Demanding Ransom (13 page)

“I see a lot more than that on a daily basis,
you know,” he calls over his shoulder, and I glimpse his head rotate ever so
slightly my way.

“Eyes to the wall, Ran.” I wriggle out of my
skinny jeans and yank on his shorts. I have to roll the waist over four times
before they agree to sit on my hips without slipping off with the slightest
rustle of movement. “Okay. You can turn around.”

“Wow.” Ran swallows. “You look hot.”

“Yeah, I really look amazing in these ratty old
basketball shorts,” I say sarcastically.

“I agree. You look awful. Take them off.”

“Shut up.”

Ran eases onto the bed next to me, and I scoot
to the right to accommodate him. His bed is big. Probably a king. I don’t like
thinking about why he would need such a large bed, and I don’t like thinking
about the other girls that have probably joined him in it. Not like that’s what
I’m doing now, but still.

“Let me take a look.” The mattress bows under
his weight as he edges toward me. He’s on his knees, his legs tucked up under
him, like he’s crawling over the covers to me. I’ve only seen one other guy
slink toward me in this way and it was Brian. But while Ran approaches me
cautiously, Brian was always ready to pounce.

I don’t mean to, but I pull my head back,
trying to gain some space between us. The borrowed shorts are long and hang all
the way down to my knees. My legs are clenched together, and when he slides
closer, I feel the muscles in them tighten.

“Maggie, I’m not going to hurt you.” He
stretches a hand toward me slowly, as if asking permission. Reading my
hesitant, but approving, expression, Ran’s fingers skim the hem of the shorts
and he cuffs them four times—just like I’d done earlier to the
waist—to pull them back enough to examine my scar. When his eyes scan
over the six-inch, light pink gash extending the length of my upper thigh,
Ran’s shoulders sag. “I’m so sorry, Maggie.”

“It’s fine.
I’m
fine. See?” I hurriedly unroll the shorts and smooth my palms over the fabric.
“Let’s go back downstairs.”

“No.” Ran lifts his eyes up from my leg to my
eyes. “Let me look at it.”

I surrender, knowing I’m not going to win.
“Fine.”

He pulls up the hem again, but this time after
he does it he slides in closer to me, so we’re leg to leg, facing one another
on the bed. When his finger meets the warm flesh on my thigh, I close my eyes
to stop my eyelids from fluttering. When I open them, Ran’s crystal blue ones
are locked with mine.

He presses his finger on my skin, at the very
base of my scar just above my knee. His touch hovers just over, almost so he’s not
touching me at all, but the space between his finger and my skin pulses like
there’s no other part of my body I can feel right now. Like everything else is
numb except for the small stretch of space under Ran’s finger. Like he’s all I
can feel.

 
“Your laceration was very deep,” he says,
more like a doctor than a college-aged boy trying to get past first base. It
pulls me back down to earth. “The shard that caused this was a half-inch
thick.”

I nod, but not because I remember. I don’t
really remember much from that night other than our embarrassing ambulance
interactions.

“It cut straight through all of your muscle and
nearly severed your femoral artery completely.” His finger has stopped moving
and rests about two inches above my knee. “Trav and I had just left the
hospital after responding to another call and were there when it all happened.”

“I’m glad you were,” I say, but it’s not
enough.

“Maggie, you can bleed out in less than three
minutes from the type of injury you sustained.” His eyes drop from mine and he
begins tracing up my leg again. The way his finger feels on my skin pulls up
goose bumps all over my entire body, not just the area he touches anymore.
Every part of me is affected by him now.

I blow out a breath and try to quietly refill
my lungs without letting him know how incredibly difficult he’s making this.
How hard he’s making it for me to focus on doing something that I’ve spent the
rest of my existence doing instinctually. Feeling Ran’s touch makes it as
though I have to retrain my body on how to function like it normally should.
Everything else has gone haywire.

“It takes a while for that muscle to not only
heal, but to regain its strength.” I look down at my scar, seeing it snake
across my leg and seeing Ran’s fingers delicately trail along the once-torn
ridge of flesh. “That’s why it gives out on you. Because it’s not as strong as
it once was. But you’d be amazed how we can heal, Maggie.” I feel Ran’s palm
press completely onto my leg and feel his fingers coil onto my inner thigh
where the scar winds on my skin, touching me where no one other than Brian has.
It shocks me, but I don’t allow my eyes to falter, though my breathing betrays
me. “We have an incredible capacity to come back from trauma. To heal from the
wounds that we sustain.”

I’ve never heard any doctor or paramedic
describe an injury the way Ran does, and I know he’s not just referring to my
leg. And then the reality of what he’s doing hits me.

I yank my shorts down over my leg and Ran draws
his hand back swiftly. “Do not use my accident as a way to lecture me on being
broken.” I taste the sickening sushi from yesterday’s interrogation on my
tongue.

Ran’s eyes emit a hurt that equals a backhand
across his face. In fact, that might have been nicer. To slap him and pretend
that I was mad because he was attempting to make a move. But he and I both know
that’s not what he was trying to do.

I swallow the lump that has swelled in my
throat. “I don’t need you to talk to me about trauma and healing. I’m just
fine.” I swing my legs over the side of the bed. “And my leg is just fine, if
you actually had any real concern over it to begin with.”

“Don’t do this, Maggie.” Ran pulls his hands
through his hair and keeps them wrapped around the roots like he’s going to tug
them out. “I
do
care about your leg.
I care about all of you. Can’t you see that?”

“Honestly Ran, it seems like all you care about
is teaching me some life lesson on forgiveness and second chances. I’m
beginning to think you’re taking your job as a ‘healer’ a little too far.” I
tear off his basketball shorts, ball them up and chuck them at him, grateful
for the long sweater I’d chosen this morning, because it falls down my legs and
keeps some modesty in my act. I yank my jeans on and am frustrated when I
stumble slightly, wishing to make my scene as dramatic as possible, but I’m
sure I look ridiculous.

