Wired (17 page)

I smiled, knowing that my feelings for him were plastered all over my face, and in this moment, however the wires might cross, the closed part of me just opened wide. Leo was wrong about him.

He looked at me, his eyes blank.

I tried to say something, but it was almost as if the energy had been completely sapped out of me. As if I were in a coma. I wanted to say,
Mason, it's me. It's me. That's not how we look at each other. Tell me it wasn't all a bunch of lies. You mean something to me
.

Thoughts in my head raced so quickly, but there was nothing in my body that could keep up. His eyes narrowed. And this man whom I'd become closer to than anybody else in the world . . . Mason Merrick raised his gun and shot me.

I felt the bullet enter my flesh. It was loud, and it took forever. Like a graphic: The Travels of a Bullet through the Human Body, from one of those forensics shows. The metal ripped into me, into my arm, and I toppled back, spread-eagled, the bag flying out of my hand. I hit the ground and lay there for a moment, then painstakingly turned my head and watched Kitty's goldfish flop desperately on the wood floor, the water from the bag mixing with the blood trickling across the boards. I couldn't move more than that; I couldn't lift so much as a limb. All I could do was watch the backs of Mason's shoes as
he walked away, watch the splash of goldfish water mingle with my blood and tears.

I remembered this now, my life: I never made it to the interview. I never got the job. That was why I worked for an agency doing freelance.

In my mind, I feebly reached out to Existential Angst, but all that really happened was a faint twitch of my fingertips. His little fishy body heaved one last time and he went still.

Kitty's going to be so sad
. It was my very last thought before the sound of my breathing and the wail of sirens drowned everything else out.

“Roxanne?”

The male voice sounded friendly, but I was clearly in a hospital, and there's just nothing friendly about that. It smelled like antiseptic and some sort of indefinable nastiness. I sat up and reached out, saw the IV in my arm, and immediately became nauseated, falling back to the bed without achieving my goal.

“Roxanne, would you like some water?”

A male voice. British accent. I slowly turned my head to stare directly into Leonardo Kaysar's eyes, trying desperately not to see him as a bad guy. Mason was the villain. The thought of it made me want to cry. The last time I saw him—before he shot me, anyway—he'd begged me to believe him. He'd appealed to my heart, not just my mind. Of course, he'd also played me before and I'd punched him in the nose for it.

Leonardo smiled sympathetically.
Mason can't be the bad guy
. I pressed my hands against my face and squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to believe. But Leo had found a way to give me proof, and I'd seen
the truth with my own eyes. We'd played a real-life game of what-if, and the answer to “What if Mason Merrick needed to kill you to get what he wanted?” was obviously: “He would.” Mason wasn't here to protect me; he was here to use me, and if he couldn't get things to suit his needs the way things stood, he was willing to kill me to make them turn out right. I'd seen that permutation.

Leonardo sat in the guest chair by my hospital bed looking down at me, resting his chin on his hand. He looked entirely comfortable, as if he could wait all day for me to start talking. And, in fact, I realized it had been some time since we'd been staring at each other without saying anything at all.

It was obvious what he was doing here. He wanted to talk—about business things, about wire-crosser things. I didn't want to hear them. I really didn't think I could handle it. Still staring at him, I burst into tears.

Leonardo stood up and put aside a pair of leather driving gloves he'd had on his lap. I just sort of sobbed, my exhaustion so complete that I could barely make a sound doing it. Very calmly he sat down on the bed next to me, and even though I wanted to hate him for ruining Mason for me, more than that I wanted someone to tell me everything was going to be all right.

He took my hand and cradled it between his. I wondered if it had even registered with him that I was nursing a broken heart even I'd been too blind to see coming. And maybe it wasn't just that. Mason and I had become important to each other in a way we'd never been all those years before. At least, he'd
become important to me. I missed him, and something inside of me refused to accept that this was how things were meant to end.

Leonardo and I never did find the right words. He just rocked me and murmured nice things in my ear until I fell back to sleep.

