He’d woken an hour ago, alone in his bed. The house had been dark, and Sadie gone. Her old Beemer hadn’t been parked out front. She’d left without a word, and the last he’d seen of her she’d been nearly catatonic, and then unconscious.
First thing, he’d called her. Her phone hadn’t even rung, just gone straight to voice mail. She’d turned it off. Next, he’d called Gordon, who’d given him his number when he’d barged into the clubhouse after the pre-rally party.
Gordon hadn’t heard from her, either, and that was when Sherlock had first known panic. Gordon had suggested they meet here, at her apartment, and work from there. Seeing her Beemer in its assigned spot should have calmed Sherlock, but instead, his stomach had boiled with acid. He didn’t know why this fear and certainty had taken him over so completely, but he knew—he knew—that whatever was on the other side of the door was bad.
Gordon turned his key in Sadie’s lock, and the door swung open. Sherlock pushed past the older man and scanned the empty room.
It was tidy as ever. Since he’d been back from South Dakota, she’d only been here to work a shift or to pick up some things. He’d fallen into thinking of his house as their house without even realizing it.
“Ah, smarty, no,” Gordon muttered at his side, and Sherlock turned to take in the other half of the apartment.
And the paraphernalia arrayed across the table. Oh, God. “Sadie! Fuck, no! What did you do?!” God! Fuck!
While his mind tried to exert some control over this new level of panic, he realized the missing component to the picture: no Sadie. Swiveling his head to the bathroom door, he saw the halo of light around the jamb, and he nearly flew across the room.
At least that door wasn’t locked. But what he saw inside made him yell in despair.
She was naked and fetal in the bottom of the tub, dry but for her blood, which was spattered and smeared all over the white porcelain and all over her—her face, her hair, her body.
So much blood. That couldn’t have just been cutting—and it looked like it was coming from her arms. He could still see fresh blood pulsing wetly from her skin.
Her fingers gripped a razor blade. He could just make out the glint of metal in the blood.
Everything that he’d feared had come to pass.
He grabbed a bath towel off the rod on the wall—it was white, but he didn’t give a fuck—and dove to his knees at the side of the tub.
“No!” she cried, curling into an even tighter ball. “Go away! It’s not working yet! No!”
He ignored her, barely even heard her except to be relieved that she was conscious and strong enough to yell, and snatched the blade from her, then covered her body with the big towel. He’d teased her about her decadent taste in bath towels—they were huge and thick and dwarfed her when she wrapped herself up in them after a bath or shower. In turn, she’d called his towels ‘napkins.’
Glad for the thick blanket he could cover her with now, he leaned over the tub and began wiping the blood from her, starting with her arms, dark red with thick blood.
She fought him, her exertions flinging fresh drops and sprays, and he got into the damn tub, on his knees, so he could overpower her.
“Lord,” Gordon lamented behind him. “I’m calling 911.”
“No! No! No!” Sadie screamed, trying and failing to free herself from Sherlock’s hold.
He got the towel and his arms around her, and that would have to suffice until he could get her calm. Holding her, close and firm, he looked over his shoulder at Sadie’s sponsor. “She’s strong. Gimme a minute to see if we can handle this. They’ll put her on a hold if she goes to the ER.”
Gordon stared hard, and then, with evident reluctance, nodded. “One minute. That’s a lot of fucking blood.”
“Spilled blood looks like a lot long before it really is,” Sherlock answered and turned back to the tense, struggling girl in his arms. That was true. It was also true that he didn’t like how much blood there was. Enough to pool in the bottom of the tub.
“I guess you’d know that better’n me.” With a shift in his tone, Gordon added, “Sherlock—the shit out here. It’s clean. Unused.”
Relief hit him so fast that his head dropped and landed on hers. He realized that she’d stopped fighting.
“Sadie, sweetheart. Let me help you. Let me see what you did.”
“Go away,” she moaned. “Please go away.”
“Never gonna happen, sorry.” Blood was soaking through the towel. He had to see if she’d slit her fucking wrists. “What did you do, sweetheart?”
“I was trying to make it better.”
Now that she was quiet in his arms, he pulled the towel back. The first thing he saw was the scar from the bullet wound he’d sewn up. She’d cut it open, and it was still bleeding freely. “Fuck,” he muttered and then lifted her arm, steeling himself for what else he’d see.
She hadn’t opened her veins, not in any intentional, irrevocable way. Instead, she’d drawn a row of two-inch gashes laterally through the meat of her forearm, starting at her elbow. Each gash was a nearly-exact copy of the others, and the spaces between them were uniform. This was the pattern of scars that covered her thighs, too. He supposed she’d run out of room down there.
The cuts were deep, though, and a few were bleeding heavily, as if those had caught veins after all.
He shifted her in his hold—she neither resisted nor assisted—and checked her right arm. It looked like he’d interrupted her work on this side. She was right-handed, and the few gashes there weren’t as controlled.
A check of the rest of her body showed no other wounds.
