AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He stares at me like he wants to murder me.
“Lay down,” I say, dragging the first aid kit closer and taking what I need - a roll of tape, some surgical gloves.
“Jesus, buy me a drink first,” he snarks. At least his sarcasm means he’s not dead, I suppose.
I freeze when I feel the gloves against my palms. These are the same kind of latex gloves our captor has been wearing whenever he touches me.
I forego the gloves in favor of dousing my hands in sanitizing alcohol gel. The stuff burns my eyes as I work it into my palms. I turn my attention back to Rome, who hasn’t laid back on the mattress. The pained look on his face tells me he can’t.
“It’s okay,” I say quickly. “Just sit there and stay still.”
I set the gauze and tape next to me and take the taped, square edge of Rome’s gauze bandage, carefully pulling it away from his skin. As I peel it, my eyes can’t help but travel down his torso, past packed abs and endless inked images. I run my other hand down his chest, ever-so-gently. He breathes in sharply at the slight touch of my fingers, but he doesn’t push me away. I stop when I brush along a deep, jagged scar, an old wound that looks like it was stitched together by a five-year-old with knitting needles. The wound is thick and raised, and even the bright red and orange ink covering it can’t disguise the violence that happened here.
“Somebody stabbed you here?” I ask, letting the tips of my fingers rest lightly against the raised flesh. Now it’s my turn to feel Rome’s eyes burning into me, but they don’t contain curiosity. When I meet them, they’re full of thinly bridled hatred. An odd sensation crawls down my spinal column, imaginary spiders against my flesh. I haven’t been this close to Rome Montague for this long in a decade, and suddenly, the proximity dizzies me.
“A prison fight,” Rome says tightly.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, unable to tear my eyes - and my fingers - away from the scar. It’s my fault he’s damaged. My fault he’s scarred beyond repair.
“Don’t,” he says.Don’t go there, he means. I blink back tears, remembering the day I discovered his plea deal had been rejected, that he had been sentenced to a prison term. I tried to visit him in the state lock-up before he was transferred to a more permanent facility, but he refused to see me. Once upon a time, I thought the guilt of what I’d done to him might kill me. After time, once I knew he’d been released, the guilt didn’t lessen, but it became like grief does over time - a little easier to bury.
I focus my attention on peeling the rest of the blood-soaked bandage from Rome’s shoulder, and what I see underneath shocks me. His wound looks, quite literally, as if someone has jammed their fingers into it and broken apart the stitched, healing flesh.
“What happened while you were gone today?” I whisper, horrified. Rome looks down at the wound and frowns. “Some bitch got her claws into me,” he says cryptically.
He frustrates the fuck out of me.Why can’t he just tell me?“What bitch? Where did you go? Did you see anything, any way out…”
I want him to give me some kind of hope. As he meets my eyes again, it’s clear to both of us that he’s going to disappoint me.
“There’s a shitty old house up there,” he says, as he looks up at the ceiling. “A couple empty bedrooms. And there’s a woman up there.”
A woman?“He’s keeping her up there?” I ask, the cogs turning in my brain. “Like he’s keeping us down here?”
Rome shakes his head. “No.”
“Then what?” I explode. “Just tell me!”
I see anguish in his stricken expression for the briefest of moments, before his mask slams back into place. “I can’t.”
“Rome.”
“I’ll tell you,” he says, “if you tell me something first.”
“What do you want to know?”
He waits until I’ve stuck clean gauze to his wound before he asks me. “Why did you lie?”
My heart sinks. I know exactly what he means. What he’s asking. And I know nothing I say will ever make up for what I did to him.
“I don’t know,” I say weakly.
“Bullshit.” Rome grabs my wrist, pulling me closer to him. “You got up on that stand, and you lied. You told a judge and twelve jurors that I beat your cousin Tyler almost to death because I hadanger issues.”
I glance down at his hand, squeezing my wrist almost tight enough to snap it. “You do have anger issues.”
He pushes my wrist away in disgust. “Fuck you. I should have walked away that night and let him kill you.”
I gasp, covering my mouth with my hand to stop any more noises or ill-timed words from spilling out. The image of that night is burned into my skull. The night Rome turned eighteen. The night my own cousin, Tyler Capulet, slipped roofies into my drink and forced himself on me. The night Rome walked in on him choking the life out of me, and beat Tyler almost to death. And then, a couple hours later, it was the night my sister killed herself.
