Page 53 of Savage Love

Jacob gives a tight, sharp laugh that tells me he agrees, and then he turns away to deal with the others. I follow my assigned driver back to the car, my mind already turning to how to keep quiet when I get home so as not to wake Elena up. I don’t want to worry her.

I’m not so lucky. I’m barely stripped out of my clothes, rummaging for a first-aid kit with one hand holding a hand towel that I’ll throw away later to the wound on my leg, when the door clicks open, and I see Elena standing there, her eyes gone wide as she takes in the sight in front of her.

Fuck.

Elena

For a minute, I’m not entirely sure what I’m seeing. It’s my husband, I know that, stripped down to his boxer briefs—which is distracting enough in and of itself—but it’s the rest that really gives me pause. He has a wadded-up hand towel—one of the new ones that we bought—held to his thigh, which has dried blood streaked down it and more soaking the towel in his hand, and his arm is bleeding, too. The arm wound looks worse—a flap of skin is hanging loose, and the gash is wide, bleeding more than even I know it should be.

I have no idea what the context is, but what I do know is that all of this put together points to my husband having been somewhere that he didn’t bother telling me he was going. That, combined with the forced distance, only makes me all the more upset.

I’ve spent the whole day and night sleeping and crying by turns, feeling lost and hopeless, unsure what to do next—howto do this. I spent the hours that I was awake and crying, wondering ifIneeded to start learning to shut myself down, to protect my heart, before it becomes broken past repair.

And now I know he kept something from me today.

“I know I was the one bleeding last night,” I tell him coolly, crossing my arms as I face him from the doorway. “But this doesn’t have to be a competition.”

“Elena.” Levin turns to face me, his expression completely startled for a moment before he smooths it over. “You shouldn’t be out of bed.”

“The doctor said it wasn’t total bed rest. What’s going on?” I motion to the wounds on his thigh and arm, which don’t look nearly as bad as what I helped him patch up after the fight in the hotel, but still don’t lookgood.

“You shouldn’t be out of bed,” he insists again, and I glare at him.

“Stop changing the subject.”

“I can handle this myself.” He’s rummaging through the first aid kit with one hand while trying to keep the compress on his thigh with the other, blood trickling down his arm.

“Do you remember what happened in Rio?” I demand, my irritation growing by the second. “I canhelp. Sit down.”

He looks at me as if he’s not entirely seeing me for a moment, before he lets out a long sigh, and sinks down onto the toilet, still holding the compress to his thigh as I start to pick things out of the first aid kit.

“Rio would have been easier with one of these,” I mutter, pulling peroxide, ointment, bandages, gauze, and anything else I think I might need out of it.

“Rio would have been easier with a lot of things. Elena, seriously—”

“No, you.” I glare at him, and he flinches a little. I think he can see how upset I am, because he doesn’t say anything else as I start to deal with the wound on his arm first.

If he didn’t know, he does when I don’t bother warning him that it’s going to hurt, when I’m done cleaning off the old blood and press an alcohol-soaked pad to the wound to clean it. Levin sucks in a breath through his teeth, but doesn’t say another word or make another move as I clean it out, carefully using butterfly bandages to close the gash before patting antibiotic ointment around the edges and then laying gauze over it, wrapping another bandage around that.

“I can do my leg—”

I ignore him, reaching to tug away the hand towel. The wound on his leg is bigger—still not so bad that it can’t be patched here, but enough that it makes me swallow hard when I see it. “These are gunshot wounds, aren’t they?”

“Just grazed.” Levin looks at me as I clean the old blood away. “I wish like hell you didn’t know enough to figure that out, Elena.”

“It seems like it might come in handy, being married to you.” I press another alcohol-soaked pad to it, and Levin’s jaw clenches above me, the muscle there leaping as I finish cleaning it and start to tug the edges together with bandages again.

“You shouldn’t be the one dealing with this.”

“Who else should be? I’m your wife.”

“I’m supposed to protect you. Keep you out of all of this—”

My own jaw clenches at that, and I tug a little harder than necessary at the edges of the wound as I finish bandaging it up. “You’ve done a good job protecting me. But I’ve been in all of this for what feels like a really long time, Levin. So let me help you, so at least I’m fuckingdoingsomething. You, of all people, should know how that feels.”

The last sentence is probably, a step too far. But he says nothing, staying silent as I finish patching up the wound.

“What happened?” I ask as I pat the antibiotic ointment around the edges. “Can you at least tell me that?”

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