As he pushed her back through the door, she resisted and cried, “What about the kids? They need you!”
Sherlock was quiet for a couple of seconds, and that dark twist dropped from Sadie’s spine into her stomach. Then he said, “For years, you wouldn’t let me act like a father to them. For years, you told me they didn’t need me. You don’t get to change that game now. They have a father, as you love to point out. Get out, Taryn. Now, before I finish what Sadie started. You’re not welcome here.” He shoved her the rest of the way through the door and then slammed it shut.
As he turned all the locks, there was one more heavy crash, like the woman had thrown something at the door, and then silence. Sherlock and Sadie both stood where they were, frozen, waiting. Finally, he set the alarm and turned to face her.
“Sadie.”
“I…I wanted to kill her. I tried to kill her, but the gun was too big.” The enormity finally landed fully on her, and she gasped. “I tried to kill her.”
He came toward her. She took a step backward, then another; her feet tangled together, and she was falling, but somehow, Sherlock was there, collecting her into his arms before she could hit the floor.
“I got you, I got you, I got you,” he repeated over and over, holding her tightly to his chest. “I got you.”
He lifted her into his arms and carried her into the living room, where he sat on the sofa, settling her on his lap, keeping her snug against him.
Sadie had never felt so exhausted in her life. She knew there were thoughts that needed to be thought, but they all had long, sharp teeth and claws. Resting against Sherlock’s chest, she could hear the thump of his heartbeat. Steady and slow, like the world hadn’t just flipped over on its head. She let it lure her, let it transfix her.
She slept.
~oOo~
When Sadie woke, she was in bed. Sherlock lay at her side, deeply asleep. Turned away from her.
She had no memory of anything after sitting with him on the sofa, but he must have carried her back here and tucked her in at some point.
Rolling to her side, she studied Sherlock’s gorgeous back, the word HORDE inked across his shoulders in a gentle arc. She knew every inch of his body; he was the only person in the world she could say that about.
But she didn’t know him, not like she’d thought. That had been stupid, anyway, to think she’d known him already. They’d only been together two months. How could she have known him? How stupid was she?
Maybe not stupid, but naïve. Underdeveloped. Something. Because she’d trusted him, believed him. When he’d told her something, it hadn’t occurred to her that it wasn’t true, or that it might be a half truth, an incompletion.
There was more between him and that woman than she knew, even now. She could feel it. The way that woman had just assumed that Sherlock would come back to her, the way she’d called him ‘Tim,’ the talk of children like he’d been in their lives all along. Six years, she’d said. Sadie had still been a teenager six years ago. A sophomore in college, living at home. That woman was Sherlock’s age. They’d had something together. Something more than Sherlock had implied when he’d cast her aside as an ‘ex’ who didn’t matter. That woman knew him. Really knew him.
Sadie had told Sherlock that she liked the way being with him made her feel, and that was true. When they were alone together, she always felt better, stronger. Even when he’d come at her about the morning-after pill, even while he was scaring her, hurting her, still she’d felt capable of handling it. She’d been a billion times fizzier while he was away and out of touch than she had when he’d been there, yelling at her.
But she hated the way jealousy felt: sour and rending. It tore down those good feelings and left waste in their stead. It made her mad and scared and crazy, all at once.
So crazy she’d pointed a loaded gun at a human being and pulled the trigger. So crazy she’d meant to hit her target.
She’d meant to kill a person.
There was so much wrong in her, she didn’t even know how to begin to understand.
And maybe she was pregnant. She probably was. They’d had sex about a dozen times or so in the days since he’d asked her to let him go without a condom. If she wasn’t pregnant, then she figured there was probably something wrong with her body as well as all the things wrong with her head.
Sadie lay in the near-dark, staring at Sherlock’s sleeping back, and wondered how her life had fallen into such disarray. She’d been more together as a fucking junkie than she was right now.
This was wrong. Everything was wrong. She couldn’t deal with how wrong it all was, when it had all felt so exactly right. She’d had that right feeling in her hands for long enough to know its power, and now she just felt empty and scared.
Everything was just wrong.
Sadie turned back the comforter and got out of Sherlock’s bed, careful not to disturb his rest.
~oOo~
“Say hey, Lady Sadie. How you doin’, kitten? I was glad to get your call. Been a couple of minutes since you been by.”
Yeah, it had been a ‘couple of minutes.’ More like four hundred and sixty-something days. She’d stopped keeping exact count somewhere along the line. “Hi, Gage.”
Gage stepped back, clearing the doorway to his house. “Well, come on in, tell me what you need.”
As she stepped into his living room—just a normal, middle-class living room, not at all what television and movies would lead you to believe—Sadie muzzled the screaming voice in her head that desperately wanted her to think longer about what she was doing. Thinking was only getting her in trouble. She didn’t understand anything well enough to think.
