??ITS TOO LATE ??
Chapter 40
…..
f-__-k. Good question.
I start to walk to the door, but the anticipation of coconut cake is ripped from me when I hear sirens. The sound is far off-maybe four or five streets over.
I still have time. If there was a f-__-king window in this bedroom, I could grab Sloan, $h00t Luke and be out the window and to the car before they get here.
But motherf-__-king Dalton is standing in my way.
If he’s standing at the door holding a cake, that means he’s probably right…about…there.
I aim my gun and as soon as I fire it, something hard meets my back. I fall forward, my knees hit the floor and the gun flies out of my hands. I look behind me and Luke is standing over me, pulling his leg back to kick me in the face. I roll to the side and swipe my leg across the floor, knocking him off balance. He lands on his back.
He immediately starts trying to pull his legs through his arms so his hands will be cuffed in front of him rather than behind him. I sit up and reach for my gun, but Sloan jumps off the bed and lunges across the floor. Our hands reach the gun at the same time, but mine are more experienced and know where to grab it to get the better grip. Her hands fumble around mine until she’s aware that the gun is firmly planted back in my hand. I shove her away from me, back in the goddamn corner.
She hits the wall and scoots as far away from me as she can. By the time I get the gun pointed at Luke, the f-__-ker somehow got his hands around to his front. He’s pulling himself to his feet, so I stay a step ahead and pull the f-__-king trigger. I watch as the flesh of his thigh explodes into tiny pieces.
f-__-k, that looks like it hurt.
He’s on his knees.
His back slams against the wall. He’s wincing, pressing his hands against his wound. Dalton is beating on the door now. “Asa, open the f-__-king door or I’m $h00ting it open! Three…two…”
“If you open that door, they’re both dead!” I yell.
Dalton never makes it to one.
I look at Sloan and she’s huddled against the wall, hands over her ears, tears pouring out of her eyes. She’s staring at Luke, looking like she’s about to flip the f-__-k out. I need to get her out of here before she does. But the sirens are closer now. More than likely on this street.
f-__-k.
Think, Asa. Think.
I smack my gun against my forehead three times. I can’t lose her. I can’t. If I’m arrested, I won’t be able to protect her. I won’t be able to touch her. She’ll fall for someone else’s lies. Maybe even Luke’s again.
She’s the only person who has ever loved me. I can’t lose her. I can’t.
I crawl over to her and try to grab her hands, but she keeps pulling away from me. I have to point the d@mn gun at her head just to get her to be still. I press my forehead to the side of her head. “Tell me you love me, Sloan.” She’s shaking so hard, she can’t even speak. “Please, baby. I need to hear you say it.”
She tries three times to get her voice to work, but she keeps stuttering. Her lips are trembling harder than I’ve ever seen. She finally gets out one sentence. “Let Luke go and I’ll say it.”
I squeeze my hand around the gun. I wrap my other hand in her hair and squeeze. She’s trying to f-__-king negotiate for him?
I blow out a steady breath through my nostrils. My jaw is wound up too tight to let any air through my mouth. When I calm myself enough to speak, I grit my teeth and whisper, “You love me, right? You don’t love him. You love me.”
I pull back and meet her petrified eyes. She lifts her chin and says, “I’ll answer that after you let him go. He needs a doctor, Asa.”
A doctor? He doesn’t need a doctor. He needs a mother f-__-king miracle.
“I don’t need you to answer that,” I say to her. “I have a feeling if I ki|| him, I’ll be able to tell if you love him based on your reaction.”
Her eyes widen and she immediately begins shaking her head. “I don’t,” she blurts out. “Please don’t ki|| him, it’ll make things worse for you. I love you, Asa. Please don’t ki|| anyone else.”
I’m staring right at her, looking back and forth between her eyes. It’s hard to see any truth there, because all I see is the concern she has for Luke written across her face. “Don’t worry, Sloan. He’s probably wearing a bullet-proof vest.”
I turn my head and lift my gun, aiming it straight at Luke’s chest. I fire the shot. Luke’s whole body jerks against the wall. His hands go to his chest just as the blood begins pouring through his fingers. He immediately falls limp onto his side.
