“Hey,” I said softly.
Nothing.
"Romeo," I hissed, lightly tapping him on his blood-free left cheek.
His eyelids fluttered open and closed in response.
"Oh, thank god,” I sighed. But tapped him on the cheek again to make sure. “Can you hear me?"
He nodded once with a frown.
I reached for my back pocket to get my phone. Until I remembered these were my pajamas. They didn't have back pockets. My phone was still upstairs.
"Okay, I'm going to go call an ambulance. Wait here—" I went to stand, but he caught my wrist.
"No," he murmured, voice hoarse. “I’ll be fine.”
"You're bleeding. You need medical attention." I was half crouched over him, his hand still around my wrist, when I remembered I wasn’t wearing anything under my pajama top. I pressed my other hand to my chest to keep the shirt collar from drooping.
Romeo rolled his head back against the wall and watched me through hooded eyes. “No hospitals…”
His eyes slipped shut again, and his hand dropped from my wrist. When his head tipped to the right, away from the dumpster and towards a hard dive into the pavement, I took hold of his head with both hands.
“Hey, no, you can’t go back to sleep. You might have a concussion,” I said. Ignoring the blood smeared across my left palm as I held him upright.
“I’ve slept through them before,” he murmured, eyebrows furrowed.
“Well, that’s not great.” I glanced around helplessly, hoping, by some miracle, somebody from the apartment might need to dispose of their garbage too.
Of all the areas in Brooklyn…
I didn't even want to think about how he got into this predicament.
“What am I doing?” I whispered, looking back at my hands, cradling his head as it rolled into my palms.
Going off tonight's events, the company he kept, and the coincidence of that bang — possibly fireworks but more likely a gun — and finding him here, he was everything my parents warned me to stay away from. The kind of person Dad arrested. He was dangerous.
But vulnerable.
Then again, so was I.
Romeo was a stranger with a precise right hook, and I had thrown all personal space out the window as I supported his head.
He drifted in and out of consciousness while I chewed on my bottom lip and racked my brain for what to do. I couldn’t leave him. It would eat at my sanity if I did. Plus, the small voice in my head was pleading for me to do something. The more I looked at his bloodied face, the more I found it hard to pull away.
His blood is already on my hands.
“This was not how I saw my weekend playing out,” I muttered as I shuffled closer to him.
He didn’t stir as I hesitantly moved my hands to his biceps. Truthfully, I had never held a bicep before, let alone two this solid. Of course, I was a little awkward about it, especially since they were each roughly the size of my head.
I planned to get him to his feet and into the foyer. But I had no clue how a woman of five feet and three inches thought I could support the weight of a literal athlete.
I cleared my throat before I broached the subject, settling my nerves as I looked over his face and spoke gently. “Hey, Romeo?”
His eyelids fluttered open enough for me to see a sliver of silvery blue between his dark eyelashes.
“I’m going to need your help, okay?” I held his biceps a little firmer. “I’m going to support you as much as I can, but I need you to stand.”
