Little Battles

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Little Battles Page 12

by N. K. Smith


  “What’s wrong?” I asked him quietly.

  “N-nothing.”

  Bullshit. Elliott was a terrible liar. His eyes told the truth when his mouth did not. “Why does your side hurt, Elliott?”

  He dropped my hand and moved away, but not far. “I-it’s o-okay, S-Sophie.”

  Liar.

  “Why can’t I hide if you do?”

  “I’m n-n-not hhhhhiding.” He came back to me and retook my hand, while I squeezed the rock again. “M-my sssside is fine.”

  It was because of my mutinous body that did whatever it wanted instead of listening to me, that I found myself pressed against him, breathing in his orange earth scent. Careful of his seemingly injured side, I slid my hands around his waist and hugged him.

  Measuring my breaths, I kept telling myself that it was okay, that I could be this close to him. I felt like I was moving, even though I was pretty sure I was totally still. He rested his chin on the top of my head, and my heart started racing as I fought desperately between wanting this comfort from him, and needing to be very far away from his touch. This felt so good. Too good.

  I wasn’t stupid. I recognized the want, the need, for him that had been created within me. But like I told him, it was stupid to want what you couldn’t have. Although he was so incredibly willing to give himself to me, what he offered came at such a high price.

  If this continued, I’d let him see me; I’d tell him things that even I didn’t want to know. Once someone knew something they couldn’t ever not know it, and once he was aware of everything, he would leave, so he shouldn’t even try.

  I pushed away from him, still mindful of the pain in his side. I wanted to go to the other side of the room, a safer place where he wasn’t, but he took my hand again and sure enough I was bound to him once more.

  He kept me close to him. “Elliott,” I exhaled, not entirely sure why I was saying his name like that.

  “D-d-don’t get hhhhigh tomorrow a-a-and I’ll tell you ab-b-bout mmmy r-ribs.”

  Saturday morning was the outright worst Saturday morning known to man. I woke up after only a few hours of sleep, wishing that I had never made that stupid promise to Elliott. I had the perfect opportunity, since Tom was gone by the time I left my room, and I had plenty of pot. It would have helped me fall back to sleep, but the stupid nagging voice inside my head wouldn’t let me disappoint Elliott.

  I nearly fell to my death on the stupid, slanted stairs in Tom’s old-as-shit house. I burned my finger on the coffee burner since the carafe wasn’t the correct one for the model, and it took me longer than ever to read my blood sugar so that I could inject my insulin. When I did, I jabbed the lancet in the finger that always hurt and it bled like hell. A small red drop found its way onto the knee of my jeans.

  I took the bus to the strip mall about a mile from Elliott’s house. I could’ve let him pick me up, and now that I was hoofing it the rest of the way, I wished my stupid, prideful mouth would have accepted when he’d offered to pick me up.

  I held the rock from the night before in my right fist. I wondered if he missed it, or if he even knew that I had it.

  He looked so good in jeans and a light blue t-shirt when he opened the door. He was so much more comfortable in his own home than he was at school. Then he grabbed his coat as we went to the quiet greenhouse, and I was amazed by how warm it was in there. I looked at the plants, which were no longer sprouts but actual plants, and I immediately felt like shit.

  If I’d been high, I wouldn’t have felt like the worst person on the planet.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Ffffor w-what?”

  “I’m not really fair to you, am I?” He looked at me, questioningly. “You give more than you get from me.”

  Elliott shook his head. “Y-you g-give a-a-a llllot.”

  His eyes said he was lying. “Your lies make baby Jesus cry, Elliott. I’m a bad lab partner.”

  I almost regretted trying to lighten the mood just a little when he looked down, but then his mouth slowly turned up into a smile.

  “I haven’t gotten high all day, you know,” I whispered.

  What the hell did I want? Diabetic cookies and a gold star that said “Elliott Dalton approved?”

  Then I realized that my reward was the beautiful smile that rarely graced his face, and I wanted to bask in it forever, but I remembered he promised me something in return. “So, what happened to your side?”

