Read Yours: A Standalone Contemporary Romance for Free Online Page B

but it’s supposed to calm down after a minute, unless you’re in terrible shape, and I’m not. I’m in fucking fantastic shape, heart condition be damned.  
    I’m naked and drunk with a pair of clueless heiress socialite blondes climbing all over me. Not that there aren’t smart blondes out there—hey, Astrid!—but there are reasons stereotypes exist.
    This is like Chile all over again.  
    But this time, my heart doesn’t slow down. It hammers even harder.  
    I do square breathing; focus on the beats, counting them, slowing them.
    Eventually I have to move away from the girls and sit in the sand, head in my hands, and breathe. Hope. Beg to make it just another day.
    One more day.
    I mean, to die on my thirty-first birthday?
    Jesus, what a laugh.
    But it’s real.
    Not on the mountain in Chile, no.
    At home, in Cali.  
    On a beach, naked, with a couple of pretty girls.  
    Again, there are worse ways to go.  
    But deep down, the truth is I don’t want to go at all.
    I’ve resigned myself to it. I’ve kept everyone at bay my whole life because I knew it was coming, sooner rather than later.
    I just…I’ve always hoped that maybe I could cheat it, day by day, and somehow it wouldn’t catch up.
    But it caught up all right.
    “Hey, Lock? You okay?” Morgan, this is.  
    I think it’s her, anyway. It’s hard to tell, because I can’t hear, and it’s hard to make things out. I’m seeing double, and it’s not from the whiskey. I’ve got the tunnel vision again. Chest aching. That fucking elephant is sitting on my chest again.  
    Here we go again.  
    I get reflective, because this kind of dying takes time. It feels like it to me, at least. I have time to stare at the waves and wish I were out there on the sea, riding the waves, hauling at the Vagabond ’s lines, trimming the sails, reefing the jib.  
    “Lock?” This is Lana. I can tell because she’s in front of me, and she’s got a cool birthmark on her left tit. Looks like Italy, right on the slope, sort of near the outside. “Lachlan?”
    I wave. “I…it’ll pass.”
    “Are you sure you’re all right?”
    I shake my head. “No.”  
    But this time the feeling is not passing.
    I’m on my back, and I don’t remember lying down. I hear rustling, and thudding. The helicopter, Robby is landing. Sand stings my eyes. I see skirts around me, which is what the rustling noise was—the girls putting on their dresses. Someone laboriously and with great difficulty gets my pants on me.  
    I feel Robby throw me over his burly shoulder, and set me in the back of the chopper.  
    “Yo, Lock, you good, man?”
    I squeak out a breath. My heart…I’m not sure if it’s beating too hard or not hard enough. I stare up at Robby. “Hosp…” I can’t get it out. “Hosp—hospital.”  
    “You got your meds?” With effort, I shake my head no. “Shit, man. We’re a good thirty minutes from a hospital, and that’s by air. You gotta hold on. Girls, sit down and buckle up. We’re gonna haul ass and it ain’t gonna be pretty.” Robby is an ex-military pilot, and I got him to show me some tricks once. Dude can fucking fly.
    Which is good, because it’s hard to think. Hard to see. Hard to breathe. Hard to do anything except stare at the ceiling and hope.
    I hear sniffling.  
    Lana is crying.  
    “Quit…that…shit,” I snarl. Okay, not a snarl, more of a gasp and a whimper. “Had it…coming. Whole…life.”  
    Robby was right. It’s not pretty. He keeps low and hauls ass, breaking a lot of laws, probably.
    I realize my head is on Morgan’s lap.  
    There’s a theme, here: not a bad way to go, head on the lap of a pretty girl.
    Blackness is winning.
    I’m holding on, but there’s not much to hold on to at this point.
    Everything is faint.
    I feel…thin.
    Darkness.
    I succumb.

Head looking down

    Los Roboles Hospital and Medical Center  
    Los Angeles, California
    Six years earlier

    “Twelve year-old male, multiple gunshot