“I think we can handle this here, sweetheart. I need some help, though.” Again, he shifted his grip, freeing a hand to go for his phone in his pocket. He found the contact he needed and started a call.
“J.R. Sadie’s hurt. I need you. Bring your kit.” At J.R.’s agreement, he gave Sadie’s address and ended the call.
“Okay, little outlaw. Let’s see if we can get the bleeding to stop. I’m gonna owe you a bunch of new towels.”
Gordon was still hovering in the doorway. “What can I do?”
“I need to get her out of this tub. Strip her bed and put towels down. She keeps them in that chest. We should ice the cuts that are still bleeding, too.”
Gordon nodded and got to work. Sherlock sat down in the tub and pulled Sadie onto his lap, wrapping his hands over the towel around the worst of her self-inflicted wounds.
He supposed they weren’t entirely self-inflicted. He thought he had some blame for them, too.
She was quiet, but her eyes were open and staring at the wall. Not sure if she’d fallen into that alarming catatonia she’d been in earlier, after Taryn, Sherlock nudged her gently. “Sadie?”
She sighed. “It’s all fucked up.”
“No, it’s not. Just a rough night.” Maybe another man would have seen these events—the scene with Taryn, Sadie’s jealousy, her clearly fragile state, this mess they were sitting in now—as a red flag, a tub full of red flags. But no. If anything, he loved her more. If someone were to ask him to explain how that could be, he didn’t know if he’d have an answer. But he felt responsible, and he wanted more than anything to help her, to feel her trust in him again.
He wasn’t sure he deserved to have lost it in the first place, but he understood why she’d faltered. He could imagine what that scene had looked like to her, and he knew he should have handled things differently. Sadie didn’t understand about exes.
“I can’t stop fizzing.” Now that she was calm—and he was, too, more or less—she sounded almost like herself. “I couldn’t make it stop.”
“Maybe that’s because this wasn’t the way to do it.” He brushed her sticky hair back from her face, wiping blood from her cheek as he did so. “Sweetheart, you’re not alone”—he stopped and wiped her cheek again. She was bruised. A kind of bruise he recognized. “Who hit you?”
She shook her head and turned her fac
e toward his chest. It was the first time since he’d come into the bathroom that she was turning to him rather than pushing him away, so he dropped the question. But somebody had hit her, and that was going to be addressed.
He held her close and kissed her forehead. “Let me help you, Sadie. I want to take care of you, but I can’t if you run off when you’re hurting.”
“You lied.”
He took her chin in his fingers and made her meet his eyes. “I didn’t. I avoided, and I’m sorry for that—but that was about me, not you. It makes me tired to think about Taryn. She fucked me up, yeah. But there’s no pull there at all. It doesn’t matter what she wants, or what she thinks. She doesn’t matter. I love you. I’ve never loved anybody else, not like this. You can trust me, Sadie. Believe in us.”
“I get so jealous. I hate it. I wanted to kill her. I would have. I meant it.”
“I wanted to kill her, too.” Sitting in this tub, holding his bleeding girl, he still wanted to kill the woman who’d made this crisis. “But you didn’t. Think of what happened today as a mulligan. You know what that is?”
She nodded. “My dad plays golf.”
Of course he did. “You didn’t hurt her, and now you know something about yourself.”
“That I’m a killer.”
Sherlock had killed, more than once, and he felt the self-condemnation in her voice acutely. What would she think of him if she knew that he was—in fact, in deed, in truth—a killer?
“No. That you don’t want to be. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be tearing yourself up like this over something that didn’t happen. Taryn went home to be a bitch again tomorrow. You’re the one who’s suffering.”
Gordon came to the doorway. “I got her set up. Ice packs, too.”
He nodded and turned back to Sadie. “Okay, little outlaw. Let’s get you fixed up.”
~oOo~
While they waited for J.R., Sherlock helped Sadie get better cleaned up and into some clothes—no way was J.R. going to see her whole body; it was bad enough that Gordon had—and then washed himself up as much as he could. Then he sat on the towel-draped bed with her and held ice packs on her arms. By the time the Horde medic arrived, bearing a huge tackle box that made Sherlock’s own fairly capacious first aid kit look like a box of Band-Aids, most of the blood had stopped, except for a few very deep lacerations—which included the bullet scar. She’d carved nearly to bone there. But even that was down mainly to dark seepage as J.R. sat and pulled on a pair of blue gloves.
When J.R. learned that real pain relief wasn’t going to happen, he used a numbing agent. But he was still hurting her, and Sadie—tired and over-stimulated already, and, for a girl who cut herself routinely, not remotely stoic about pain she wasn’t self-inflicting—kept whimpering and chewing her lips. The need to intervene and stop J.R. from hurting her, possible strategies for which included beating his brother unconscious, was making Sherlock crazy.