“Just Oxy. Maybe some 20s.” That was all she needed. Just something to quiet her blood, make her arms and legs, her hands and feet, her heart, her head, stop aching and vibrating.
Gage made a kind of hissing sound, sucking breath through his teeth. “Damn. Sorry, kitten. I’m low on stock right now. Clean out of Oxy.”
“Shit. Shit. Okay.” There were a couple of other places she could try. It was after midnight, but dealers never slept. “Thanks, anyway.” She turned back toward the door.
But Gage caught her arm. “Hey, hey. You give up so fast. No need for that. I’m outta Oxy, but I know you. I just packed up some new shit tonight.” He pulled her close and drew his finger down her nose. “How about I hook you up with half a G. We can party.”
Sadie had fucked Gage a lot back in the day. Pretty much whenever he wanted, which was pretty much whenever she came by. They’d do their deal, she’d fix, and then she’d climb onto his lap and fuck him while the high took her over.
She’d thought she’d been fucking him, but it had really been the other way around. She’d never had the control she’d thought she had, of anything. Ever.
For a moment, she simply stood there and let him touch her; she was so trapped in her internal turmoil about the heroin he was offering that she barely noticed when his hand went under her top and cupped her boob.
She’d dressed quickly, in the dark, and hadn’t come across her bra. When he pinched her nipple, she finally got what was going on and flinched back. “No—don’t.” He tried to come in again, but she knocked his hand away. “Gage—for real. Stop.”
Gage scowled at her, then wiped the expression away. “It’s cool. I’m just glad to see you. All of me is glad.” He grabbed her hand and pressed it to his crotch, made her fingers squeeze around his erection. “Really glad.”
God, she hated when guys did that, put her where she didn’t want to be. She hated it so much. Yanking her hand away, she said, “God! Fucking stop!”
He slapped her. Hard.
That should have pissed her off, or frightened her, or something. Made her run, made her fight back, or something. Instead, it broke her. She dropped to her knees, crying and holding her face.
“Shit. Shit. Sadie, dammit. Don’t cry. Shit. I’m sorry. Fuck, stop crying. Shit.” Gage crouched in front of her, fluttering
uselessly, but Sadie barely noticed. She held her face. She rocked. She cried.
He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “Dammit, bitch! Get control of yourself! I barely touched you!”
Sadie cried harder. Her mind drowned in tears. Nothing made sense but that.
Finally, they ebbed on their own, and she was quiet. Gage was still crouching in front of her. When she looked up, he reached out and gently thumbed away a wet stream. “Sorry, kitten.”
“I’m so fucked up.”
His smile was almost sweet. “I got somethin’ for that. Let me hook you up. My treat. I shouldn’t’ve hit you.”
The tears must have drowned that screaming voice, though they hadn’t quieted the rest of her. The doubt about this choice was gone. “I don’t have a kit anymore.”
“You know that’s not a problem, kitten. I’m a one-stop shop.”
“Okay. But I can’t do it here. I need to go home. I need to be by myself.” The thought of Gage touching her while she was strung out nauseated her.
He picked up her hand and kissed it. “You can do it anywhere you want, Lady Sadie. You sure you don’t want company?”
She knew two things with perfect clarity, and two things only: she needed to fix, and she needed to be alone. “Yeah.”
“The customer is always right.” He smiled and stood, holding out his hand to her, the way Sherlock had held out his hand to that woman. Sadie took it and let him pull her to her feet.
~oOo~
An hour later, she sat at her own dining table in her own little studio apartment, plucking at the rubber tubing that was part of Gage’s starter kit. She’d never shot into her arm, not once, not even the first time. She’d known the places to shoot where nobody would know—she’d looked it up. Now she had weird scar tissue between most of her toes, but no track marks, even after years of drug use.
On the table in front of her were the contents of Gage’s starter kit, arrayed in a neat row, and half a gram of heroin. Not much at all. Just something to get her over.
And her one-year chip; it dangled from her key ring. If it had been some random piece of metal that she’d shoved into a drawer, maybe she’d have been strung out by now, but she’d gone and made a key ring out of it.
So now she was sitting there, plucking at the tubing, staring alternately at the little bag of white powder and the bronze coin resting on her keys.
What if she was pregnant?
No—that didn’t matter. Being pregnant was dumb, dumb, dumb, so fucking dumb. That couldn’t happen. If she was, then she would do something about it and not be anymore.
The voice in her head that hadn’t wanted her to go into Gage’s house piped up quietly, cueing up images of Sherlock’s fury when he’d thought she’d taken a morning-after pill, and the way he’d snarled the words that that woman had aborted his baby. If she was pregnant, and she ended it, then she and Sherlock would be done, too. She knew that.
