Page 49 of Hold Him Like Gravity

“How’s Evander doing?” I asked when she caught me watching her.

“He’s staying in more,” she told me.

“Yeah? Something happen?” I asked, watching something dark cross her eyes. But she shook her head.

“He’s just been… clingier. I guess he’s finally warming up to me.”

That was a good thing. So why did she sound like she was about to cry about it?

I wouldn’t pretend to know a lot about women. Sure, the Lombardi family was the only one in the city—so far—to have female capos. And, yeah, I worked alongside them a lot. But Cinna and Saff kind of leaned into either their cold and ruthless—in Cinna’s case—or hot-tempered and impulsive—when it came to Saff. They never really displayed any other emotions. At least not around any of us. Which made sense. I couldn’t imagine it was easy for a woman working in such a brutal and male-dominated world like organized crime. They had to shut that shit down to protect themselves.

Outside of my work relationships, I’d never really spent a lot of time with women. Work had always come first in my life. Which meant time with women was on the short side and purely for fun. No distractions.

“That’s good. What you wanted, right?” I asked.

“Yeah, I just… damnit!” she yelped, snatching her hand away from the slicer, holding it against her chest as she squeezed it into a fist.

“You get cut?” I asked, making my way toward her. Those meat slicers were insanely sharp. Ricky was really strict about teaching the new guys how to use them properly so there were no accidents. I never stopped to consider how you could cut yourself while just cleaning it.

“Yes. Fuck,” she said, wincing. “I’m afraid to look and see if I’m missing a piece of my finger,” she said, looking a little pale at the very idea.

“I’ll look,” I said, reaching for her wrist to pull it away from her chest. “Gonna have to unfurl for me here,” I said as she turned her head to the side like a little kid about to get a shot and not wanting to watch the needle slide in.

Her fingers slid open, all of them covered in a coat of blood. She was bleeding like crazy. Bad enough that I was a little worried a part of her finger would be sitting on the meat slicer too.

“Come here,” I said, pulling her with me toward the sink in the back. “I can’t see through the blood,” I explained as I ran the water warm and pulled her hand under the stream. “Okay,” I said, feeling better when I got a good look. “You aren’t missing any parts,” I told her as she kept her head diverted, taking slow, deep breaths. “You just kinda… split it. The skin is still attached but kind of just hanging on. I’m gonna have to put some butterfly closures on this. Unless you wanna go and get stitches.”

“Ah, no. I’d rather not. You’re sure I can just do the closures?”

“Yeah, I’ve treated shit worse than this with them,” I told her, grabbing some paper towels and wrapping them around her hand. “Squeeze hard. We gotta try to stop the bleeding so I can see what I’m doing to close it up,” I told her.

My hand went to her hip, guiding her with me toward my office, then pressing her down into my chair as I walked away to go grab the medical kit, having little flashbacks to doing the same thing not long ago.

“You alright?” I asked as I came back to spread the box of butterfly closures, a pack of gauze, and a saline solution tube on the top of the desk.

“Yeah. I think it’s slowing down,” she said. “I can feel my pulse in my finger,” she added, seeming to speak mostly to herself.

“That’s normal,” I told her, reaching for a package of disposable gloves.

“Have you ever sliced your finger like this?”

“Once.”

“On a meat slicer?” she asked, watching me as I put the gloves on.

“On a pocketknife,” I admitted, memory flashing to a back alley fight in my early twenties, back when Renzo was fighting tooth-and-nail to take back the neighborhood. All we did was brawl back then. Get knocked around. Break bones. Treat lacerations. Wonder how bad a concussion had to be before we sought actual treatment.

“What? Were you playing with it or something?” she asked as I pulled the tab off the tube of saline.

“If by playing with it you mean trying to stab someone with it while they beat the shit out of me, yeah,” I said, watching her brows raise, her eyes going round.

“Fought a lot when I was younger,” I told her, only half giving her the truth as I leaned the saline against the kit to pull her hand over to me and remove the paper towel. “And this area used to be a lot rougher back then,” I added, checking the cut again before slipping some gauze under her finger, and spraying the saline over her finger to make sure it was clean before I sealed it up. “You good?”

“Yeah. It just burns. It’s not that bad now,” she said.

“It’s probably gonna be throbbing for a day or two,” I said as I carefully applied the butterfly closures. “I used one of these,” I added, reaching to pull a finger brace out of the kit, “for the first few days, so I didn’t keep accidentally bumping the finger while it healed. We’ll tell Ricky that you’re off the slicer for a week or so,” I told her.

“That’s, like, half my job,” she insisted.

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