“Oh. My bad. I was wrong.”
Sloan is screaming. Screaming his f-__-king name, screaming no, screaming what have you done, screaming his name again, screaming, screaming, screaming.
…..
She’s f-__-king screaming.
She has f-__-king tears.
For him.
I grab her by the goddamn arms and pick her up, dropping her back down on the bed. I straddle her while she covers her head and screams even louder, the tears flooding down her face.
“Why are you f-__-king screaming, Sloan? WHY?!”
I can hear my father’s voice repeating wh-_-re, wh-_-re, wh-_-re. I smack my forehead to get it to stop.
Stop, stop, stop.
She doesn’t love him. She loves me. Forever.
“You don’t love him, Sloan,” I say, my face twisting in pain. “You don’t, he brainwashed you.” I grab her cheeks and press my lips to hers. She’s trying to pull away from me, trying to fight me.
“Yes I do!” she screams. “I love him, I h@ťě you, I love him, I f-__-king h@ťě you!”
She’s going to regret this. She’s going to regret this more than she’s ever regretted anything in her whole f-__-king worthless life. If she thinks she’s sad now watching that bastard die, wait until she sees me die.
She barely knew the guy. She’s loved me for two f-__-king years! My death would f-__-king devastate her. She’ll be crying so hard, she won’t have enough air to say she h@ťěs anyone.
wh-_-re, wh-_-re wh-_-re.
I smack my hand against my forehead again and then I press my forehead to hers. She’s no longer screaming now. She’s just sobbing uncontrollably.
“You’re going to regret this, Sloan. You think you’re crying hard now? When I die, it’ll f-__-king ki|| you. It. Will. f-__-king. ki||. You.”
She shakes her head back and forth, sobbing through her words. “It’s too late to ki|| me, Asa. You ki||ed me a long f-__-king time ago.”
She’s delusional.
She’s goddamn delusional.
I laugh, knowing how much this is going to upset her. I laugh, knowing how much she’s going to regret everything she just said to me. I wish I could be here to see it when she finally realizes how much I mean to her. How much I’ve done for her. What her life will be like without me.
I press my mouth against her trembling lips.
I press the gun to the side of my head and I pull the f-__-king-
LUKE-POV
You know what they say dying feels like?
No. You don’t know what they say, because no one says it. The people who die aren’t around to tell us what it felt like when it happened. The people who lived never died to begin with, so they’re unable to describe it.
But I’m in it. So let me tell you about it while I still can.
There’s a moment-a split second right before you close your eyes for the very last time-when you can actually feel yourself embracing death.
You can feel your heart as it begins to slow down, preparing to come to a halt.
You can feel your brain shutting off, the circuits slamming shut like doors.
You can feel your eyes closing-no matter how f-__-king hard you try to keep them open. And you realize that wh@ťěver you’re looking at in the moment you close your eyes-that’s the last thing you’re ever going to see.
I see Sloan. She’s all I see.
I see her screaming.
I see Asa pick her up and throw her on the bed.
I see her trying to fight him off.
I see her giving up.
That’s why I refuse to close my eyes.
I look down at the blood pouring from my chest-the life seeping out of me and onto the floor. I’ve made enough mistakes that caused Sloan to be in the position she’s in right now. I refuse to die without correcting a few of them.
It takes everything in me-but I stretch my arms out until I’m able to reach the gun at my ankle. There’s blood all over my hands, so I struggle getting a grip on it, but finally manage. I may not be the best at my profession in a lot of areas, but I have one hell of an aim.
Right when I lift my gun, Asa points his gun at himself.
No f-__-king way is he getting off that easy.
I refuse to close my eyes as I wrap my finger around the trigger and squeeze, watching as the bullet penetrates his wrist, sending his gun several feet across the room.
I refuse to close my eyes when the sound of three more shots penetrate my ears, this time coming from the direction of the bedroom door.
I refuse to close my eyes as I watch Ryan kick open the door and rush in, followed by several other men.
I refuse to close my eyes until Asa is on the floor-several feet away from Sloan-being handcuffed.
