I swallowed.
After a moment, Ella said, “Okay, I know you’re in there. Are you mad at me because of what I said?”
On my knees, with my mouth still tasting of salt and sex, I couldn’t remember why I would ever be mad at her. I could barely remember a thing she said either, except “I don’t know.”
“I didn’t do anything to him.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
It was a puzzle. If I found all the pieces, then Ella got her life back. And I got…what? Redemption, though the idea seemed laughable as I knelt on the floor, naked and well used.
Philip nudged me, handed me my clothes, and I realized he’d already quietly dressed. I tried to read his expression, but he could hide his thoughts, even from me if he tried.
But Ella’s expression was clear as day when Philip opened the door and strode past her: hurt. And then at me: betrayal. With a soft hiccup, she turned and walked away. That’s right, I thought, because this was all I had to offer.
Take of me, but all that was left was flesh.
Chapter Fifteen
Eight months earlier
I woke with a start, blinking eyelids that felt sore and cracked. They felt broken too, jagged red seeping through and orange blurred so that I wasn’t sure they were open at all. But then a dark face hovered over me. I couldn’t make out the features, but his eyes were hazy pools of green rimmed with red, and I knew it was him. Luke.
He hadn’t left me or had me killed or any other of the rather unlikely things I had feared. No, he was too good to act on his justified anger. He was too good for me, but at least he knew it. He’d been careful to couch his lust for me in furtive glances. We both knew he wanted my body, and we both knew he wouldn’t fuck me.
If I had been smarter, I would have taken what I could get. A rich, handsome man had been willing to pay me for my company, for sex, and that should have been enough for someone like me. So what if he was a little bit criminal? So what if it was nothing more than bodily transactions? Philip was a decent guy. He deserved my loyalty. He certainly paid for it.
But then Luke had contacted me, with his soulful eyes and his stiff-as-a-flagpole ideals, and the longing had hit me so hard I couldn’t breathe. I held myself back from all-out begging, but I found a way to stay near him: I’d agreed to become his informant. And so I traded in the security of my benefactor for the hopeless wish on a star.
It had all come out, and I’d gotten shot, so this was what I got for it. The white-walled brightness of a sterile room and the beep-beep-beep of some machinery that was no doubt attached to me through plastic and metal. And Luke’s face, frowning and worrying and caring about me, and suddenly this whole mess seemed like the best idea I’d ever had.
“Don’t go,” I said, but it came out as a groan.
He seemed to understand anyway. “I’m here,” he said. “I’m right here. You’re going to be okay.”
How could I be? And though I’d never seen it coming, it was somehow a cliché. Shot through the heart. I had been sure that was a metaphor, but Bon Jovi had known. They’d called it. It’s all part of this game that we call love. But maybe it wasn’t really love, this thing I felt for Luke. Just a pale shadow, because I hadn’t been shot through my heart, just near it. Just a loud sound in my ears and a sudden pressure in my chest.
I had no idea how close the bullet had come to the organ now pumping liquid thick as mud. Certainly my whole midsection felt tight and too large. It was like the time with that man who must have weighed over two fifty and not in the good-shape kind of way, which hadn’t been so bad until I had started to panic. But the face above me wasn’t his. It was Luke, and he was talking to me.
“Expect a full recovery,” he finished in his cop voice. That was the fake voice, the one he used when he needed to hide the truth. It was the booming mirage, and he was the man behind the curtain.
I shook my head slightly, and for a half second, the whole world shook too before righting itself. I didn’t want a full recovery. I wanted this body broken and bleeding. I wanted it unable to perform. That was what I deserved. It was what I longed for, maybe more than I longed for Luke.
“How long?” I pushed through my cracked lips.
His brows drew together, and I sympathized, because even I didn’t fully understand the question. How long until I made this miraculous recovery? How long would he stay?
But he answered something different entirely. “Five days. You’ve been here for a week. You woke up a few times, but nothing coherent until now.”
It took me a few minutes to process that. In fact, it was possible I’d blacked out sometime during my study of what he’d said. For five days, I had been laid up in this hospital bed, and he had been by my side often enough to see me wake, incoherently, and coincidentally been here when I woke up just now.