip, finger on the guard beside the trigger.
My phone r
ang anew. I glanced down at my bag, then back at the man. If anybody was walking past, they didn’t stop to offer their assistance, and I heard no footsteps above the distant sounds of traffic, collected rain streaming into gutters from rooftops, and the echo of my ringtone off the alley walls.
“Don’t even think about answering it.”
“Plan on offing me here? Make it look like a mugging gone wrong?”
“No, hadn’t quite thought of that one. It’s good though. I’ll take it into consideration.”
I clenched my fists at my side to chase away little tremors. He’d get zero satisfaction of seeing me shake. That much of my pride surly was still intact. “If you expect me to plead for my life, you’ve got another thing coming. May as well kill me and get it over with.”
His sight never left me as he reached for a small radio in his pocket. “I’ve got her in the alley behind Big Sal's Pizzeria,” he reported into it.
What a glamorous place to die.
The walkie fizzled. Ethan’s broken voice came over the radio. “Alive?”
“For the moment.” Burly flashed me a smirk.
“I’m on my way,” came the reply from the radio.
“Fire that gun,” I dared. “You’re sealing your own fate when you do. Nothing would make me happier.” Everyone in a ten block radius would hear it. Usain Bolt couldn’t run fast enough to get away.
He ignored my statement. “You didn’t skip town.”
“I’ve got a big problem with self-appointed authority giving me orders,” I told him.
He pushed the barrel of his pistol beneath my chin. “Big deal.”
“Big gun.”
“Big liability.”
He wasn’t referring to the gun.
The ringing phone stopped. I closed my eyes. This wasn’t my life. I was not going to die in some trashy back alley beside a couple of grungy green Waste Management dumpsters and a one-star pizza joint.
A short, high-pitched whistle startled both me and my assailant. We turned our heads collectively in time to see a clenched fist barreling towards us. An instant and one bone-crunching punch later, Burly was nothing more than a knocked-out crumpled heap at my feet. His gun slid out of his grip a good distance from him.
I looked up again to see Noah standing there, shaking the force of the blow out of his right hand. That was the second time he unknowingly helped me using my phone.
“Next time, remember to take the safety off, asshole,” he said. He looked over to me as he pocketed his cell phone with the hand that was not about to bruise. “You all right?”
I flung myself at him in response, jumping high enough to wrap my arms round his shoulders and bury my face in his neck. His arms were around me in turn. He held me aloft a moment longer and heaved out a long, grateful sigh. Once back on solid ground, Noah used both hands to push my hair back from my face and make sure I was unharmed.
I wasn’t sure if I was going to laugh or cry. “I’m sorry. I freaked. I cut and ran before you could explain. But you came after me. Why did you come after me?”
“You little fool. Of course I came after you. Back there—none of that was what it looked like. Selene arrived seconds before you—”
“You don’t have to explain now. I know. She was a trap.” I glanced back at the formerly conscious man. “Why else would one of Ethan’s guys be waiting for me outside? He called in to Ethan just before you showed up. He was going to kill me for coming back.”
Noah embraced me again, holding me tight and chasing his breath from our little game of cat and mouse. A torrent of memories crashed to the forefront of my mind now that we were suddenly touching again. I realized just how much comfort and solace I’d found in the way his fingers cradled the back of my head and absently stroked my hair when he held me. And the peppermint of his cologne which made me think Christmas was always just days away. I missed his warmth and the immovable rock he became for me.
Screw this, I thought as I clung to him, I’m staying in California. I’m fighting for what’s mine.
“I’ll fight,” I said, my voice muffled into the dark fabric of his button-down. “I’ll fight for everything.”
“Thank God. Listen, Howard was right. He’ll get what’s coming to him with the litany of crimes we have on him. It’s been a long time coming.”
I pulled away to look up at him. “What about you and the business?”
“I’m selling my half. I couldn’t care less about—” His eyes flicked up and past me suddenly. “Piper, move!”
The world exploded into an abrupt and unexpected blur of lamp-haloed amber streetlight and concrete. Noah shoved me out of his arms and off to the side of the alley. I grasped his hand so as not to careen into the wall on the opposite side. Noah’s sights were locked on the other end of the alleyway.
And on Ethan standing there, not thirty feet away.
And the revolver in his hand.
The gun went off as my fingers slipped from Noah’s. The wretched thwap of the bullet connecting with flesh rang into the air.
