Bonds of Attraction (Full Length Erotic Romance Novel) (25 page)

In the movies, when someone points a gun at
the heroine, she’s unafraid. Maybe a fight breaks out and she’s able to wrestle
away the gun or avoid the bullets. This wasn’t a movie. In real life, when
someone points a gun at you, your heart stops.

“We were
meant to be togethe
r!”
Marilyn yelled, rising from the desk.

I stammered over my words, forcing something
out that would hopefully save me.

“Calm down,” I said. It was the best I could
do but it was still lame. I was pretty sure we were past the point of Marilyn
calming down. “You don’t need the gun, Marilyn. I’ll do whatever you want.”

“We are bound together! Don’t you see that,
you stupid whore?!” Marilyn yelled, pointing the gun at my head, her eyes
growing wide and bloodshot. I raised my hands and backed into the couch.

“Yes!” I cried out. “I see, I see!”

I thought of a show that I had seen on PBS
once about dogs and how they sensed fear. Fear was mistaken for aggression and
only exacerbated a bad situation. I needed to control myself and bring the
intensity of the room down. If I started to cry or freaked out, who knew what
Marilyn would do.

“Ok,” I said. “We can talk if you just point
the gun away from me. Is that acceptable?” I asked calmly. My heart slammed
against my chest and sweat poured down my back in cold waves of panic, but my
voice was a steady dam against my emotion.

Marilyn rested back against my desk and
lowered the gun. She still held it in her hand, her finger on the trigger, but
it was pointed down to the floor.

“Thank you,” I said soothingly. The situation
had escalated into an entirely new thing and I needed to act accordingly. I had
no idea how I was going to maneuver myself out of this mess, but I felt
confident that I could. There had to be a way. Marilyn was a torrent of
emotion, but I was sure that she had not come here to kill me.

“Call Leon,” Marilyn said coldly. “Make him
come here.”

“Marilyn,” I said calmly. “I can’t make Leon
come here. He’s not even a client of mine anymore. He won’t come.”

Marilyn’s brow darkened as her eyebrows
lowered. The gun twitched in her hand and my eyes fixated on it. If I could get
her to put the gun away, everything would be so much better. Her hand gripped
the gun even tighter and I saw the veins bulge out of her hand. When I looked
up to her face, she was as dark as night.

“Liar,” she hissed. “You’re a lying whore. So
you just fuck him and then kick him to the curb?”

I paused, considering whether to tell her
everything that had happened. Would it upset her further or make her sympathize
with me? I had no idea, but I didn’t want to give her the slightest idea that I
was lying.

“No, it’s the truth. I went to his office
this morning and he was with another woman,” I admitted. The pain of the
morning wormed its way into my voice and Marilyn’s face lightened slightly when
she looked at me. She believed me. Good.

“So what?” asked Marilyn harshly. She studied
me as I searched for a response and then her eyes opened wide as she began to
understand. “You have feelings for him, don’t you?”

“No, it’s not that at all,” I said quickly.
Too quickly.

A dark shadow cast down over Marilyn’s face
as her brow dropped again. There was no confusing the look on her face; she was
angry.

“So, you fall for my Leon and then when you
see him enjoying himself, you get all hurt and run off crying like some little
schoolgirl? Did you really think he could ever care for you? I doubt he even
finds you attractive. Leon likes to seduce. You were probably just a little
practice for him.”

I barely registered her insults. The tone of
her voice was startling. While she dismissed me as nothing, she was becoming
visibly upset. I tried not to look at the gun but my eyes defied me and stole a
quick glance. Marilyn had raised it to her waist as she crossed her arms. The
gun pointed towards the door, towards my purse.

“No,” I said. “I never thought he had
feelings for me. How could he have?” I said, pandering to her. I needed her to
believe that I agreed with her, pride be damned. Marilyn was obviously more
unstable than even Leon had thought and now I was face to face with this
woman’s wrath.

Marilyn said nothing. She studied me with
eyes that looked as if they were staring at something far away and alien. I
felt like her eyes were dissecting me, trying to see inside me. My skin crawled
as those eyes focused in on me, but I refused to turn away.

“Call him,” Marilyn said.

“Marilyn,” I began.

“Call him now!” Marilyn screamed. Her voice
broke as she yelled. Rage twisted her face into a distorted parody of the
beautiful girl she normally was. My hands began to shake and now I was running
on pure adrenaline.

“Alright, let me get my phone,” I said. I got
up from the couch and walked over to the door, slowly.