“This is not my idea of a girl ripping her
clothes off for me.” Ran tosses the discarded shorts onto his bed.

“You’re not my idea of much, either Ran,” I
spit.

“First,” he says, calm and composed, “I’m not
even sure what that means. And second, you said my job as a ‘healer.’ That’s
not what we do. We don’t heal, we sustain. We make sure things don’t escalate
and we patch things up until the real healing can take place later down the
road.”

“I don’t care what you do for a living. I don’t
care about anything other than getting out of this apartment and forgetting
this night ever happened.”

“Again, not something a girl has ever told me.”

“Would you stop already?” I can’t keep my voice
calm any longer. It thunders out of me without permission. “Stop doing that.”

“What?” His eyes droop at the sides like a
puppy dog.

“Stop trying to charm me when I’m obviously
furious with you.” My hands plant firmly on my hips, my nails digging into the
bone that protrudes there.

“Is it working? The charming?”

I purse my lips bitterly. “Not in the least.”

“Why do you hate me so much?”

I throw him an incredulous glare. “Are you
serious? Because you make me extremely angry, Ran.”

He’s still sitting on his bed, his legs crossed
one over the other, and I’m glad he is because it allows me to tower over him.
I wonder if that’s his intent. To let me feel like I have the upper hand for
once.

“I don’t think that’s true, Maggie.” His hands
are clasped at his ankles and a dark lock of hair slips onto his forehead as he
slightly tosses his head to the side. “I think I make you think about the
things in your life that make you angry. There’s a difference.”

“You make me angry, you make me think angry
things. Whatever.”

“So the anger you have over your mom leaving
your family,” he begins, and my mouth gapes open at his audacity. “Has no one
ever challenged you to look at what it’s doing to you?”

“We’re not having this conversation. You don’t
get to
know
me, Ran. You don’t get to
ride in on your white horse and pretend to be the hero.”

“I believe it was a white ambulance,
but—” he interjects.

I talk over him loudly. “You don’t get to
pretend to have this deeper sort of relationship with me because you may or may
not have saved my life. I don’t owe you anything.”

“You’re absolutely right. You don’t owe me a
thing. I was doing my job. It was a matter of being at the right place at the
right time.”

“Well, I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time
right now and want to leave.”

“That’s what you think? Really? That you and
I…” he waves his hands back and forth in the empty space between us, “… that
this is all wrong?”

“There is no ‘you and I.’ ” I make childish air
quotes around my words. “You and I have nothing in common, Ran.”

Unfortunately, the time for his courteous
sitting-while-I’m-standing-act is over and he rises to his feet and takes three
steps toward me. My eyes are level with his chest and he has to lower his face
so I won’t need to crane mine up to look at him. It’s not something he needs to
do, because I don’t plan on making eye contact. Instead, I stare straight into
the inked design on his shirt.

“Maggie, we’re practically the same person.” I
feel his eyes attempting to draw my gaze up to him, but I won’t surrender. “I
think I get you.”

“Now
that
is the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said. Forget the lame attempts at
charming me. You’re a certified psycho with that last one.”

“Oh
really
,
Miss-I-Have-Abandonment-Issues-I’m-Not-Willing-to-Face.”

My breathing becomes labored, like each
individual pull of oxygen that enters my lungs is pushed back out into the
world in the form of burning anger. “And driving a motorcycle because my daddy
who didn’t want me drove one just screams ‘I’m a completely whole person,’
Ran.”

I had promised myself I wouldn’t, but when I
give in and look up at his face, I wish I had been further up against the wall
and not standing out in the open of the room, because my legs try to give out
on me completely.

Ran’s mouth straightens and he tucks in his
bottom lip as though he’s biting back something terrible. Something that will
put me in the horrible place I deserve. I wait for it—wait for him to
yell, wait for him to launch into all the reasons why I deserve to be
miserable—but it doesn’t come.

The seconds of silence pulse around us and my
ears flood with my own beating heart.

“I think you should go, Maggie.”

The quiver in my bottom lip takes everything in
me to get under control, and I do that same lip biting he did to keep it from
trembling. Unfortunately, I can’t find anything appropriate to do with the
entire rest of my body that shakes just as violently.

I nod, bringing my hands up to my mouth, biting
on my thumbnail until it snaps off completely. “I’ll call Mikey.”

“I think that would be best.”

I pull the phone from my back pocket as Ran
slides past me, exiting his room. The timer for our dinner beeps steadily from
the kitchen.

When I hear him open the oven and settle the
pizzas onto a cooling rack, I collapse onto his bedroom floor, giving in to the
guilty cry that’s been trapped inside me for more years than I can count.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

“I’m sorry I made you leave work, Dad.” I sink
as far down into the passenger seat as possible, until I’m slumped so low I can
hardly see over the dash.

“No apology necessary, Maggie Girl.” Dad’s
calloused hands hang over the steering wheel as he coasts the car into the
garage. “I’ve stacked up my overtime and took on two extra shifts later in the
week to cover the hours I missed last night.” Though everyone else’s
hair—even Mikey’s—is starting to grow back, Dad’s kept his billiard
ball look and still sports a closely shaved head. It looks good on him. “Plus,
I’m just dropping you off. Heading back over to finish up my shift.”

“How long were you there yesterday? At the ER?”

“Just under twelve hours.” Dad twists off the
headlights and the garage is sucked up in the hazy darkness of twilight.

“You should have called me.” I pull on the
handle.

“It was just a blood clot, Mags. The doctors
gave him some blood thinners to inject. He’s fine.”