“It looks worse than it is,” Max replies, but his breathing is ragged, his voice rough. He doesn’t sound good at all. I rip off my cardigan and tie it around his torso to stem the blood flow as much as I can.
“Maggie, come with me,” Felix is saying, and I look up to meet my former roommate’s terrified eyes. She looks like hell, which is only fitting considering the fact that she’s just had a long, torturous walk through the inferno itself. We exchange knowing nods and she wordlessly goes with Felix, the two of them racing away to meet the cab.
“I’m going to drive you to get help,” I explain to Max, forcing my voice not to tremble. “I’ll need you to tell me the way, alright?”
“Do you even know how to drive a stick shift?” he asks, his eyelids fluttering. The color is draining from his gorgeous face, and I know this needs to happen fast.
“Kind of. I’ll make it work,” I insist, urging him gently to move into the passenger seat. With a painful lurch he lumbers out of the driver’s side and walks around the front of the car, holding a hand to his chest with the other out to steady himself on the hood of the vehicle. He limps slowly around and into the seat, slumping back with an expression of intense agony on his face. I jump behind the wheel, murmuring to myself the tips my dad tried to instill in me in regards to driving a manual.
“Foot on the clutch,” I whisper, reaching down to fling the car into first gear. To my infinite relief, the knowledge comes trickling back to me through the fog of panic in my brain. Max gives me mumbled directions as we make the jerky, awkward drive back into town toward the nearest hospital.
By the time we finally get there, Max is conked out entirely, his eyes having rolled back into his head. But I am in survival mode, my former frenzy sharpened into a needle-point focus. Mustering all my strength, I all but carry his enormous weight to the glass doors of the emergency room, the two of us collapsing to the tile floor. Overwhelmed and exhausted, I black out amidst the frantic muttering of French doctors and nurses.
One week later, we’re finally home from the hospital, both on the mend. Turns out, my lack of proper sleep coupled with extreme stress resulted in my having a physical breakdown of sorts. I was booked into a hospital room alongside Max, for exhaustion and overexertion. Next to Max’s gunshot wound, I felt a little silly and weak, but the doctors assured me that I would be much better off repairing my body in the hospital. Besides, I think they caught onto the fact that I would probably be glued to Max’s side. If I was going to spend every second in the hospital room anyway, I might as well be getting treatment, too.
But now we’re both doing much better. I feel rejuvenated and relieved after our brush with near death. Max is up and mobile again, nearly back to his former strength already. Turns out, the bullet only grazed his left lung, too high up to fully puncture it or his heart. He is beyond lucky to have survived. Any further south and that bullet would have certainly killed him.
In the couple of days since leaving the hospital, Max has been fighting the desire to get up to his old ways again — not the hitman life, but the athletics. He wants to run and work out like he used to, but the doctors have urged me to keep him from doing anything too strenuous. To keep him busy and keep his mind off his current predicament, I’ve asked him to train me in self-defence so that he can live vicariously through me while he’s on the mend.
Granted, it’s not only self-defence he’s been teaching me… Now that we’re through the storm without any other distractions, we can explore each other’s bodies like we couldn’t before. And with his wound, I have been trying my best to give him all the TLC he deserves. Just because his body is weakened at the moment doesn’t mean I have to tone down my own physical abilities. And I am a gymnast, after all.
We’ve also done some weapons training. Even though I dislike guns, I still feel as though it would be beneficial for me to learn how to use one properly, just in case the situation ever arises that I need it. And with Max’s past still looming over us, it’s entirely possible that such a situation may very well find us again. Especially right now, with Max vulnerable, I am more determined than ever to learn how to defend myself. And him.
Not that I’m allowing that dark cloud to rain on our little niche of paradise, though. One upside to Max’s being on the mend is that we get a lot of quiet, soft time together, just the two of us. Tending to his wound and seeing a more exposed, tender side of him has been an eye-opening experience, a glimpse into how beautiful and complex his heart truly is. Underneath the layers of diamond-hard armor is an amazingly sweet man. We’ve spent many a night curled up in bed together, talking until the wee hours, baring our souls to each other. And during one of these late-night sessions, he let slip that he wanted to make this — us — official. It wasn’t exactly a proposal; more like a natural development of our current bond. It is a question that doesn’t need asking. Our union is inevitable.