The exit was agonizingly close. I fought back
the urge to just run away, but Marilyn was far too unpredictable for that. If I
scared her or made her feel threatened, she might do something crazy like shoot
me. I would play it cool.

“We were made for each other. Two sides of
the same coin. Puzzle pieces joined together. I am the bottom, he is the top.
Do you get it?” Marilyn asked wildly. Her voice was becoming more frantic now,
more manic. Every word seemed to pulse with a nervous energy that made the
sweat on my skin grow cold with fear. Marilyn was breaking down in front of me
with a gun in her hand that she had already pointed at me once.

“Yes,” I said, my hands fumbling. I reached
into my purse and pulled out the phone. Marilyn was holding the gun up again, pointing
it at me. I noticed the gun was shaking slightly.

I pressed the button on my phone to bring it
to life and tried my best to steady my hand. I closed my eyes for a moment and
breathed in deeply, calming myself. I felt the weight on my shoulders lift
slightly when I opened my eyes. Don’t panic. Breathe. Everything is going to be
fine. I entered the code on the front screen of my phone and brought up the
keypad on the digital screen.

“I’m calling him now. Can you stop pointing
the gun at me?” I asked calmly. Marilyn lowered the gun, but it was still
pointing at me vaguely, albeit not at any vital organs.

I began to bring up Leon’s contact
information and then thought it over. If I called Leon and convinced him to
come over, what would Marilyn do? She wouldn’t hurt him, but that didn’t mean
she wouldn’t hurt me to prove a point to him. I canceled looking up his info
and dialed 911 slowly, trying to mock that I was pressing other numbers as
well. When the phone began to ring, I lifted it to my ear.

“Give me that,” Marilyn hissed as she walked
over and grabbed the phone out of my hand.

Marilyn stared at me and then I saw rage boil
over her like a volcano erupting with hot magma. Her voice became sweet as
honey when she spoke, a stark contrast to how she actually felt.

“Oh my god! I’m so sorry! I meant to call a
friend.”

“Help me! I’m being—” I yelled, but it was
too late. Marilyn had hung up the phone and cut me off by throwing it at me. I
raised my arms defensively and the phone bounced off my forearms.

The gun was raised, pointing at me. Before I
had time to think, before I had time to even move, I heard Marilyn yell
something. Then the sound of the gunshot drowned out her voice. Everything fell
away and the world turned dark.

The music was still on. I could hear a band
playing soft, sensual harmonies, the kind of harmonies you could enjoy while
having sex with a stranger and a few drinks in you. Thoughts came to me from
far away, much like the music, and I wondered where I was.

A searing pain was tearing through my chest,
burning a hole through me. It felt like I had been stabbed with a hot iron that
entered my chest and exited through my back shoulder. Everything hurt. My head
hurt. My chest screamed out with pain. Even my legs seemed to whine with a sore
throb. But it was all far away. Distant.

I thought I could hear sirens in the
distance, but that could have easily just been the music.

Everything was so distant, so far away, that
it was as if it was happening on a television with low volume. When I tried to
move myself, nothing seemed to work. All the energy was sucked out of me.

My hand was wet with some fluid. My eyes
slowly looked around, noticing the bright lights that were fuzzy and clouded
through my blurred vision. I blinked a few times, trying to clear my eyes, but
I could only get glimpses of images. When my sight finally found my wet hand,
red filled my vision. I managed to open and close my hand slowly, and I saw
that red dripped from it as I did so.

Blood,
I thought from far away.
My hand is covered in blood. But whose blood?

The sirens, eons away, grew louder. I heard
doors opening and the sounds of footsteps coming closer, but all I could do was
open and close my hand dripping with red. Pairs of legs moved past my vision
and surrounded me.

“Dispatch, we’ve got a gunshot victim at...”
a man’s voice said before it faded out into a steady hum. Darkness enveloped my
vision and I fought it, trying to stay awake, but to no use.

I could see Marilyn standing in front of me.
I wanted to run but my legs wouldn’t move. The sound of the gun shot through
the office like a crack of lightning and a searing pain tore through me. Blood
pooling out across my dress as I dropped to the ground. On my knees, struggling
to stay up, I heard Marilyn run out of the office. My phone had been so far
away, impossibly far away. I had reached for it before collapsing entirely.

“Jesus, she’s fucking lucky that the woman
upstairs heard the shot. If not for that who knows what...”