  The smile faded and he shook his head. “C-C-C-Ch-Chr-Chris.”

  “What the fuck did he do?”

  Again, Elliott shook his head and he held up a hand as if to tell me that his ribs didn’t hurt that badly. “Hhhe j-just hhhhit me.”

  “Why?” My teeth were clenched. I wanted to hurt Anderson.

  “D-does hhhhe n-need a reason?”

  No matter how much I yearned to beat the shit out of Chris for hurting Elliott, we spoke no more of it. It was obviously a subject Elliott didn’t want to talk about, and I was pretty sure it was because he was embarrassed. I wished he wasn’t embarrassed. I wished he’d just kick the shit out of the guy and get it over with.

  We went inside and started cooking dinner.

  “You made your own barbeque sauce?”

  David’s loud question shook me out of my quiet thoughts as I stared at my food. I’d been trying to avoid too much talking. I wasn’t high at all, and it was incredibly difficult to hold much of a conversation with anyone.

  I cleared my throat. “Uh, yeah, all you really need is tomatoes, hickory smoke, molasses, and a couple of spices.”

  I wanted dinner to be over so that I could go back up to Elliott’s room with him. Alone.

  “You have an artful eye for plating, Sophie,” Jane said. “The colors and shapes are beautiful.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” She could stop saying shit like that any time now.

  It wasn’t until I was in the solace of Elliott’s room that I was comfortable again, and it was with that comfort that I was sitting on his couch with him beside me.

  It was incredibly new to me, because every single cell in my body was directing me to climb into his lap, lock my arms around him, and wriggle around until we were naked and attached to each other. The only things that kept my hands off of him were how incredibly nervous he looked, and the fact that he hadn’t touched me.

  It was ridiculous. I could be riding him right now, but no, I was stone-cold sober, sitting next to him with no part of my body touching him.

  When Elliott took a deep breath, I focused on his face. He put his hand on my cheek, brushing my hair back before it was actually there.

  “Y-you’re sssso b-beautiful, S-S-Sophie.”

  Suddenly, I was very far from Elliott’s room…

  It was dusk and despite the air being on, my room was way too hot and humid after baking in the Florida sun all day. It was stuffy and uncomfortable.

  He was touching my face and it was almost painful. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t want him to touch me because the very nearness of him caused my blood to grow icy, making the heat of my room contrast with my incredibly cold body.

  Shivers involuntarily assaulted me and I swallowed hard against the fear this man created by simply touching my cheek the way he was. His seemingly tender action would only shift into its polar opposite soon. It confused me, and I had no idea if I was supposed to feel comfort from him, or if I should anticipate the moment when he would change.

  Because it was going to come.

  When he spoke, it was like millions of fire ants crawling up my back. I hated his voice. I hated the feel of his breath across my skin. I wanted to move; I wanted to jump off of my bed and run for the door. I wanted to hide in the closet or under the bed, even though I knew that I was too big and that he would find me. I wanted to run out
the front door and never come back. I wanted to run all the way to Maryland. I wanted to make him stop touching me like that, but I couldn’t move, because, as usual, my body had shut down and it was all I could do to keep my heart beating and my lungs breathing.

  So I was trapped inside my body as I waited for him to do what he always did.

  But I so desperately wanted him to stop touching my face.

  “Mmm. You are so beautiful. Did you know that, Sophie? Do you know how simply beautiful you are?”

  I shook my head, my mouth unwilling to move, to talk, even if I had the voice to speak.

  “Smile for me, Sophie. There’s nothing to be sad about.”

  I smiled like he told me to, but it wasn’t real. I couldn’t even remember what a real smile felt like.

  He rubbed his thumb over my lower lip and I looked away until I found the crack in the drywall. A small spider had set up shop there, its webbing covering the corner.

  “There, that’s better.” Both of his incredibly large hands cupped my face, his thumbs stroking my lips. “Now open your mouth a little.”

