Charlotte

Five days later, I still remembered that moment with perfect clarity.

The motion of Estelle’s arm. The sound—a bang, so like fireworks, and yet not. Devon and Max were out of the car, running across the street, shouting. Kids were screaming in the park, parents running to grab their children. People were shouting and running for cover on the sidewalk. The two bikers on the corner were running toward Estelle. Traffic was stopping. I saw all of it like it was on camera, like I could see every part of the frame at the same time.

And in the middle of the frame was Ben. He slid off the park bench to the ground, and—oh, God—he started to bleed. And bleed. And bleed.

There was so much blood by the time I got to him. It had soaked his shirt, his jacket, and was dribbling onto the pavement. He was pale and gray and unmoving. He loves that jacket, was the crazy thought that went through my head. He’s going to be so upset it’s ruined.

I was told later that a bunch of other things happened: Devon wrestled Estelle to the ground and kicked the gun out of her hand; Max punched out one of the bikers when he tried to interfere; Estelle screamed like a crazy woman. It was a huge scene, her shooting Ben right there in public, in daylight, with little kids thirty feet away. It would be in the news in South San Francisco for days.

I didn’t remember any of that. I didn’t remember much past Ben’s jacket and his gray face and the dribbling of blood on the pavement. Like someone had turned the knob on a garden hose.

I still remembered that five days later.

He’d had one surgery, and then another. The bullet was lodged inside him, in his chest, and it had to come out. Then there was too much bleeding, and a surgery to stop the bleeding. My beautiful, sexy, wicked, smart, fucked-up man, the one who believed in me and protected me and would do anything for me. He nearly bled to death. I thought I would lose my mind.

But I didn’t. I didn’t even cry. I sat stoic, and I waited. In waiting room after waiting room, hospital corridor after hospital corridor. I stared at the industrial cream walls and thought about nothing and I waited.

Devon and Max came and went; they dealt with the details with the cops and whoever else they had to talk to. I didn’t know. Olivia stayed with me a lot, and Max’s wife Gwen—who was Olivia’s sister—stayed too. Gwen was blonde and sensationally beautiful, even in jeans and a zip-up gray sweatshirt, and when she sat next to her sister the resemblance was obvious. They both brought me tea and made sure I slept sometimes.

Devon’s brother Cavan came, too, with his wife Dani. They lived in Portland, but they came for Ben. Cavan was so different from Devon—lean and tawny where Devon was a muscled jungle cat, laid back where Devon was intense. But he was bred from the same stock as his brother: fearless, protective, ready for anything. Dani was tall and slim, with sleek dark hair to her shoulders. She was, quite possibly, the sweetest woman I’d ever met. She took one look at me, put her arm around my shoulders, and let me lean on her until I was okay again.

Estelle, they told me, had been arrested. There was a lot of press, mostly because the shooting was so public. Ben was written of as “the son of the late noted attorney Michael Hanratty” and “a lawyer who has worked for the Lake of Fire motorcycle club for the past ten years.” Like the only thing they could think of to say about him was that he was a biker lawyer who hadn’t lived up to his father’s reputation.

“He’s more than that,” I said to Max when he’d read some of the article out loud to me from his phone. I was so tired, I couldn’t say it in words. But they hadn’t talked about Ben as a man or a friend or a boss or a lover. As someone who’d changed me and given me the best night of my life and been nearly killed protecting me in his way. They didn’t say any of those things.

“Yeah, he is,” Max agreed. I liked Max; he was big and solid with muscle, but he was easy to be around. Probably because his default was that he was painfully shy and didn’t require any small talk. You could sit for hours with Max and not talk at all, and he would find that perfectly okay. “He’ll be fine, you know,” Max told me gruffly. “He’s healthy as a fucking horse. You should get some sleep.”

So I napped on a hospital bench, and when I woke up there was a woman sitting next to me. I didn’t recognize her. She was about thirty, a big woman with large breasts and big round hips. She wore a flowy top and leggings like a woman who rocked her figure, and her brown hair was tied in a messy topknot. “You’re her,” she said when I sat up and looked at her. “The assistant.”

I blinked. I had a moment of sheer terror that this was the ex-wife—but no. She looked nothing like the photo I’d seen, which meant she could only be one person. “You’re his sister,” I said.