Hot, white pain exploded through my shoulder.
My eyes shot open and then closed again. I was being lifted up and whatever
surface I was on jostled me. It felt like a sword of acid tearing through my
shoulder, masticating the flesh and burning my skin. Everything was still far
away, but the pain had been the exception. The pain had become my world.

Bright lights blinded my eyes. They would
only open a crack, but I could see that I was somewhere new. The office was
completely gone. Everything was washed white with light and people moved
frantically around me. I tried to lift my head and a strap rubbed around my
forehead.

“Ma'am,” a woman’s voice said. “You have to
stay still, we’re getting you to a hospital. You’ve had a really close call and
you’re not out of the woods yet.”

I opened my mouth to speak and no words would
come out. I let out a sigh and closed my mouth, my tongue dry and
uncomfortable.

The pain was unbearable. If I had any energy,
I would have writhed and screamed. It was as if the bullet was continuously
tearing through me, eating through the flesh as it entered and exited me. Tears
fell down the sides of my face and I closed my eyes, praying to pass out again.
Even if I died, it would be better than this pain.

A prick of a needle injecting into my arm
caused me to try to open my eyes again, but they seemed to fight me. Soon, a
pleasant warmth flowed up my arm and wrapped itself around the pain in my chest
and shoulder. It rained down heaven on the white hot pain and it dropped away,
a distant memory of the excruciating wound that once was. A fuzziness blanketed
my head and I let out a long sigh of relief.

Morphine, I thought, the word coming out of
the fog of darkness. Or maybe I had heard somebody say it. Either way, I began
to praise the word in my mind, not sure as to what it even really meant. All I
knew is that the warmth was associated with the morphine. Morphine was the
salvation from the horror of my pain.

A calm, loving embrace of darkness touched me
and I welcomed its reprieve. The lights of the ambulance faded away and I was
left floating alone, floating down an unknown road to an unknown destination. A
woman had told me we were going to a hospital. In the warm darkness, that
sounded just fine to me.

I floated, devoid of body and mind. Only the
sensation of weightlessness was with me. My mouth hung open, far away, feeling
as though it belonged to someone else entirely. From somewhere in the darkness,
an alarm was going off. The alarm was trying to wake me up. A loud ringing, a
siren that screamed for me to flee from the darkness. Bodiless, I was unable to
turn away or close my ears to the sound. Soon, it grew so loud that it was the
darkness itself.

“We’re moving her to surgery, now!” a
different woman’s voice exclaimed. Blinding lights cut through the darkness as
my eyes were pried open. A woman dressed in blue scrubs was pointing a
flashlight into my left eye and then she pried open the next eye and did the
same. I looked at her intently and her face was determined and stoic.

“Miss Facet,” the woman said. A word floated
up into my mind and I grasped onto it: doctor. “You’re in good hands. We’re
gonna patch you right up.”

“Ok,” I croaked, the syllables coming out
slowly and disjointed.

I was moving, strapped to a gurney or some
sort of bed. People were yelling all around me, but not angrily. There was a
dialogue occurring all around me that I couldn’t understand, yet I knew it was
about me. At some point, I felt scissors caress against my skin as they cut
through the dress that was soaked with my blood. I randomly thought of the
carpet in my office, now stained with the spilled glass of whiskey and my
blood. If I could have laughed, I would have.

My eyes opened to slits and I saw people
staring down at me, faces clad in hospital masks and hair hidden with blue
caps. Everything on them was blue. When a gloved hand lifted above me, I saw a
plastic apparatus in the hand that was fastened around my mouth. The people
around me clad in blue began to hand each other things and talk in stern,
collected voices. In the distance, I could hear classical music.

I breathed in. A dreamless sleep grew with
every break that cut out all of my vision and left the sky full dark.

I awoke. My eyes opened half-way and I looked
around. Beige walls surrounded me. A machine beeped next to me and I strained
to turn my head to look at it. Screens showed numbers that I had no reference
for and one machine showed a line that jumped every few seconds with a beep. I
saw a number next to the line and figured out that this was my heart-rate.

I moved my head back and it was like moving
the Earth itself. It was heavy. All of my limbs were heavy. I was able to lift
my arms, but some invisible force pushed against it as nothing ever had before.
I felt like  newborn babe, without strength and without agility. I opened
my mouth and licked my dry lips, breathing in deeply through my nose as I did
so. A large yawn escaped me and slowly my jaw closed again.