  “Please,” I finally whispered, not knowing exactly where the courage to speak had come from. “I don’t want to.”

  He shifted my face so that I couldn’t look at the happy little spider hidden away in its little crack. I had to focus on his mouth.

  “Don’t make me tell your mother how bad you’ve been, Sophie. You know she doesn’t like it when she finds out exactly how bad you really are.”

  I tensed and held my breath. “But it…” I stopped speaking as he put his hands in my hair, his fingers tightening.

  I blinked rapidly, my hand immediately coming up to bat Elliott’s away from my face.

  “Stop fucking touching my face.”

  He sat up straight, looking panicked and scared. “I-I’m sssssssorry.”

  I felt so sick. I didn’t want him to look at me like that, but I couldn’t stop him. My stomach churned and clenched. All of my muscles ached and I realized how tightly coiled they were.

  With every ounce of energy I had, I launched myself off of his couch and flung open the door, which was quite tricky because Elliott always locked it. Across the hall, I found the bathroom and emptied the dinner I’d just eaten into the toilet. Even after my stomach was empty, I kept heaving.

  When it finally stopped, I rinsed my mouth with water, then swished several times with the mouthwash I’d found on the counter. The burn of the acid felt good against the raw portions of my tongue and cheeks.

  I opened up the medicine cabinet and found the Mecca of prescription drugs. There were shitloads of brown bottles packed into this tiny little cabinet. I searched through them until I found some with names I knew. Then I played eeny-meeny-miney-moe for which one I would actually take.

  When I had the two large white pills in my hand, I downed one, not even needing water to get that shit into my belly. The other one I crushed up with the handle of someone’s green toothbrush and snorted that shit as quickly as I could.

  I pocketed a few more pills, not enough for anyone to notice they were missing right away, and then I sank down to the floor to wait for the numbness to kick in. It was going to kick in hard. I knew that. I wanted that. I needed that.

  As he whispered in my ear to be quiet, I vaguely felt bad for breaking my promise to Elliott, but I needed that man’s voice to get the hell out of my head, because I didn’t want to be quiet, and I wanted to stop feeling his ghost fingers tickling my cheek and rubbing over my lips.

  I sat in Elliott’s car, staring at Tom’s house for far too long. Whatever the hell I’d snorted had hit me like a ton of bricks and all I wanted to do was sit still and become a tree. My body rooted itself to the passenger seat. That shit had effectively taken away all thoughts of whatever it was that I didn’t want to think about.

  But as I turned to look at him, knowing that he knew I was high now, the disappointment pushed through that blissful numb. I was trying to be good for him, but I wasn’t good. I wished he’d just go away. Why couldn’t he just figure me out and decide that I was too messed up for him? I’d broken my promise and I knew that Elliott would never break any promise he ever made. Especially not to me.

  He didn’t hide from the bullshit, he saturated himself in it. He was so much stronger than I was.

  “I’m ssssssorry.”

  “What?” I asked, my chest feeling heavier than it probably should have. “What are you sorry for?”

  Holy shit, the look in his eyes made me want to cry. Would I even be capable of crying? I’d stopped that shit a long time ago and I wondered if I had any tears left to shed.

  “I’m fucked up, Elliott.” I nodded slowly. “I’m fully aware of that. Are you?”

  “Am I-I-I fffffff…”

  “Are you aware that I’m fucked up?” Elliott’s eyes danced around my face until he nodded, looking ashamed of his admission. “Then you should be running away from me.” He shook his head. I took a deep breath. “So what are you sorry for?” I asked as I bit the inside of my cheek.

  “I upset y-you. I shhhhouldn’t hhave t-t-t-t-t…”

  If it was possible, I felt even shittier because someone like Elliott was worried that he’d upset me because he’d touched my face. If only I’d been a normal girl! He deserved a normal girl. A girl who could let herself be touched. Who wanted to be touched. A girl who didn’t think about messed-up shit all the time. A girl who wasn’t too wrapped up in her own pain to give a shit about anyone else.