“Roxanne, can you hear me?”

I blinked to clear the fog, and suddenly a woman's face was above mine. A nurse's sort of face. The bitter, vengeful nurse. I suddenly panicked, afraid that Mason was getting his revenge on me for the plaster cast gone awry, but she made no reference to our earlier conspiracy.

“How's our patient?”

“Oh, my God,” was all I could say as all over again I processed Mason Merrick shooting me. He
shot
me. “Did I lose a lot of blood?”

She blinked. “Blood?”

“The bullet,” I slurred.

She smiled. “There's no bullet and no blood, sweetheart. And you're not pregnant.”

“What?”

“You fainted,” the nurse said. “Your blood pressure was off the charts. We just wanted to make sure we covered all the bases.”

I tried to sit up, but the movement triggered a whole lot of murmured protests, clucking, and a totally unnecessary tucking in of blankets. “I want to go home,” I said, quickly degenerating into something wet and snotty and sniveling.

“Your friend is on the way,” the nurse said.

What friend?
I thought of both Mason and Leonardo
and turned my head into the pillow to shut everything out.
Do I even have any friends anymore?

I fell back to sleep.

When I woke up, a blond woman I didn't recognize sat in the guest chair reading a magazine. When she saw me, she tossed the magazine away and came over. She was working the smoky-eye look more than most mortal women should, but with the blond bangs it somehow worked.

“Thank God. You feeling okay? 'Cause I want to get you out of here. And I want to get me out of here. I accidentally passed a room where this baby was being born and nearly puked. And then they were talking for a second like maybe you were pregnant, which would explain the fainting. And, I mean, I totally had a heart attack for laughing. No offense, Rox, but that's just ridiculous. I mean, you're practically celibate. Of course, that was before I met your Leonardo, and you
so
have some explaining to do. I mean, you're going out! And
that guy
. And frankly, you never mentioned that you were on a diet, and obviously if the reason for your anemia has to do with some kind of eating disorder, totally disregard what I'm about to say, but if not, I am
so
going to kill you about that because you know how I am about discipline, and if I'd known you were going on a diet, I totally would have gone on a diet with you, and if you ask
me
 . . .”

He's not
my
Leonardo
. I let her go on and on as she put some clothes on me and stuffed the rest of my belongings in a bag. I looked down at my shirtsleeve. There was no bloodstain, no hole in the fabric.

I squinted up at the blonde.
Who the hell are you?
was on the tip of my tongue, but I never said it because I knew her. I mean, I knew I knew her, even though I sure as hell couldn't place her.

“. . . I'm always telling you, and you always roll your eyes and ignore me and then suddenly, boom! You take my advice. What do I always say? ‘Just remember, Roxanne; it can't always be about tomorrow. Sometimes it's about right fucking now.' And you go and listen to me for one night, and snag a—”

“What did you say?”

“You always roll your eyes—”

“The part after that.”

“It can't always be about tomorrow—” she began.

“Sometimes it's about right fucking now,” I ended. The voice. The cadence. The motto. I stared into those kohl-rimmed eyes and almost burst out crying all over again. No
way
. “Kitty?”

It was Kitty, without the black lipstick, the multiple piercings, the jet-black hair. Kitty, who'd somehow morphed out of a really serious Goth-chick phase into some sort of urban hipster creature who could have posed in the pages of a magazine.

“When did you start calling me that again?” she asked.

“What do I normally call you?”

Her eyebrow arched. “I went back to Katherine a long time ago.”

“Old habits,” I mumbled.

She shrugged. “You're my oldest friend. You get to call me whatever you want.”

“When did you change your look?”

“What?”

“When did you . . . become a blonde?”

She put her hands on her hips. “L. Roxanne Zaborovsky, you are scaring the piss out of me. You were there. Remember how we tried to get the black dye out by doing a peroxide thing and nearly burned the fuck out of my scalp, and I ended up greenish gray, and I was crying hysterically? And I know for a fact that you were trying not to laugh, which was really mean, but you took me to a salon and held my hand while they fixed it.”

