“Is this your room?” I ask, looking around. I fall backward on the bed, dizzy, weak and feeling like I’m drunk. My eyes flutter shut for a moment and Jase shakes me roughly.
“Hey, Samantha?” His tone is one hundred percent serious now.
I crack one eyelid, even though the effort is almost impossible. “I’m tired,” I say, closing my eye again.
“I’m gonna take you to the hospital,” he says, and upon hearing that, my eyes snap open and I sit up. “No. No hospitals. Just a first aid kit.”
He shakes his head. “Samantha, you’re fucking bleeding everywhere! A bandaid is not going to work.”
He goes to scoop me up and I put my hand on his forearm. “No hospitals,” I say adamantly. “Just a needle and thread.” I think about that for a moment. “And a bottle of Jack.”
“Wouldn’t swabbing alcohol be better to disinfect it?” he asks dubiously.
“It’s for me to drink,” I say through gritted teeth.
He disappears, and returns a few minutes later with a small plastic box marked with a white cross over a red square, a fresh, unopened bottle of bourbon, a bottle of cola and a small sewing kit.
I eye the cola as he pushes my dress up my thigh, moving the blood-soaked pillowcase I have been using to staunch the bleeding out of the way. He opens the first aid kit and pulls out a package of sterile wipes, tearing it open with his teeth. That’s probably not sterile, but I’m not complaining.
“Who’s Mariana?” I slur, my head full of cotton wool and my leg a sharp, throbbing pain that won’t dull.
“She was my stepmother, I suppose. She never married my dad, but she was with him for a long time.”
“Jesus!” I swear as he swabs my leg with alcohol. I grab the bottle of bourbon that he tossed on the bed next to me and twist the lid off, taking a long, deep drink that simultaneously burns my throat and soothes my ragged nerves.
“Sorry,” Jase mutters, finishing his wiping. He stands back and surveys my wound. “It really needs stitches.” He prods it gently. “How deep did he put it in there?”
I want to laugh, but I don’t. “Up to the hilt,” I say, swallowing back bile and chasing it with more bourbon.
“We need a doctor,” he says. I grit my teeth and hand him the bourbon, snatching up the calico sewing kit from the bed next to me and unzipping it. I locate a small needle and some black cotton and clumsily try to thread the cotton through the eye.
“Here, let me do that,” he says. He takes the needle and thread from me and produces a lighter out of his back pocket. I lie back on the bed as he busies himself with the needle and thread.
“You ready?” he asks me.
I sit back up, the room spinning. “Not really.”
“On the count of three,” he says, using one hand to push my torn skin together and the other to hold the needle. “One, two…”
On two he presses the needle into my flesh. Pain ricochets through my entire body, every nerve ending alight with sizzling, searing pain.
“Was there a three?” I mutter through my clenched teeth.
He doesn’t answer, just swears and holds the needle up to me. “The thread keeps breaking,” he says.
I roll my eyes. “Fishing line,” I spit. “Fishing line will work.”
“I’ll be right back,” he says, leaving the room and closing the door. He isn’t gone long, maybe five minutes, and when he gets back, he is panting.
“Did you go for a run?” I ask sarcastically.
He holds up a spool of brand new fishing wire in one hand and a small bag of off-white powder in the other.
I immediately look to the bag, intrigued. “Smack?” I ask.
He hands over the bag, nodding. “It’s pretty pure,” he says. “You’ll only need a tiny pinch.”
I take a pinch of the powder from the bag and nestle it in the webbing between my thumb and forefinger. Holding it up to my nose, I close off one nostril and breathe in forcefully.
Almost immediately, a sense of blissful calm settles on my shoulders, even as I swallow the bitter taste of heroin that coats the back of my throat.
“You good?” Jase asks. I nod.
“Yeah. Go for it.”
He digs the needle into my flesh, and though the pain is still apparent, it is now much more bearable.
“I don’t know how to knot this,” he says. I wave my hand dismissively. “Doesn’t matter.”
“It’s going to scar,” he continues.
What’s another scar?
“Doesn’t matter.”
He laughs. “Nothing much matters when you’re high.”
“I am not high,” I say, staring at the weird shapes the ceiling fan is creating on the walls.
“Okay,” he says, standing to admire his handiwork. I crane my neck, trying to get a glimpse of my war wound without sitting up.
“Do you feel okay?” he asks.
I shrug lazily, floating on a cloud of fluffy marshmallows. “As well as I can when I’ve just been stabbed.” A thought enters my fuzzy head and I frown.
“How do you know how to stitch wounds, anyway?”
His face appears directly above mine, a hint of amusement on his slightly upturned mouth.
“I’ll tell you some other time,” he says. “Come on. We’re getting out of here. I’m taking you to my place.”
I sit up and look around the nondescript room. “Isn’t this your place?”
“Samantha,” he says, the hint of a smile tugging at his mouth. “You really think I live in a bikers’ clubhouse?”
Ten
We are roaring down the highway when it occurs to me that I’ve driven this route before.
“Where are we going?” I asked. It was hot, the air blowing into the car stifling. Jase and I sat in the backseat, Mariana and my father in front.
“You’ll see,” Mariana said, her Columbian accent clipped and anxious.
I looked over at Jase, who was glancing between Mariana and my father before landing his gaze on me, a troubled expression on his face. I put my hand on the hot leather seat between us and held my palm up, wiggling my fingers. Jase smiled, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners, grabbing my hand and squeezing it.
My father stopped the car when he reached Mariana’s house, parking out the back, hidden from view. My stomach roiled when he did that. I had grown up in the life and I knew that when my father started hiding and acting secretively, things were about to get bad, real fast.
Inside Mariana’s apartment, the one where Jase lived, we were told to sit down on the sofa, Mariana and my father sitting across from us.
“Daddy,” I said thickly. “What’s going on?”
He sighed, his eyes pinched and old, as he looked pointedly at my hand and Jase’s, squeezed protectively together between us.
Mariana didn’t sigh, though. She smiled, her beautiful face lighting up with things long forbidden for the mistress of the Vice President of the Gypsy Brothers. For although the name suggested they were vagabonds and travellers, the same could not be said of their families, their children, their mistresses. These people were effectively trapped in a web of lies and bloodshed, forbidden to step away from the watchful eyes of the club.
“We’re leaving,” she said, hope dancing in her eyes. That hope she carried around with her was such a dangerous, devastating thing to clutch onto.
I nodded, looking at Jase, who looked like he was about to flip out.
“You are coming with us, hijo,” Mariana said affectionately, reaching her hand over to brush his cheek. “You don’t need to be scared. I will always take care of you as if you were my own.”