Weren’t they done already, though? Wasn’t that why she was sitting here in her apartment, why she’d sneaked out of his bed in the middle of the night? Why she’d called Gage?
Gordon spoke up—fuck a duck, it was getting crowded and noisy in her head. Okay, call me. Why haven’t you called me? This is your worst one yet, smarty. You need me.
She did need him. She needed Sherlock. She needed the shit sitting on her table. But she was tired of needing.
It was easier to be a junkie. Then she’d had control over the thing she was hiding from everybody. She’d felt strong, proud of herself for everything she’d accomplished while hauling addiction on her back everywhere she went. And when it got to be too much? Well, she’d had a place to go where it wouldn’t matter for a while.
She didn’t have that place anymore. The thing she was hiding from everybody now was how weak and small and scared she was.
But she did have that place. It was sitting right in front of her.
What if she was pregnant?
It didn’t matter.
What if it did?
Her phone was on the table, too. She could call Sherlock. He’d come to her. The last thing she could remember him saying to her was I got you. He’d said it over and over and over. But sitting here in her apartment, she couldn’t believe it.
She could call Gordon. He’d help her. He could make it better.
Instead, she got up and went to her bathroom, away from all those temptations and terrors, and toward the thing that always worked.
~oOo~
She hated the bright cold of normal bathroom lights, so she’d had an electrician install in the ceiling a little crystal chandelier she’d found at an overstock store. The dance of faceted light pleased her, when she was in a state where pleasure was possible.
Sadie stripped, folding her clothes neatly and setting them on top of the little dresser where she kept her bathroom linens. Then she opened the bottom drawer and reached way in the back to pull out a tin box. Not very big: about six inches long, three wide, and one deep.
Though she’d lived alone since her junior year of college, when she’d moved out of her father’s house, she still hid this box. She wasn’t sure why, but it made her feel secure—the same way that carrying a tiny box of razor blades in her backpack had helped her when she was in high school.
Despite the psychic maelstrom she’d been caught in during her high school years, she’d never had to cut when she was away from home, and she thought the reason she’d been able to avoid it was that she’d had the tools for it with her, should an emergency have arrived. Having the option had given her the strength to avoid using it.
That probably would have made no sense to anyone else. She didn’t know; she’d never told anyone.
Hiding the box was a little bit like that, though. It wasn’t an out of sight, out of mind thing; it wasn’t like hiding it made her think about it less. Hiding it was familiar, and the familiarity gave her calm.
Naked and with the box in her hand, Sadie stepped into her empty bathtub, sat down, and stretched out.
She opened the box and surveyed her supplies. There was a pattern, a ritual—that was part of the thing that made this work. She didn’t just hack at herself. It was methodical. There was purpose and intent. The right tool had to be chosen, and the right place.
Sometimes cutting wasn’t what she needed. Sometimes a needle sliding into the meat of her thigh, that strange, hot itch that rose up around the point of penetration, was it. She had some little alligator clamps, too; sometimes their toothy bite was the right medicine. Those tools left no lasting marks, shed no noticeable blood.
Tonight, though, she needed the blood and the mark. She had different tools for that, too, things that made different kinds of cuts, from scratches to something deeper.
She selected a single-edged razor blade and then closed the box and reached down to set it on the tiled floor of her bathroom.
This was good. This was right. This was how she could keep that bronze chip on her key ring and how she could make things make sense. When things made sense again, she’d know what to do.
It was hard to find a place on her thighs where the pain she needed could get through anymore, though.
The scar on her left arm caught her eye. Two months old now, it was still pink. The seam was straight and thin; Sherlock had done a good job sewing her up.
Sadie smiled. She’d liked him from the moment she’d seen his eyes. She really did love him now.
She drew the blade over the scar. It opened and bathed her arm in bright blood.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Sherlock ran up to Sadie’s door and tried the knob. Locked. Taking that beat to check had just about finished his self-control, and he pounded on the door with both fists. “SADIE! SADIE, LET ME IN!”
Without waiting to see if she would, knowing in his heart, in his gut, that something was wrong, he backed up and prepared to kick the motherfucker in.
“Sherlock!” Gordon topped the steps leading to this second floor. “W
hat the fuck are you doing, son?”
“She’s in there”—they both knew that; her car was in its space in the lot—“I don’t have a goddamn key!”
“I do. Take a breath, son. You’re doing nobody any favors right now.” Gordon dug into a front pocket of his khakis and came up with a key on a plastic fob.
Never had Sherlock felt the way he felt right now. He was desperate to get through that door, to get to Sadie, but he was absolutely fucking terrified, too—a kind of fear he’d never known.
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