Noah fell back.
“NO!!” At first I rushed for him, but then it occurred to me that Ethan had only fired one shot. His gun was still loaded.
I’m still not sure how I managed to rummage for Burly’s gun so fast. A glint of streetlight narrowed my vision toward it. I snatched it up off the ground a few feet in front of the man and aimed at Ethan. Noah had taken me to the range. He taught me the basics. I was a fast learner even by a geek’s standards. It only took a quick flick of my thumb to release the safety.
Ethan leveled his gun at me. “Don’t be stupid, Piper; you don’t have the—”
The blast as I fired deafened my ears to however Ethan’s sentence planned on ending. And then I fired again. Not once, not twice, but until the bullets ran dry, the barrel locked itself back, and the gun went click a handful of times. I didn’t care how many hit him; all that mattered was that, once the ammunition ran dry, Ethan dropped face first into the grunge of stagnant water on the pavement left over from the rain.
This was me, repossessing my life and protecting what I could of Noah’s.
The world crashed back into me in a rush of sound once the ringing in my ears faded. Noah was hit and I was shaking like a leaf in a hurricane. The gun clattered to the street as I gathered myself just in time to hoarsely shout, “Someone, help!” before I collapsed to my knees at Noah’s side. My hands groped for something—anything—to hold onto to make the nightmare disappear. His eyes were still open, his chest still moving up and down in a frantic attempt at breath. With trembling hands, I put pressure on the tide of red leaking from the side of his chest and practically babbled, “Oh God, Noah, hold on. Stay awake. Help’s on the way. Don’t leave me. Not after everything we’ve been through. Please don’t leave me.”
Sirens wailed in the distance as I grasped his hand in mine. I wanted to believe someone else heard the gunshots. I wanted to believe those sirens were meant for us.
***
What just happened? And why did it all happen so fucking fast?
Every detail of the hospital was so vivid and whipped by so rapidly that once I took it in I almost immediately forgot it as the paramedics explained the situation to the staff, all of whom scrambled to take over care. I couldn’t focus on anything save what was occurring in front of me at any given moment. The ambulance ride, though only thirty seconds in my past, vanished from my memory while I followed the paramedics down the hallway.
One of them rattled off, “Single GSW to the chest, breathing is unstable; probable Pneumothorax to the left lung. BP dropping; currently—”
“What does that mean,” I demanded of the paramedic. The reaction was involuntary.
A nurse alongside us ordered, “Somebody get her out of here!”
Just then a large, rough hand clenched tight around my bicep and yanked me back. “Come with me, ma’am.”
I never even looked to see that it was a cop I was about to slam my fist into. “Get th
e hell off me! Noah, wake up!”
A second hand caught my fist before it connected. It took two grown, fully-muscled men all of their strength to wrangle me from my adrenaline-fueled pursuit of the gurney flying down the hospital hallway. I crashed bodily against the wall, shooting pain all the way down my back with the force to my still-healing scars there. It knocked the wind from me and rendered me silent. Tears of pain and desperation and horror streamed freely down my face.
“Ma’am, I need you to calm down and come with us.”
I choked, “I’m not leaving him.”
“They’ll take care of him. You’ll only make it harder for them to do their jobs.”
He got shot. I just got him back and he got shot. He took a bullet for me. My clothes and shaking hands were stained with his blood because that was the sort of man Noah was.
The officers escorted me through the sterile building to an even more sterile room secluded on the third floor of the hospital. A small round table comprised of particleboard, more than likely from IKEA, rested against one of the white walls in the tiny, windowless room. They sat me in an off-white plastic and metal chair to wait.
And wait.
And wait some more.
With no clock on the walls, I once again didn’t have any grasp on time. My mind reeled on loop through the events. Memories always came to me in third person. I pictured myself, Burly, Noah, and Ethan like the pieces on a chess board in the alley instead of the way I truly saw things through my eyes. The fucked-up things trauma did to a person, I swear.
A nurse came in to check on me at one point. She wouldn’t acknowledge my questions about Noah or Ethan. Her only priority seemed to be to make sure I wasn’t hurt. She left abruptly after brief examination, stating she would return shortly to clean what she could of the blood off my hands. Shortly, in hospital time, meant at least an hour. One of the officers who escorted me into the room stood inside the cracked door. I wasn’t sure if he was positioned so strategically to keep me in or to keep others out. Both, maybe.
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