"This is one piece. Just with a hole in it, kind of like a vase or something."
"That's not funny."
"You're cleaning my bullet wound in a bar with a first aid kit. Nothing about this is funny, but if I don't make jokes I'm going to think about how close that round was to the bone and the bone is connected to the artery and the artery is connected to the part of me that stays alive, and I'd rather make jokes."
I stop cleaning to glare at him. His face is doing the thing it does when the joking is covering something real, the grin still there but his eyes not participating.
"How close was it?"
"Couple inches from the brachial artery, if the angle was right. Russo will tell me for sure when he looks at it, but I can still feel my fingers and the bleeding isn't arterial, so I got lucky."
"Lucky." The word comes out flat and I mean it to. "You got lucky. That's your assessment. You walked into a parking garage and got ambushed and shot and you're sitting on a stool in my bar bleeding through gauze and your assessment is lucky."
"What do you want me to say?"
"I want you to say you're not going to do this again. I want you to say you're going to stop walking into situations where people shoot at you. I want you to say that the man who told me he loves me twelve hours ago is going to be around long enough for that to mean something."
My voice cracks on the last word. I didn't plan for it to crack. I planned to stay angry because angry is easier and safer and anger doesn't make my chest feel like someone is sitting on it. But the crack happens and once it happens the rest follows, now I'm standing behind the bar with bloody gauze in my hands and tears on my face and I'm furious at myself for crying because I do not cry over men.
Except this one.
This one, I cry over.
"Hey." His good hand comes off the gauze and reaches for my face. "Hey, come here."
"You're bleeding, keep pressure on it—"
"Come here, Savannah."
I lean into his hand. His palm is warm against my cheek, and his thumb wipes a tear off my face and smears blood across my skin in the process, his blood on my face, and the intimacy of that is so fucked up and so us that it almost makes me laugh through the tears.
"I can't lose you," I say, and my voice is small in a way I don't recognize. I do loud and sharp and profane. I throw lamps and punch arms and tell men exactly what I think of them in words that would strip paint off a bumper. But right now my voice is small because the fear is bigger than the anger and the fear is this: everyone I love leaves. Gigi died while I was buying a Sprite. My mother walked out before I could form a memory of her face. Every man I ever let close enough to matter turned out to be temporary, and now the one who matters most is sitting on a stool with a hole in his arm and a grin that's trying to convince me everything's fine.
"You're not going to lose me."
"You don't know that."
"I know that I just got shot and Carmelo drove twenty minutes back to this compound and all I did was think about one thing. Not the bullet. Not Ferrara. Not Matteo or the Castillos or any of it.You. I was thinking about your face and your voice and the way you said I love you last night, and I was thinking that I'd take a bullet every day for the rest of my life if it meant coming home to you."
"That's the dumbest thing you've ever said, and you've said some truly historic dumb shit."
"It's also true."
"Stop talking and let me finish cleaning this."
He lets me work. I clean the wound properly, disinfect both sides, pack fresh gauze, tape it down tight enough to hold until Russo can come in and stitch it. My hands stop shaking somewhere around the third piece of tape, not because the fear is gone but because the work takes over. Hands doing a job, the way Gigi taught me. When the world gets loud, make your hands useful. The rest will follow.
When I'm done, his arm is wrapped in white gauze from elbow to mid-bicep, taped down, clean. Not pretty, not medical-grade, but solid. It'll hold until the actual doctor gets his hands on it.
"You need stitches," I say. "Where’s Russo?"
"Sometimes he takes a bit, relax. He’s our on-call, but he also has an actual job. I’ll go check after this."
"After what?"
He reaches out with his good hand and pulls me in by the waist. I step between his knees, and his forehead drops against my chest. His arm wraps around me and holds on, and the man who was making jokes thirty seconds ago is quiet. Not performing. Not deflecting. Just holding me with his face against my sternum, his breathing uneven, his body doing the shaking his mouth wouldn't let him do in front of Carmelo.
He's scared. Not of the bullet, not of the men who shot at him. Scared of the same thing I'm scared of.
