A Quarter for a Kiss Read Free Page A

the person responsible for bringing the two of us together.
    “Stella?” I asked, trying to picture a woman I didn’t know very well at the other end of the line. I had met her the day she married my dear friend Eli, but she and I had not really spoken since, except for those times when I called their house and she had been the one to answer the phone. “What’s up?”
    “Oh, Callie, I’m so glad I finally reached you. I need you. I need your help. I need Tom Bennett, also, if you know how to reach him.”
    “What is it?” I asked, my heart surging.
    “It’s Eli,” she sobbed. “He’s in the hospital.”
    “In the hospital?”
    “Callie, he’s been shot.”

Two

    Eli had asked for both of us to come. So while Tom dealt with returning the rental car, I went straight to the airline ticketing counter and made the necessary changes to our flights. Because Stella and Eli lived in Cocoa Beach, Florida, we would fly into Orlando and then rent another car and drive east to the coast. According to Stella, Eli was in the hospital in Cape Canaveral and about to go to the operating room.
    The best I could do was a connection through Atlanta that would get us to Orlando around midnight. We probably had another hour’s drive from there to the hospital, so once everything had been arranged, I called Stella back and told her to expect us between 1:00 and 2:00 A.M . It was going to be a long night.
    Tom and I met back at security, and then we filed through and found our gate. Mostly, I was operating on autopilot, somewhat in shock. The flight to Atlanta seemed to take forever, and the connection from there on to Orlando felt like an eternity. Despite the comforts of first class, my mind was filled with so many emotions I had to remind myself several times to breathe.
    Tom and I had barely said two words to each other on the first flight, though once the second plane took off out of Atlanta, he reached for my hand and asked me if I was okay, if I wanted to talk.
    “No, and no,” I said softly, giving his hand a quick squeeze before pulling mine away. How could I begin to explain all of the confusion that was swirling in my brain?
    Eli had been shot, caught in the chest by a sniper’s bullet, and now he lay in the hospital teetering between life and death. I leaned away from Tom and rested my head against the seat, my heart pounding as strongly as it had since we first received Stella’s phone call. I was relieved that Tom didn’t press me to talk but simply took out his laptop and turned his attention to the screen.
    Don’t die, Eli! my mind shouted. I knew I should be praying, but I was paralyzed with shock and fear, too numb to do anything but hold in my sobs and keep from screaming.
    Eli was like a father to me, and the thought of him dying was difficult enough. But for him to have been senselessly shot in some random act of violence was so horrifying that it defied explanation. I closed my eyes, unable to stop the image of him walking down the street toward Stella and then suddenly falling down, his chest struck with the bullet that nicked his right lung and tore through his liver. She’d said the sound was far away, like an echo without an origination, and when Eli first fell to the ground she had merely thought he’d tripped. But then she ran to him and saw blood on his shirt and knew that something was terribly wrong.
    According to Stella, she had been so consumed with getting help for her bleeding husband that it hadn’t even occurred to her until later that she might’ve been in danger too. But the sniper had not shot at anyone else.
    Now she was at the hospital, waiting as Eli went through surgery. The last thing Eli had said to her before he lost consciousness was that he needed to talk to Tom right away and that he needed me as well. Stella wasn’t sure what that meant, but Eli had been so adamant that she had attempted to reach the two of us before she called anyone else, even her own children. As we