AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“What?” I wrench my head down and search frantically for whatever it is she sees. I follow her gaze, past her long lashes and down to the meaty part of her upper arm where a long gash slices right along the outside. “Jesus.” I push her into the chair and kneel to get closer and inspect her wound.
The shower rains down over my back and soaks my shirt until it sticks to my skin. But even with the water running over her arm, Rory’s wound barely bleeds. “Shit. You got shot today!”
She snickers, her soft breath feathering against my cheek, our faces insanely close as we inspect the same part of her body. “I gotscratchedby a bullet,” she murmurs. “I think that’s the more accurate term for what happened. Hardly even counts.”
“It counts.” I push her skin back together, though the wound isn’t even deep enough, in my mind, to warrant sutures. “A couple inches to the left and it would have pierced your fucking heart.”
“You mean like it pierced Officer Clay’s?” She loses her smile and studies me with glistening eyes instead. “Like that?”
“Didn’t get his heart. He’s gonna be just fine.” Looking down between us, I find her hands clasped together, her fingers interlaced and fidgety. Since I guess we’re showering together anyway, I reach up and pump a dollop of soap into my palm, then I take hers between mine and start washing.
I need to know the blood is Clay’s and not hers. I need to know it washes away.
Soap bubbles lather between our hands, making my massaging fingers easier to glide. To clean. “I call you Little Bird, because… well…” I glance up from my work and look into her eyes. “I dunno. Because you’re young.” That one is easy. A quantifiable reason in my mind. “Because you’re small. You’re no shorter than the average woman. So it’s not that. But you’re small, anyway. Too thin, Aurora. You take up too little space in this world.”
“It’s called a college diet,” she mutters. Almost whispers. “Gotta make the dollars stretch.”
“You’re afraid,” I push on. “You have every reason to be. Bad things are happening to you, and your survival instincts are responding exactly the way they should.”
“I’m a coward.” She gently pulls her hands from mine and rinses the soap away under the spray. “I saw a man get killed, and I ran away instead of helping.”
“If you’d stayed,” I lean to the right when she’d rather study her hands instead of me. But when that doesn’t work, I take her chin between my fingers and drag her back. “If you’d stayed for even a second longer than you did, you’d be dead. That’s called survival instinct, not cowardice.”
“Bullets were flying today, and again, I did nothing. I dropped to the ground and screamed about it.”
“Ipushedyou down,” I argue, fully prepared to counter every argument she can find. Because I know she’s brave. I know she’s so much more than she lets herself believe. “I literally shoved you down, Aurora. You did what I asked, and then you saved Officer Clay’s life by packing his wound.”
“I cried about it.”
“So?” I look to the ceiling and shake my head in frustration. “Some people cry, Rory. Some swear. Some hit things.” I bring my eyes down again and snatch back her delicate hands. “We all have emotional responses to emotional situations. Just because the results look different doesn’t mean we aren’t all reacting in the same physiological way.”
“You react by shooting back and standing in front of me. I react by running away and crying like a baby.”
“And when someone is hurt,” I bite back, “I shoot. That makes it revenge.Youhelp by packing wounds and keeping someone alive, which is so much fucking nobler than what I do.”
“You’re comparing apples and oranges,” she grumbles. “All to make me feel better about being a coward.”
“No, Rory. You’re comparing apples and oranges, all to make yourself feel like shit for being human.”
I release her hands and reach past her face to carefully tug the elastic from her hair. Long brown locks, already wet from the shower, make it difficult because I don’t want to pull or bring her pain. But she remains still anyway. Patient as I drag the elastic down and let it fall to the tiled floor. Pumping shampoo into my palm, I lather up and reach past her again to work it through her long locks. “I call you Little Bird because I feel like you’re gonna fly away,” I breathe. “Like we’re not supposed to catch wild birds and expect them to stay. I kinda feel that way about you.”
“Like I’m gonna fly away?” She closes her eyes as I edge closer and angle the shower spray to wash the shampoo out. Red runs with it, proving what I already suspected: blood in her hair. “You think I have that much freedom?”
Curious, my brows pinch in thought. “Do you not feel free? I mean,” I pull back just far enough to see her face. “Apart from this week with Vallejo’s men targeting you.”
She breathes out a soft laugh and flutters her lashes open. “I’m the least free person I know. Second only to my mother.”
“But you have the world at your feet.” I set my elbows on my thighs and study the droplets of water that sit in her lashes. The kaleidoscope effect the water has on her multi-colored eyes. “You’re twenty-one-years-old, Aurora. You’re about to enter medical school. You have no boyfriend to hold you down. No kids to slow you down. No dead-end job trapping you in a cycle of survival. You can have the husband and kids and family life later,” I murmur, “whenever you want it. But for now,” I shake my head, trying, but failing to see what she sees, “I don’t understand how you’re stuck.”
“I’m in the middle of a six-figure degree,” she mumbles, “with student loans coming out of my ass, and just enough ramen in my home to see me through to the end of the week. And that doesn’t even factor in the men who were shot in my living room two nights ago. My mother is dying, and no matter what I say, or do, or how hard I wish for a different outcome, that’s not going away. My father’s love language is money and status, and he uses both to trap me. I have no one on this planet who cares about me.” Her eyes water now, but not from the shower. “No one. Once my mother is gone, that’s it for me. There’s no one left. And that’s not to say I want people to feel sorry for me.” Her voice shakes, tears falling from her lashes to join the droplets on her cheeks. “I’m not going to beg for a family, Drake. But that doesn’t mean the loneliness isn’t crippling all the same. Soon,” she presses, “really, really soon, I’m going to be the only Swanson woman left. I’m going to spend my life alone. Working. Helping people. Hopefullynotbeing shot at. And that’s all okay, because I don’t mind my own company. But when I stop to think of it all, when I sit down and really take stock of my life, it’s difficult not to feel like one, teeny-tiny drop in the ocean. And sometimes, that knowledge makes me feel too small. Too insignificant.”
“You’re not insignificant.” I set my thumbs beneath her eyes and swipe the mess away to clear her cheeks. “You’re smart, Aurora. And compassionate. And brave. You see yourself as one, tiny drop. But I see you as the entire fucking ocean.”
Her eyes flicker to mine and stop. Red and swollen and so unbelievably sad, they make my heart ache.
“You’re right,” I continue, “the ocean is huge. And enveloping. It’s powerful, Aurora. It’s where men go to drown, and waves crash down and wipe out whatever is in its path.”
“I feel like life is the ocean,” she whispers. “And I’m always being dumped on.”
