Page 141 of Unorthodox
He smiles, his eyes closed. “It’s just a flesh wound.”
“Max!” I grab his face between my hands, shaking him. I don’t want to look at the way his shirt is soaked through with blood. Don’t want to think about the fact that he has his eyes closed. That he isn’t moving. “Max, tell me what to do—”
“Untie Mamie,” he says softly. “She’ll take care of it, love.”
I don’t move, his face still in my hands, my heart hammering in my chest.I need to leave him.I need to run.
I should let him die.
I should kill him.
“You thinking of leaving me, baby girl?”
I glance at his blood-soaked shirt, the black fabric sticking to his skin. “Yes,” I tell him honestly.
He smiles, his eyes still closed, his usually pale face even whiter. “You might want to think again.”
Even like this, with a gunshot wound to the shoulder, cuts on his face, his fingers barely grazing my hips as I sit in his lap, his words still make me shiver.
“I just kicked that guy’s ass for you.”
“You killed him, Max.”
He smiles, and I watch him swallow before he says, “That’s what I said.”
And despite what my brain is screaming at me, I get off of him. I get off, and I find the knife, and I cut Mamie free.
She goes to work on Max immediately, applying pressure to his wound as she calls someone with his phone, speaking in a hushed voice as I stand, half-naked, in the middle of the carnage and blood and bodies, shivering with my arms wrapped around myself.
I don’t run.
I don’t leave.
I don’t get my clothes and get the fuck out of here.
Because sometimes what we want and what’s best for us are not even fucking close to being the same thing.
Leaving is best for me.
Max is the furthest thing from.
But as Mamie ends the call and turns to look at me over her shoulder as she works on Max, an unspoken secret passing between us, I know that I’ll get both.
I’ll get another week with Max.
I’ll get to know that the man who killed so many, lived.
And I’ll get to leave too.
I’ll leave him, and hope to God he stays far, far away.
For the both of us.
In the morning,I pad down the hallway in bare feet, my steps silent along the cold floor. I smell something sweet wafting from the kitchen, and I follow the scent as if I’m in a daze.
I see from the door that leads out to the pool that the sun isn’t up yet, the world still bathed in darkness.
But there’s a light on in the kitchen, and Mamie is pulling something that looks like muffins out of the oven.
