Mika jumped back. “Oh my God, you’re hurt.”
“And so are you, ma’am. If you’ll go with this paramedic here.” He pointed at a woman in a blue uniform carrying what looked like a plastic toolbox the size of a house. “We’ll get you both straightened right out.”
Just the idea of being separated from Mika was like someone taking a buzz saw to his sternum and ripping out his still-beating heart. “No, I’m not leaving—”
“Carlos.” She put her hand on his arm and smiled up at him, tears still fresh in her eyes. “It’s okay. Let me go.”
He didn’t miss the implication in her words. She didn’t just mean for him to let her go to the hospital. She meant for him to let her go for good.
“It’s for the best,” the paramedic said.
But it couldn’t be, not if that meant losing Mika.
Chapter Sixteen
“It’s not about the dress you wear, but the life you lead in the dress.”
—Diana Vreeland
Flat on his stomach, his silver knight costume sliced up the back and his bare ass up in the air, Carlos gritted his teeth at the sharp pain of the needle repeatedly piercing his skin. Mika was here somewhere, but they wouldn’t let him see her, insisting that he had to get his butt stitched up first.
“Can’t you sew faster?” he asked, looking over his shoulder.
The doctor shook his head. “Not unless you want some kind of gnarly scar where the bullet grazed you.”
“It’s my ass; I don’t care what in the hell it looks like. I need to get out there.”
He had to find Mika before she left. He hadn’t gotten to apologize. He hadn’t gotten to tell her he loved her. If she walked out those hospital doors before he got a chance to talk to her, there was a good chance he’d never get to again.
Fuck this. His ass would heal with or without stitches.
Ignoring the doctor’s protests, he got off the emergency room bed. The needle hanging from the unfinished stitch pinched his butt cheek with each step, and his whole ass burned as the topical numbing medicine wore off, but he didn’t care. He had to find Mika.
Powered by anxiety and frustration, Mika completed her billionth lap around the hospital’s emergency department waiting room and glared at the woman sitting behind the admitting desk who’d already refused three times to provide an update on Carlos. The last time she’d asked, the woman had arched one perfectly waxed eyebrow in a non-verbal fuck you and then proceeded to ignore Mika.
“Hospital waiting rooms are hell on earth, honey, but poking the devil doesn’t make it any better.” An old woman sitting in the first row of uncomfortable seats waved a knitting needle at Mika. “You’d better sit down before that woman up and kicks you out of here.”
Her feet froze to the linoleum floor and she gulped. “Do you think she would?” She had to be there when Carlos came out.
The old woman snorted. “Do pigeons always shit on a nice clean car?”
Determined not to miss Carlos, Mika took the seat next to the woman and settled in for a long wait. The paramedic had assured her during the ride to the hospital that Carlos’s gunshot wound wasn’t serious, but what if he’d been wrong? Her hand flew to her throat as she swallowed past the emotion squeezing her throat closed at the thought.
“No use trying to cover it up, honey.” The woman let out a low whistle. “Those marks around your neck aren’t going away anytime soon. What in the world happened to you?”
Where did she start? Feeny’s? The muggings? Those last moments when she thought she was going to die and all she could think about was Carlos? The vision of him as her white knight was what had lessened the terror of those last few moments.
They’d pushed each other away enough. It was past time they pulled themselves together.
“Forgive me, dear,” the woman said as she patted Mika’s knee. “You don’t have to tell me what happened if you don’t want.”
“It’s okay—at least it will be,” Mika said, confident her happily-ever-after would be walking through the emergency department doors at any moment. “It all started when I fell in love with a man who asked me to dance.”
A hospital volunteer stood beside a goodie cart at the nurses’ station, her eyes wide with shock as she took in Carlos’s surgically shredded knight costume. The nurse sitting behind the intake desk just shook her head as if love-crazed men walking around in a LARPing knight’s costume with their bare ass hanging out the back was par for the course.
“Mika Ito. Do you know what room?” he asked.
“She’s been released,” the nurse said.