“Julie,” a woman’s voice said. I looked to my
right to the source of the voice and I saw a woman in her early forties
standing there, clad in green scrubs and a white jacket. A stethoscope hung
around her neck. A badge was clipped to her scrubs that I could not make out.

“How are you feeling? I imagine you’re a
little fuzzy from the painkillers.”

“I’m… alright,” I said. As I spoke, I started
to grasp onto the meaning of the words as they came out of my mouth. “Am I in
the hospital?”

“Yes, you are. You had surgery twelve hours
ago that lasted for three hours. You are in the medical ICU. I’m your doctor,
Hannah Lexington. I was the head surgeon during your operation.”

The warmth that had been so welcomed in the
ambulance was still with me. I could feel the pain of my shoulder, far away,
but it wasn’t bothersome. It was so distant that it was though it wasn’t even
there.

“How bad is it?” I asked slowly. The morphine
dulled the fear, but a wild thought crashed through the wall of opiates and for
a moment I was sure that the doctor was going to tell me I was now debilitated.

“The bullet missed your heart by about an
inch. It also missed your lungs and all major organs. It entered on your upper
chest and exited out just next to your left shoulder blade. You lost a lot of
blood, and the tissue around the area sustained a serious trauma, but since the
paramedics were called quickly, you were brought here before any further damage
from blood loss could occur.”

I searched my mind for the memory of what
happened after the shot. Nothing was there. I couldn’t remember the ambulance
drive at all, but I knew that I had been brought here by a man and a woman.
They had called me lucky.

“How did they know?” I asked, my voice hoarse
and thick.

“Apparently the woman above you called it
in,” a man’s voice said. I looked around the room and noticed that two men were
in the corner by the door. One was sitting in a chair, checking his phone,
while the other stood calmly.

“These men are police officers,” the doctor
said. “They want to ask you some questions, despite my misgivings about
stressing you immediately after you’ve woken up.” The doctor gave the two
police officers a disapproving look.

“It’s much better to do this when it’s still
fresh in the witness’s mind,” the sitting officer said.

“It’s much better for the patient to get some
rest and not be stressed out by reliving the horror she just survived.”

“No, it’s alright,” I said, my voice thick
and raspy. “I can answer some questions. I’m a little woozy from the meds, but
I want them to at least start working on catching Marilyn as soon as possible.”

“Marilyn?” the standing officer asked.

“Alright,” the doctor interrupted. “I think
I’ll stick around and make sure nothing goes awry.” She eyed the two police
officers mistrustfully and sat down next to the bed, crossing her legs and
watching them intently. I immediately liked this woman.

“First, what did you mean when you said ‘the
woman above me’ before?” I asked.

“She’s a graphic artist. She said she was
working late on a project and heard an argument break out below her. It was too
muffled for her to hear the exact words, but she heard yelling and then she
heard a gunshot and then a car peeled out of the parking lot,” said one of the
officers, a thick brown mustache below his nose and a huge bald spot on the
front of his head.

“It would have been great if she gave us the
license plate, but she said she was so terrified that she killed the lights in
her office and hid under her desk when she made the call,” the other officer
said. He was much younger, probably a rookie. “Understandable, I suppose.”

“That young woman saved your life, it might
not be a bad idea to thank her when you get out of here,” the mustached officer
said.

When I got out of here, I was going to send
that graphic designer to the Caribbean on an all-expenses-paid trip.

“Now, can you tell us what happened?” the
mustached officer asked.

“A woman named Marilyn Benedict shot me,” I
said. The young officer wrote down the name immediately and then showed it to
his partner, who then nodded. When I didn’t continue speaking, the officers
looked at one another and exchange a glance that I couldn’t read.

“Please, we know you’re tired and hurt, but
tell us about the entire night.”

“I planned on getting some dinner by myself,
but I was driving and spotted a nightclub. When I saw it, I decided to stop in
for a drink, maybe dance a little bit.”

“What was the name of the club and who owns
it?” the young officer asked.

“Leon Christensen, a client of mine, owns it.
It’s called the Nova,” I said, my voice shaky. Saying Leon’s name filled me
with a feeling of heaviness that caused my shoulder to ache, despite the
morphine. The young officer wrote down what I said and then all eyes were back
on me.

“In the club, I had a drink or two and I was
dancing. It was fun,” I said, remembering how I had gotten lost in the beat.
How good the drinks had warmed my belly. How the feel of the dance floor
beneath my heels had been wonderful. “I started talking to this guy and we had
another drink before we decided to get out of there.”