My dreams were fevered, full of images and things my mind couldn’t quite comprehend. I saw Malaika, I saw my mother and father, my brother. I saw the Guardians as they were the night of the raid, and again as they were when they attacked at the hotel. I fought them in my mind, only to find they’d morphed into Truesdale and his wife, into Jack and Crispin and Matthew, people I knew, some whom I trusted, some I hated. Some I just wasn’t sure about. I fought for hours, always exhausted before, during, and after. So exhausted, like weights were holding me down. But I kept fighting.

When I finally opened my eyes, Malaika was there.

“You fucking shit!”

I smiled, my lips cracked and covered in some sort of disgusting paste. “What?”

“I thought you were dying!” She slapped my shoulder. “I came so close to calling 911 a dozen times over the past three days!”

“Three?”

“Yeah, asshole! You’ve been asleep three days, burning up with fever! You could have died!”

“But I’m still here.”

“Stinking like a pig!”

“Thank you.”

She leaned into me, kissed my forehead several times. She didn’t stink. In fact, she smelled like lavender and roses and all the best things about being a woman. I pulled her close and just took deep breaths of that incredible scent.

“I thought you were dead.”

“I’m not. And I’m going to prove it to you as soon as I clean up.”

She slapped my shoulder again, but she was laughing. “You couldn’t prove shit to anyone right now.”

“You want to see?” I grabbed the center of her shirt and jerked her down onto the bed. She squealed. “I’ll show you!”

But pain was burning in my chest. Not quite as bad as before, but bad enough. I grunted, and she rolled to one side, curling up against the uninjured angle of my chest. She chuckled a little, but it turned into a sob. She cried against me, her tears running down my sides. I stroked her hair and let her cry. I didn’t know what else to do.

She cried for a long time. I don’t think I’d ever felt quite that inadequate.

 

 

Showering was a trick. I didn’t want to get the stitches too terribly wet, but the blood drying all around it and below it was grossing me out. Malaika came into the room while I was standing there, struggling to keep my weak knees underneath me, and added to the struggle by climbing in completely naked.

I was sick. I wasn’t dead.

She soaped up a rag and gently scrubbed my side, sighing with relief as the clean wound proved to show fewer signs of infection than before.

“How do you know all this?”

Without looking up, she said, “My mother is a surgeon.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Nope. Sometimes I wish I was.” She ran her rag over my chest and along my shoulders. “My father works for the state government. My brother is an oncologist, and my sister is a college professor. At Harvard. One of the youngest ever offered tenure.”

“Impressive.”

“Yes. I’m the afterthought, the late-in-life child who will never be the overachiever that they all are.”

“I wouldn’t say that being an executive at a large bank is underachieving.”

“If I was an only child? Maybe not. But compared to all of them? Definitely.”

“You shouldn’t compare yourself to other people.”

She snorted. “Why were you destroying Truesdale’s life?”

“I don’t compare myself to my family. I’m trying to help them.”

“It’s not your job to make things right for your parents.”

“Touché.”

I touched her face, drew her close to me. She sighed as our lips touched, but then she pulled away, forcing me to face the stream of water. She washed my back, her hand moving slowly and gently, like a mother bathing her child. I leaned forward, holding myself up with my hands on the wall, and closed my eyes. Exhaustion burned behind my eyes despite the past three days of sleep she swore I’d had. But, with her touch, I could feel my strength coming back.

We dressed—her quickly, and me, much more slowly—and she forced me to eat two bowls of soup she heated in the microwave, and to drink as much Gatorade as I could stand.

I never wanted to see another bottle of Gatorade again.

“Can I ask you something?”

She tilted her head. “No, I won’t have sex with you until you’re fully recovered.”

I pushed out my bottom lip, forcing a pout. “That’s not what I was going to ask, but I have to say, that is pretty cruel. I took a bullet for you, woman!”

“And you need to heal. You ran a high fever for two days.”

I lowered my head, accepting that bit of defeat. “I was actually wondering about something you said the other day. About a teenager who ran off with a self-proclaimed gangster?”

“I was hoping you’d missed that little tidbit.”

“Not a chance.”

She picked at the leftover vegetables in the bottom of her bowl of soup, trying not to look up at me. Her hair fell into her face, dark curls hiding her face. When she sighed, the curls shifted slightly, revealing one eye full of dark memories.

“I was sixteen. My brother and sister were both gone, one in the first year of residency, and the other in a Master’s program. I was failing my calculus class and feeling neglected at home because my parents were so rarely there. So, when I met this guy who claimed he loved me, I believed him.” She peeked at me. “Typical little rich girl story.”

“You ran away with him?” I prompted.

“Yeah. Lived with him on the great, mean streets of Albuquerque for nearly a year. My father tried to pay him off twice, but he didn’t offer nearly enough. This guy—he was twenty-four and thought he was the smartest guy ever—thought if he waited long enough, my dad would offer him a million to get me back. The most he ever offered was ten thousand.”

“I would offer a billion.”

She smiled, her full lips glistening from the moisture of the soup. “Thanks.”

I pulled her feet into my lap and leaned back against the headboard, rubbing them as I waited for her to go on with her story.

“He was one of those guys who always thought he had the perfect scheme to get rich. He would rob these small businesses, take his crew and plan these bigger and bigger scams. Sold fake watches on the street, stole wallets and sold the identities inside. Ran a credit card scam to buy all this crap on the internet, and then turn around and sell it again. Anything to keep from working.” She shook her head. “I look back on it and wonder what I ever saw in him.”

“You loved him.”

“He was a prick. He’d just as soon hit me as do anything else with me. And when one of his crew would get shot or beaten, he’d bring them to me like he thought I’d learned medicine through osmosis, just from being around my mom and my brother. Guy was a fucking idiot!”

“How did you finally get away?”

“I broke into my mom’s office one night to steal some antibiotics for one of his buddies. She caught me, forced me to go to rehab. She thought I was using drugs, of all things.” She shook her head. “They did. I never did. I wasn’t that stupid.”

“But you got free.”

“I did. Spent two months in a mental health facility when they figured out I wasn’t on drugs, angry as all hell, but I got away.” She brushed at her hair, wiggling her feet to remind me to keep rubbing them. “Never went home again. I went straight from the hospital to boarding school to college. We live in the same city now, but I don’t go home. I can’t stand the idea of being under that roof again.”

“You speak to your parents.”

“Once a week. Like a condition of my parole.”

I ran my hand up her calf, rubbing at the muscles that were knotted up there, like all her muscles seemed to be.

“You’re a survivor, Malaika.”

“I’m an afterthought. A mistake.”

“Don’t say that. No child is ever a mistake.”

She shook her head, reaching up to wipe away a tear. “That’s not what they said. You should have heard them talk about me when I was little, like I was this great inconvenience. They had the perfect family before I came along. My mom thought she was in menopause, that her symptoms were just a manifestation of that. By the time she realized she was wrong, it was too late to get an abortion. A month sooner…I wouldn’t be here.”

“I’m glad you are.”

I held out my arms to her, and she crawled into them, resting her head on my shoulder. I ran my hand slowly down her back, wanting to touch her but aware that she was right about allowing my wound to heal. She’d saved my life. I wanted to save her.

We kissed, slowly, those kinds of kisses that you savor like an expensive wine. She tasted sweet and savory all at once, the lingering taste of her soup still on her tongue. And more. The taste of her lotion, of her essence somewhere buried under it all. I couldn’t get enough of it.

This woman had somehow managed to get under my skin in a very short time. And I wanted her to stay there for always.

I’d never wanted a woman to stick around before.