She nodded and swallowed hard, and I noticed that her eyes were red, her cheeks soaked. I wondered how long she’d been sitting here crying while I slept. “Theresa,” she said, introducing herself. “He told me about you.”

“He did?” I said in surprise.

She nodded again. “He told me he had a new assistant,” she said. “He said you were driving him crazy.”

I’d had no idea he’d talked to his sister about me. “That’s all he said?” I asked her, suddenly hungry to hear it. “That I drive him crazy?”

She sniffed, and more tears poured down her cheeks. “Tee, there’s a woman. That’s what he said when I called him—just like that. Tee, there’s a woman. Her name is Charlotte. I hired her as my assistant. I think she’s going to drive me crazy. He’s never talked to me about a woman—not once since the divorce. Not even Hey, there was a pretty girl at the grocery store today. Not a breath of a word. And I bugged him about it all the time. I know my brother, and I heard the tone in his voice, and I thought, No way. Nuh-uh, this can’t be happening. Not after all this time.” She mopped her cheeks with the palms of her hands, wiped her hands on her leggings. “He probably told you I’m a pain,” she said. “But he’s my brother. I want him happy, because he’s my favorite person.”

And just like that, I loved her.

Tee said the press was having a heyday with the shooting. Now they were writing about public safety and whether there should be security guards in public parks. It had been a juicy story at first, mostly because Estelle was a woman from a biker club. Everyone wanted to know why she’d shot a lawyer. Was he blackmailing her? Were they lovers? It made for a good episode of Sons of Anarchy, but only for a short time. In the end, it was just some trashy woman going crazy and shooting a lawyer who probably deserved it. Estelle wasn’t talking from prison, and Ben wasn’t talking from his hospital bed. So they found other things to write about.

We talked for hours, and then Tee went home, because she had a husband and two kids. “Are you going home?” she asked me.

“He’ll wake up soon,” I said. “I’ll stay.”

She picked up her purse, then turned to me, biting her lip. “I guess he told you about Slutty McSlutface,” she said.

Even in my exhaustion, it was sort of funny. Everyone had a hideous nickname for Janice. “Yes, he did.”

“It was a long time ago,” Tee said, “and he moved on. But he always assumed he’d be alone forever, you know? That that was just the way it would be.” She gave me a small smile. “I’m glad to know he was wrong.”

I said goodbye to her and walked back down the corridor to Ben’s room. Everyone else had gone, and I was alone now. I walked in to find him propped up in bed, drinking water from a Styrofoam cup.

I stopped and stared at him. He was bruised, and bandaged, and pale, but he was awake. He put the cup down and looked at me.

“Damn,” he said, his voice raspy. “It’s good to see you.”

I walked to the bed and sat on the edge. “How do you feel?” I asked, my voice shaky.

“Good,” he said. He picked up my hand from the bed and kissed the back, then turned it over and kissed the palm, my wrist. “Better now.”

I wasn’t really sure anymore how I’d ever resisted him. “Everyone’s been here,” I told him. “Your billionaire clients, their wives. Tee. They all assume I’m your girlfriend.”

“You are,” he said, kissing my wrist again. “Unless you’re dumping me in my hospital bed. Which I don’t advise.”

He assumed he’d be alone forever, Tee had said. “I’m not dumping you,” I told him. “Not ever.”

He was quiet for a minute. “All right,” he said. Then he leaned back against the pillows, a glint in his gray-blue eyes. “You look good,” he said. “When can we have sex?”

I ignored the happiness that turned over in my chest. “You’re a horndog,” I told him. “You just woke up, and I do not look good.”

“Oh, man, I disagree,” he said, his gaze traveling down me, and then up—T-shirt, messy hair, and all. “I feel like someone ran over me with a Hummer, but you’re a very sexy woman.”

I leaned over and kissed him. “No sex until you get home.”

“At least take your shirt off.”

“Nope.” I kissed him again, then stood up. “Now get some rest.”

“Where are you going?” he asked. “I just woke up.”

“To wrap up a few things. Take care of the details, like I always do.”

He looked a little alarmed. “What details, Charlotte? Shit. Don’t sell my house,” he said as I walked to the door. “I like it.”

“No promises,” I told him, and I left. But as I walked back down the corridor, I was smiling.