I refuse to close my eyes until they meet Sloan’s.
She’s off the bed, across the room, on her knees, pressing her hands to my chest, doing everything she can to keep the rest of the life from seeping out of me.
I don’t even have enough energy left to tell her it’s too late.
……
close my eyes for the last time.
But it’s okay, because she’s all I see.
She’s the last thing I’ll ever see.
Sloan-POV
This feeling is nothing new to me. I’ve experienced living through the death of someone I’ve loved before. Horrendous, heart-wrenching, soul-crushing death.
It was one month before I turned thirteen.
I had twin brothers, Stephen and Drew. From early on I basically became their caretaker. Both my brothers had a lot of medical issues, but my mother used to leave all hours of the night, regardless of their needs. She would go through spurts where she could be the mother she needed to be. She’d get them to their doctor’s visits for the medications they needed in order to convince the state she was a decent mother. But then she’d leave the majority of their everyday care up to me while she went out and partied or did wh@ťěver it was she did until early hours in the morning.
The night Drew died, my brothers were in my care. I can’t remember all the details because I try not to think about that night too much, but I remember hearing him fall in his bedroom. He had seizures frequently, and I knew he had more than likely just had a seizure, so I ran to his room to check on him.
When I opened the door, he was on the floor, his whole body jerking from the seizure. I dropped to my knees and held him as still as I could, but since he had turned ten, it became increasingly difficult for me to help him due to the fact that he and Stephen were already bigger than me. I did my best, holding his head until it was over.
It wasn’t until the seizure had stopped completely that I noticed the blood. It was all over my hands and on my clothes. I started to panic when I saw the gash on the side of his head. Blood was everywhere.
When he had fallen from the seizure he hit his head on the door hinge going down. We didn’t have a phone, so I was forced to leave him alone in the room while I ran to a neighbor’s house and called 911.
By the time I returned, he was no longer breathing. I’m not sure he ever took another breath after the moment I had left him. I wasn’t aware at the time that he had died from the blow to his head, but I realize now that he had probably died before I even dialed 911.
I changed after that night. Before that moment, I still held on to a little hope for my life. I knew that no one could be cursed as a child with such awful parents, only to then go on to have an equally awful adolescence and adulthood. Until that point, I thought maybe everyone’s life had an equal balance of good and bad and the only difference was that the good and bad luck was dispersed to each person differently at different points in their lives. I had hope that all my bad luck had been dispersed early on in my life and that things would only get easier.
But that night changed my way of thinking.
Drew could have fallen anywhere in that bedroom other than where he did. In fact, the doctor said the location of his injury was so unfortunate, he could have fallen a mere six centimeters to the left or right and he would have been fine.
Six centimeters. That’s all that separated Drew from life.
The impact to his temple ki||ed him almost instantly.
I obsessed over that six centimeters for months. Long after my mother had stopped pretending to grieve his death.
I obsessed over it, because I knew that if he had fallen six centimeters to the left or right, his survival would have been referred to as a “miracle.”
But what happened to Drew was the opposite of a miracle. It was a tragic accident.
A tragic accident that made me lose my belief in miracles altogether. By the time I was thirteen, anything labeled a “miracle” pissed me the hell off.
That’s one of the main reasons why I never partook much in social media. The amount of “miracles” seen in my Facebook newsfeed would make my eyes practically roll out of my head. So many people “cured” of cancer, thanks to the prayers of all their Facebook friends. “It’s benign! Hallelujah! God is so good to me!”
There were so many times I wanted to reach through my laptop screen and grab those people by the shoulders and scream, “Hey! Guess what? You aren’t special!”
Lots of people die from cancer. Where was their miracle? Did their Facebook friends not pray enough? Why did their chemotherapy not work? Because they didn’t post enough public prayer requests on social media? Why didn’t they get their miracle? Does God think less of their lives than those whose lives he spares?
No.
Sometimes cancer is cured…sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes people hit their heads and die, most of the time they hit their heads and survive. And any time you hear of a person beating the odds…that’s all they’re doing. Beating the odds