Blaze (Virtues & Lies 3)

“But she had a doctor, right?”

“And the doctor is coming for you too.”

“When?” Casper’s voice booms around us.

Oh shit, he’s panicking too.

When I face him, I pause at the reopened cut on his lip. Then I look down at his knuckles, and they’re bloody too.

Oh God, not now. What has he done?

“When will the doctor be here?” he repeats with alarm breaking his voice.

“You cannot be the one panicking right now,” I snap at him, and then it dawns on me that if he’s here, he’s going to see everything. Every fucking embarrassing thing that neither of us will ever forget.

What if I shit myself? Oh no. No. No. No.

“I’m not panicking,” he says, sounding calmer.

Big hands hook under my arms and gather me to

him as he shares a conversation I don’t understand with his grandmother. It’s got to be Portuguese because it sounds exactly like when his grandfather had the conversation with me.

His thumbs work up and down my spine like his grandmother was doing before. Rocking me from side to side, he holds me to his hard chest.

“What did you do? Why are you bleeding? It was enou—”

“It’s not what you think,” Casper tells me, swaying me from side to side. “Me and Freddie…it doesn’t matter right now.”

All I can do is inhale his scent into my lungs. In through the nose, out through the mouth. I think it works because the pain is kind of subsiding. A tad.

“You know, we don’t really have a song,” he says out of nowhere. “We need a song to get married, don’t we?”

“You want to talk about marriage now?” I look up at him to find the smallest smile. It’s cool. Collected. Just as his hands are sure and soothing.

“Humour me?”

“Big man…”

“My grandmother says that you’ve been having these cramps for a while.” A hand brushes my hair from my face. When my arms drop from his waist, he hoists them back around him. “She doesn’t think you’ll make it to the hospital, and you don’t want to have our girl in the middle of a back road, do you?”

“No.”

“You’re the strongest person I know, so you’ve got this. Okay, baby? This is nothing.”

“It’s not nothing!” My words come out gritty and gravelly with the tightening of another contraction.

“No, it’s everything. And I’m going to owe you big time, beautiful.” The softness of his voice is tantamount to awe and terror. Casper partly walks and partly carries me to the now open window, wiping the sweat from my brow with the long sleeve of his T-shirt.

“Casper?”

“Yeah, Trouble?”

“What if I poop?”

I feel the low rumble of his laugh before he clears his throat and says, “Did you know that when you put a bullet through a person’s brain they shit themselves too?”

“Good to know. Really.” I laugh through the fading pain because only he could say that kind of shit right now. “I wanted to know that.”