Page 43 of Eye Candy

It was like seeing it on her hand snapped me back into reality. I rolled off her, landing on my back beside her, and I struggled to sit up and glance down at my abdomen. My shirt was wet with blood, the bullet lodge somewhere inside. Then the pain hit me, and I winced, trying to put pressure on the wound—but it wasn’t a good angle for that.

Laina leaned over me, setting her hands on the wound and applying pressure. “You’re going to be fine,” she told me, not sounding too confident. Her voice trembled and shook, and it occurred to me then that she really did care about me. It hadn’t just been about her body reacting to mine; no. You didn’t sound like that when you were talking to someone you didn’t give a shit about.

In the crowd, Mike had been the first to reach the gunman, and he’d tackled him to the floor, knocking him out with a swift punch to the temple while everyone else tried to get out. But there was only one gunman, so once he was incapacitated, we were safe.

Well, Laina was safe, I should say. Me, on the other hand? I’d felt better.

“Oh, my God,” Tessa was busy saying, crawling over to us. Vance had ordered one of the security guards to get an ambulance for me, as soon as possible, but I couldn’t pay attention to any of them.

How could I, when Laina was over me, staring down at me like I was her whole world? The rest of the room faded away until all I could see was her face. I lifted a hand, the one I’d tried to use to stop the blood, tracing her jawline and smearing bright red along it. The sick thing was, she didn’t look bad with some of my blood on her.

“Stay with me,” she begged me. “Stay awake. You’re going to be fine, Kieran. A bullet’s not going to stop you. You have to get back on your feet. Who else is going to annoy me with their sarcasm? It has to be you. It has to be.”

If this was it, if this was how I was going to die… well, there were worse ways to go. Laying here, listening to Laina while gazing up at her beautiful face; oh, yes, there were much worse ways.

I’d never been shot before. It wasn’t fun. I couldn’t tell if the bullet went through me or was lodged deep in my gut, amongst my organs and the like. Either way, it hurt like a fucking bitch. All heat and agony, hot metal at its core.

“You’re going to be fine,” Laina said again. I didn’t know who she was trying to convince more: me or her. Her right hand was still on my wound. The longer I stared at her, the longer I tried to listen to her repeat that phrase over and over, the harder it became.

Suddenly, I grew so, so tired. Like I’d been hit by a truck. Or, you know, a fucking bullet. Like my body had decided that now was a great time for a little nap. Just a quick snooze. I’d wake up later and find that all of this was nothing more than a dream. Just a dream. A terrible dream, but a dream nonetheless.

My fingers got cold. Or maybe it was my toes. Or both. Either way, my breath began to shorten, like I couldn’t hold enough air in my lungs to take a full, deep breath. My vision blurred, and then there were two Laina’s above me, two Laina’s staring down at me with a pleading expression. So beautifully worried about me.

But I was going to be fine. A silly little bullet wasn’t going to stop me. Everything would be okay. I’d pop up in a fewminutes and shake it off, like that Taylor Swift song. How’d that go again? Something about shaking it off. Yeah.

It grew too hard to think, so I stopped. It became too difficult for me to keep my eyes open, so they closed on their own. I was still there, still conscious, but barely. I could hear Laina’s voice telling me to open my eyes, trying to command me to wake up, but sometimes, regardless of how badly you wanted something, it was still out of reach.

Like Laina had been for so long.

The cold creeping up my extremities swallowed me whole, and soon enough I stopped hearing Laina’s voice. The bitter, cold blackness of oblivion took me, welcoming me into its vicious embrace.

Chapter Fifteen – Laina

I stood beside Kieran’s hospital bed, staring at the man, willing him to wake up. The whole day had been a blur; I didn’t even remember how we got here. My dad had been talking to the crowd, and then a shot rang out. Just one. Mike had sprung into action, but it was too late. The bullet had already left the chamber and was heading right to me.

Except Kieran had stepped in the way while he was trying to take me down. The bullet had hit him instead, and now I was the one on my own two feet while he was lying in a white hospital bed, IVs hooked up to his arm and a clamp hooked on his finger to keep track of his heart rate.

Kieran’s eyes were closed. He wouldn’t open them, but he was still alive.

If he never opened his eyes again, did that even count? Was it a life? Was it anything if he was just here, a vegetable? It didn’t even make sense to me, why he wasn’t waking up. It was just one bullet. Just one. How could it cause this much damage?

My dad and Tessa were talking to the doctor in the hall. The door was open, though, so I could hear everything that was said. “I’m fairly confident he’ll wake up in time. Sometimes, with traumatic wounds like this, the body just shuts itself down. Beyond the damage from the bullet, which we’re getting everything prepped to remove it, his body’s fine. His brain is fine. Just give him some time.”

That was the thing, though. I didn’t want to give him time. I wanted Kieran to wake up and tell me he was all right. I wanted to listen to whatever stupid jokes he had, wanted to bury my face against him, and breathe him in. God, I wanted to feel those lips on mine again.

The sound of someone moving behind me made me realize I wasn’t in the room alone. Mike was near, though I was pretty sure he was watching me and not Kieran. I felt a warm hand on my back, and he whispered, “You should clean yourself off.”

Though it was hard, I managed to pull myself away from Kieran, turning to face Mike. I angled my head back to meet his stare, asking, “What?”

“You still have his blood on you,” he replied, lightly touching my right arm, just above the elbow. A soft, tender touch that almost brought tears to my eyes—though I did my best to push them back.

“Oh” was all I could say as I lifted my right arm and stared at my hand, at the bright red blood on it. It had dried, staining my hand and my lower arm, a reminder of the day’s events.

“Come on,” Mike said, corralling me away from the hospital bed and moving me toward the adjoined restroom. Since Kieran was the mayor’s brother-in-law, the doctors and nurses had worked fast. He’d been moved out of the ERlickety-split and been given his own room, even though they hadn’t operated on him yet.

The bathroom lights were motion-sensitive, so they flickered to life when we walked inside. Mike stopped me right before the sink, and he reached around me to turn the water on. I stood there, staring at nothing in particular, as he grabbed a whole bunch of paper towels. He said not another word as he wet them.

I hardly felt it when he ran those wet paper towels against my skin. Since the blood had dried, he had to scrub every inch of my hand and lower arm over and over, and even then, some of my skin was still pink with the faint hint of old blood.

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