Lighting a Match in the Rain

Chapter Thirty-Seven

I wasn't good at sitting still. My hand was holding a towel against my bleeding leg as anxiety fled through my blood.

The green and white walls of the apartment were unfamiliar, as was the white porcelain bathtub that I was sitting on the edge of. My eyes were staring in empty space, though unfocused, I could see Julian digging in the cabinet under the sink.

I couldn't slow my heart rate.

"Why would they help?" my words were choked and strained. "And without asking questions?"

Julian pulled a first aid kit out and pried it open on the floor in front of me. "Curtis and Zoe were childhood friends of ours," he explained, pulling out a spool of thread and a needle. "They keep in touch and check in with me every month or so. They know about all the stuff Reed's gotten mixed up in and has even gotten him out of stuff he couldn't get himself out of."

I thought of two teenagers out looking for Reed and possibly running into the same members of the brotherhood I'd encountered just twenty minutes before. I hadn't even gotten to meet the two siblings before they left to go look for him. We'd let ourselves in their apartment with the spare key hidden in the potted plant outside the door.

Why were we leaving this to two teenagers? At least, supposedly, they were reliable.

Julian pulled the blood-stained towel away from my skin and cleaned the wound the best he could with the blood still spilling out.

"Why aren't we calling someone?" I asked, my voice rising as I needed to release some of the building emotion. "We need to call someone. The cops, your parents...literally anyone."

Julian's head shook from side to side. "Reed wouldn't want us to."

"That doesn't matter if Reed is dead!" My outburst didn't faze Julian in the slightest. He pushed the threaded needle into my skin without the slightest shake in his movements. I was so stressed that I didn't pay attention to or feel it. I shook my head. "This went too far. It was always too far. Ricky and Porter...the rest of them...Seb..." I breathed. "Julian, Sebastian was there. Why would he want to be a part of that? Why would anyone?"

I replayed the minutes in my head, every ticking second of it all, an individual red flag. "I shot someone," my voice broke off, another tear falling down my cheek. "Julian, I think I killed someone."

Julian finished stitching up my wound, tied it off, and pushed all of the supplies to the side. A second later, he pulled me off the edge of the bathtub and onto his lap where he held me in his arms.

The man probably had a family. What if he was married? What if he had kids that were waiting for him to come home to?

For a few minutes, he rubbed his hand in circles on my back while soothing words spilled from his lips and calmed my breathing.

"What if they come after me next because I killed one of them?"

His arms tightened around me. "They won't."

"But what if they do?"

He didn't reply to me and I didn't know if that was for the best, or if it just made me worry more.

Sooner than later, we ended up getting off of the bathroom floor, cleaning up all the blood that I'd trailed through the apartment, and ended up sitting on the couch. Julian had found pain killers for me in a kitchen cabinet and some cloth that he wrapped around the stitches on my leg.