“I held your hand while they fixed it?” I repeated, oddly touched. “So, you came back from Europe after graduation.”

Kitty threw her hands up in the air. “I never went. You got shot—” She stopped short and looked down at me, blinking in confusion. “You know what? I'll be right back. I'm going to get someone to discharge you before they decide to move you up to the psych ward.” She tucked the sheets in up to my chin—it was funny how her mothering of me had evolved over the years.

She was as good as her word, and by the time we hit the parking lot the smell of bad cafeteria food had ebbed away. I didn't say a word as the next stream of consciousness gathered steam. There was something so comforting about the way she took our friendship for granted. I didn't feel so alone, I guess.

Obviously, she knew the way to my place. And when we got there and I inched slowly toward the door to get out of her VW Bug, I caught her staring at me like I was insane.

Her face had gone dead serious. “You're like an old person. Just wait. I'm coming up with you.”

I couldn't go any faster; I just didn't have the energy.
She double-parked the car and helped me up the steps, which I was kind of horrified to discover felt like trying to negotiate Mount Everest. I was out of breath by step two out of fourteen. It was as if my muscles had atrophied.

I thought about Mason's words. How he'd told Leo I'd never get my heart rate up. And then I thought about Mason. I clutched at my heart, though there wasn't any medical explanation for the pain I felt there. Kitty unlocked the door, marched me inside, and pressed me onto the sofa.

I let my head sink back into the pillows. Kitty plopped down next to me and patted my knee. “It's going to be okay. Things are already looking up. That Leonardo is so nice. I like him a lot. Got a guy who's nice to your friends, you got a keeper.”

Nice
would not have been the first word I'd pick to describe Leonardo Kaysar. “He's nice to me because he needs me for something. He was nice to you because you're a hot blonde.”

Kitty giggled. Through the easing fog of my sedative, I started to giggle with her . . . and then I just started to laugh hysterically. “I'm a mess,” I finally mumbled.

Kitty's face fell. “You are not a well individual. I'm going to go park the car. I'll be right back.”

“It's okay,” I said.

“It's not okay.”

I watched her head for the door, overwhelmed by the joy of having a close friend again. I don't know how we could have ever lost touch. And then it occurred to me: Maybe we did, maybe we didn't. But maybe it would happen again.

“Kitty!” I shuffled out to the top of the steps leading to the walkway. “Kitty!”

She turned just before getting back in the driver's seat, her face highlighted red in the Bug's hazards. “Yeah?”

“I'm sorry about your goldfish. I just . . . I just couldn't reach.” I headed down the stairs. She looked at me as if I were insane.

“Reach my goldfish?”

“Existential Angst.”

“You still feel guilty about that? Please, do not even think twice. That's
so
in the past, Rox. You'd think you just had a near-death experience. Are you going to start making me go with you to beg forgiveness of everyone you ever jostled in a supermarket?”

I managed a smile. I was testing me, testing her—testing reality, I guess.

She got in the car and the window slid down. “Would you go in already and get out of the cold?”

“I just . . . I missed you. In case I don't see you . . . again . . . soon. You know.”

Kitty blinked in confusion. “I'm not going anywhere.”

“But that's really not necessary,” I said, assuming she meant she was planning to baby me some more. “You don't have to come back.”

“Uh,
I
find it necessary,” she said.

“I fainted. That's all!”

“Yeah?” she asked.

“Well?” I said.

She scratched the side of her face and turned off the hazards. “Roxanne, I'm your roommate. I live here.” And then she drove off to find parking.

What the
hell
?

I managed to get myself back into my apartment and immediately climbed the stairs to the storage room. I put my hand on the door and pushed. The door swung open. The bedroom was just as Kitty had always kept it years ago. Bed over there, dresser over there. Clothes, jewelry, shoes strewn about. And storage boxes nowhere in sight.