Saving Della Ray

“I’m sorry he startled you,” he apologized.

I watched him, my heart breaking at the state he was in. I couldn’t hold back anymore. I was trembling like a leaf in a storm. “I want you to leave the club.” I sounded ridiculous and I knew as I had absolutely no right to request this of him, but right this minute I didn’t care what he thought. I just had to say my piece. I had earned the right after that idiot pointed a gun at me for no freaking reason at all. “I want you to leave otherwise I’m—I’m not going to be involved with you any longer. And it’s going to be your fucking loss. With me and Jess, you could live a better life, I swear it to you. You don’t need to live in this insane MC life.”

I felt as though I had gone crazy, my breathing was ragged, and out of control. I wanted to shake him awake, to pour some common sense into him. He could never benefit from the club. It just couldn’t be worth the constant risk to his life.

“I’ll leave,” he said quietly.

I froze. I was almost too scared to ask, just in case I’d heard wrong. “What?”

“I’ll leave,” he repeated. “In four weeks.”

I swiped the tears away from my cheeks. “What? What do you mean? What’s happening in four weeks?”

He didn’t respond.

I lowered my gaze from the brightness of his eyes so I could think. Then it came to me. His retaliation for the death of his friend. Something deathly cold slithered through me. “What are you going to do? What do you mean exactly by you’re going to leave? Do you mean the club or …” I couldn’t say it.

He looked ashen under his tan. “I can’t tell you.”

“You’re just going to get yourself killed, aren’t you?” I sobbed. I had truly gotten involved with the wrong man. I rose from the chair and looked around in a daze in search of my purse. I found it on the floor and slung the strap across my shoulder.

I wanted to say goodbye to him but I didn’t have the courage to.

My heart felt like it was splitting into a thousand pieces inside of me. But better now when I could still recover fragments of it to keep me moving forward, rather than later on when I would be even more invested in him. Just the thought of him getting hurt destroyed me in ways that I didn’t want to even fathom. With my parents’ deaths, I had known what it felt like to lose a part of your being. I didn’t want to ever feel that way again.

“I’ve got to go to work. Your food is still on the floor. Help yourself,” I said and walked out of the room without looking back.

Della Ray

-only love can hurt like this-

Two weeks later, and I was slowly crumbling into an irredeemable mess. Even Jess noticed. She brought out her pink doctor’s bag and started taking my temperature and listening to my heartbeat using her pink stereoscope. “I think you need more vitamins,” she said after a very thorough examination, which included looking into my ears with one of her medical instruments.

She wrote me a prescription and I promised her I would go to the pharmacy and get it.

Even Nichole tried to ease the burden by doing more household chores, but that just made me feel even guiltier. There was nothing wrong with my body. It was just that my heart was breaking.

That evening I walked into my shift at the bar, sleep deprived, with a headache that was threatening to split my head into two, and found it already bursting with patrons. I stopped at the door. Suddenly, I felt as though I couldn’t do one more night here. As I stood there indecisively at the entrance, Henry spotted me as he rushed by with a tray filled with cocktails and cried to me to come to his aid.

Pushing my mental exhaustion aside, I pushed myself into the bar and got to work. I spent the night mixing up orders and spilling alcohol everywhere.

Midway through the shift, Tim, the manager confronted me. “What’s going on with you? Is something wrong with your niece?”

“No. I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” was all I could say. My entire body felt like a lump of wood that I was lugging around.

“Go home,” he said.

My eyes widened at him in surprise. “It’s okay, Tim—”

“No, Della. It’s not okay. This has been going on for a while now,” he said. “You used to be my best employee, but now you’re constantly distracted and sometimes downright sour. It’s costing me. Just go home and let me know when you’re ready to come back to work.” He walked away with a pained expression.