Finally, J.R. scowled at him. “Get the fuck out of here, bro. I’m hurting her more because you’re making me so jumpy.” He looked down at Sadie and smiled. “Okay, honey? You don’t need his ugly mug hanging over us, do you?”
Sadie shook her head. Sherlock felt a hand on his arm and turned to find Gordon trying to lead him out to the balcony. He let him.
Shit. It was daylight. He hadn’t even noticed.
Gordon closed the door securely behind them and then came and stood next to Sherlock at the railing.
The view from the balcony was nothing special up close: just the parking lot and neighboring buildings. But the buildings nearby were low, and the long view, when the sky was clear, was of mountains in the distance.
“You’re a good man, Sherlock. I know this. I can see it in your eyes.”
Sherlock looked down at the smaller man. Pressed khakis and a trim striped shirt. He’d roused Gordon in the middle of the night, and still the man looked like he’d dressed for company. “Thanks.”
He knew there was more to the man’s statement than a compliment.
“I know you love her. I know you want to be good for her. I believe these to be true.”
“Get to it, Gordon.”
“Are you?”
“What?”
Gordon didn’t repeat his question, and he didn’t need to. Instead, he said, “I’m not suggesting you’re not, or that you can’t be. I’m asking if you’ve thought deep about what it means to be good for our girl. It’s not just that she’s an addict. It’s why she got to be one. You know her story?”
Sherlock focused on the hazy blue silhouette of the mountains. “Yeah. I know what happened.”
“She went through all that alone. She never told anybody. After her mom and brother died, her dad…well, she didn’t want her dad to worry about anything, so she made herself into somebody he didn’t need to worry about, no matter what. That’s why I told you, the first time we talked, that this girl is strong but not tough. She was a twelve-year-old child, just a baby, protecting her father from the truth of his failings, letting something terrible happen to her, all so that he wouldn’t know any more pain. For years and years—and it hollowed her out. She became the shell he needed to see, and she never had a chance to let anybody love her for herself. She doesn’t know how to trust it. That’s not how she sees those years, but it’s plain as day when she talks about them. It’s only been since she came out of rehab, since I’ve known her, that she’s started to fill up her insides. She’s learning herself for the first time.”
“If you’re asking me to be patient, I’m not going anywhere.”
“No. I’m asking you to be what she needs. And if you can’t be, then I’m asking you to think hard about what’s going on behind us. What she did tonight, she won’t be able to hide so easily. All those years, she was careful. Not this time. And she wasn’t done, was she? If you hadn’t called me, if we hadn’t gotten here, where would she have stopped? So what’s that mean? I don’t know what happened to make this mess, but I do know she didn’t call me. She’s never not called me since I became her sponsor. If she’s closing herself off from somebody she trusts, if she’s giving up on the consequences, then we need to think hard about that.”
“What does she need?”
“Don’t you know?”
Sherlock stared at the mountains. He’d thought he knew.
“She needs a rock,” Gordon answered for him. “Strong and steady. She needs somebody who’ll let her be weak, but won’t make her weak. Who’ll hold her up when she’s tired.”
Unbidden and unexpected, tears pricked at Sherlock’s eyes and then slid down his face. Jesus. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried, but here he was, standing on this balcony in the new morning sun, Sadie’s blood hardened to a crust on his clothes, being lectured by a man he barely knew, and crying. He bent his head and closed his eyes, straining for composure. “That’s who I am,” he gritted through his tight throat.
Gordon’s hand came down on his slumped shoulder. “Good. Then be that for her. The rest of it she’ll figure out, as long as she’s got a strong center, somebody she knows for sure is right there with her no matter what. It’s feeling alone that makes her fizzy, as she says. I don’t think she’s figured that out yet. She thinks it’s when she feels out of control, but I think it’s when she feels like she has to control everything because there’s nowhere she can turn for help. Be where she turns.”
Those words sparked the memory of the moment he’d known she’d come back to him in the bathtub. When she’d literally turned toward him, let him pull her close.
Gordon wasn’t finished. “She needs more than me, it seems. Makes sense—I’m not who you are to her. Your relationship with her gets close to some scary things for her. I can guide her through her recovery from the drugs, but that’s just the symptom. Where you are—you’re right up against the cause. You have to tread lightly, so close to what scares her most of all.”
“She could be pregnant. The past few days, almost a week now, we’ve
been trying.” Sadie would likely be pissed as hell that he’d just said that, but he needed Gordon to know. He felt like they were on the same team. The Sadie Ballard Protection Squad.
Gordon was quiet for a long time. The world began to make its morning sounds. Traffic noise picked up as people headed to work. A dog barked. Sherlock smelled the aromas of coffee and bacon wafting from a nearby kitchen window.
“Then I hope to fuck you mean to be her rock for the long haul.”
The door slid open behind them, and Sherlock and Gordon both turned and faced J.R. “Hey, bro. She’s all put back together. She’ll be okay, but right now she’s hurting. I gave her some Tylenol, but that’s not gonna do much. You know the drill on taking care of the sutures.”
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