  He deserved more than me. He deserved better than me.

  “Elliott,” I said, trying to calm down so I wouldn’t upset him further because I hated when he looked so lost and panicked, “I’m the screw-up here, okay? You didn’t do anything to cause me to…” I licked my lips, not really wanting to talk anymore. “I have to go now.”

  “W-w-w-why did you get hhhigh?”

  I wasn’t about to tell him about the feel of that man’s breath on my cheek. I wasn’t going to talk to him about the way my skin crawled when I thought of that man with the short brown hair and the skull tattoo. “Will you come over tomorrow after I get off of work?”

  He nodded.

  “Good,” I said softly before forcing my lethargic and sedated body to move, getting out of his car, and shutting the door behind me. As much as I wanted to be with Elliott, it was sometimes too much.

  He made me feel good, and sometimes it was just too much.

  Before I hopped out of Tom’s car in the parking lot of the Quickshop, feeling like a total schmoe in the god-awful uniform, I turned to him. “Elliott’s coming over tonight, so be nice, okay?”

  Tom looked at me, eyeing me closely. “Sure, okay. Of course I’ll be nice. I like the kid just fine.”

  I looked at him for a moment, wondering if he knew that calling him names didn’t convey liking him “just fine.” “You call him a ‘delinquent,’ Tom.”

  He sighed and looked away. “You don’t have much of a sense of humor, do you?”

  “Say something funny and maybe I’ll laugh.”

  He ran his hand through his hair. “The kid had one parking ticket, and no arrests or citations. I was being sarcastic.”

  “Oh.”

  I could have pointed out that had I known him better, I might have caught the sarcasm, but I left the conversation where it was.

  “Have fun today.”

  “It’s work.”

  “You can’t have fun at work? It’s a part-time job, Soph. Doesn’t the Simons girl work here?”

  As I nodded, I already had my hand on the handle, eager to get out of the SUV. “She’s a cashier though, and I stock.” I pushed open the car door and then stopped. “So you promise you’ll be nice to him and won’t try to intimidate him, right?”

  He sighed, but wor
e a smile and said, “I promise.”

  I’d only worked one other day and that was nothing but computer training and safety videos. My fat, balding manager who kept looking at my boobs assigned me to work with this guy named Brody.

  I really wish he hadn’t, because Brody was fine, all blond hair and scruffy beard. He had to be in his early twenties and I had no idea how he got stuck in Damascus stocking groceries in this crappy grocery store.

  So needless to say, I had to keep myself in check because all I did was think about how sexy he was and how easy it would have been to pull him behind the pallet racking and jump on top of him.

  Instead I stocked some shit, watching him out of the corner of my eye, and thought about Elliott. It was because of him that I wasn’t jumping on Brody-the-hottie-stock-boy. I wanted to be good for Elliott, but I was growing incredibly frustrated by the lack of humping in my life.

  “I can’t use the baler,” I said as the tall, gorgeous guy waited for me to shove the cardboard into the big machine. “It’s stupid. I don’t think a few months will make a difference, but they seem to think that I shouldn’t operate it or use a box knife until…”

  He looked at me, his dark hazel eyes moving over my body. “You’re not eighteen?” I shook my head, wishing like hell that I was. “Damn,” he said quietly. “That’s too bad. You look like fun.”

  The only thing I could do was give him an embarrassed smile because he looked like fun too, but he thought I was too young and I was somewhat attached to Elliott in some weird, entirely too-involved sort of way, so the fun wouldn’t be happening.

  Which was really a shame because Brody’s hands were sexy and I wanted to see what they looked like cupped over...Damn, I had to stop this train of thought.

  “Yeah, I used to be fun, but, um, I’m reformed.” I shook my head and chuckled a little. “Or at least, I’m trying to be reformed.”

  I glanced at his watch, which was upside down from my perspective. We’d been working for a few hours. “Do you party?”

 

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