“Holy shite,” I gasped, my eyes flying open. “It works!”
Opening my eyes was definitely a bad decision because Elijah was only about a foot away from me, his head bent down, bringing him close to me as he focused on what I was doing. This meant that I had a close up of his face and could see his pale green eyes up close. I wasn’t a fan of green, it was too… well, green, but the shade of his eyes went against my usual dislike of the color. Consider me a convert.
I was so busy studying the color of his eyes that it didn’t even bother me that he was frowning as he watched me staring at him.
Well, that was until he asked, “How hard did you hit your head?” and then covered an eye, then did the same on the other one, as he looked between them. “Pupils seem equal, and there are no obvious differences in reaction. Do you feel dizzy? Sick?”
Not following what he was doing, I shook my head, smacking my nose into the hand that was still in the air beside me. “No, why would I feel dizzy or sick?” Then I registered the hand that was still next to my face and asked warily, “What are you going to do with that? Shadow puppets?”
“I was going to get you to follow my finger, but I’m thinking I should probably get Parker to take a look at you. You’re weird normally, but you’re acting even weirder right now.”
That snapped me out of the Elijah haze. Narrowing my eyes at him, I lifted my foot and kicked him in the shin before he could take a step away. “You’re a dickhead normally, but you’re a complete and utter wanker right now.”
And with that, I walked around him, leaving him rubbing where I’d maimed him, and exited out of the room, thanking every God there was that I didn’t trip or walk into a door on the way out. No one wants their grand finale to include a bleeding nose or picking themselves up off the floor. Can you imagine having a moment of grandeur, an awesome exit with dignity, then you walk into a wall, your nose is broken and hanging off your face, and that’s it—fin. It’d be utterly humiliating and a total anticlimax, and I wasn’t going out like that. Not today, Elijah Satan.
So, with dignity, I followed the hall to where it opened up into the bar and took my place back at my section for the night. It wasn’t until ten minutes later that I realized that my anxiety was still deeply buried, something that’d never happened to me. Usually, once the monkey was out of the cage, he danced around, hid behind it, and then went on a rampage around my body.
And it was all thanks to the pain in my arse, Elijah Townsend-Rossi.
Oh, bloody hell, I was going to have to thank him, or at the very least say sorry for assaulting his shin.
That meant I’d have to speak to him, something that, again, would’ve usually had my anxiety running riot.
It didn’t, but my vagina almost did. The dirty bitch.
Elijah
Anxiety recognizes anxiety.
Once you’ve had it, you become aware of what the symptoms are as they take over inside, so you’re able to notice it in other people.
With Sadie, it’d been the pulse in her neck, her pupils dilating, and the way she fisted her hands. Add onto that, whenever someone spoke to her, she looked like she was going to pass out… and I hated that she had to go through it. It’d taken me a while to get to grips with my anxiety issues, but I could remember losing control of them, and it hit hard that Sadie was experiencing it too.
I’d only followed her to make sure she got to a safe space without anyone cornering her to talk, but when we’d gotten there, I’d been unable to stop my feet from following her inside.
And what I saw wrecked me.
It was ingrained in me to respect personal boundaries, and I’d never been so appreciative of that before in my life.
And she’d let me in.
For someone who felt like they had no control, letting someone into their personal space was huge. That feeling only got better when what I was doing helped her.
Sadie Dahl was an enigma in many ways. She looked genuinely confident and had a smart, sassy mouth, but if you looked at her eyes, you saw the truth. She watched anyone who approached her with wariness and caution, and sometimes when men made sharp moves with their hands or arms, I swear she was doing everything to stop herself ducking and hiding.
I was still mulling over the riddle of Sadie Dahl as I walked back to where Archer was waiting for me at the bar when I heard my name being hissed by the riddle herself. Pivoting, I leaned on the bar top and waited, admittedly amused by it all because she was scanning the area around us like she was about to divulge top-secret information.
When she finally looked back at me, I grinned and raised an eyebrow, deliberately goading her into feeling slightly pissed at me so that she wouldn’t feel vulnerable while she was saying what she needed to.
“Okay,” she huffed, crossing her arms. “Thank you for the daisy. I really appreciate it.”
Not wanting to make a big deal about the reason she’d used the daisy, I went with a dirty response, which would hopefully piss her off enough to distract her from the problem for the rest of the night. Hopefully, it would also get her thinking about a specific body part of mine that definitely thought about Sadie a lot.
“Baby, you can pluck my daisy anytime you like.”
And with that, I carried on walking to my seat. A glance over my shoulder had me bursting out laughing, though, when I saw how red her face had gotten in the time I’d had my back to her.
Sure enough, she shot me the birdie and then hurried over to where a customer was waiting to get served.
I made sure to keep an eye on her the rest of the night. I didn’t see her hands shake, but I definitely saw her mouth “wanker” at me a couple of times.
Chapter Two
Elijah
Life out of the Coast Guard was like the brakes in your car failing when you were at the top of the hill with a descent that went for thousands of miles ahead of you.
One minute you were stable, you could see the whole world ahead—the next, you were falling with zero control over your fate.
Added to that, I no longer had my best friend, so I had zero foundation under me.
Some weeks I had no nightmares, some I had them frequently like the one I’d had tonight where I was being dragged underwater while I held onto Cooper. I swear I could even taste and smell the sea.
Mind and heart racing over the memory of holding his body, I threw the covers off my legs and got out of bed. It was better to beat the shit out of something than to relive one of the worst moments of my life. At least for me, it was!
So, picking up my phone, I dialed the number I’d gotten after taking part in a fight in Florida when I’d visited my parents.
The underground circuit was a close-knit community. One organizer knew another, fighters had heard of each other and knew who they wanted to fight at some point, and the spectators were eager for the thrill of seeing it play out in front of them.
Me—I just wanted to get rid of some tension and to have the pain snap me out of this repetitive cycle of bullshit I had going on inside my head.
“Pepper Pizza. How can I help?” a young guy’s voice answered after it’d rung three times.
“I need a pizza with just pineapple and anchovies,” I told him, following the directions I’d been given and holding back the gag that wanted to accompany the words.
This time when he spoke, he sounded slightly sharper than he had previously. “Just pineapple and anchovies?”
“Yeah, hold the cheese, too.”
There was some rustling, and then a deeper voice asked, “What’s the name?”
“You can put it under Ross,” I instructed, giving him my fight name.
For some outrageous reason, people always went with a dramatic name when they fought. The Indestructible, Hulk, The Hermanator, Good Will Thumping, and shit like that. Me, I’d gone with something that made me seem regular and average, and it’d worked for me until I’d won enough fights for people to realize I was far from it.
The sharp
breath my name received showed the organizer had heard of me. There was only one Ross actively fighting right now—me.
“I see. Our Bakeridge Pass restaurant’s open, so they’ll have your pizza ready for you to collect. What time would suit you?”
“What times have you got?”
“How about forty-five minutes?”
And with that, I was ready to go. Bringing up directions on my phone to where he was talking about, I pulled on shorts and a t-shirt and got into my truck, my head already focused on how I was going to fight tonight.
Sadie
Somehow, I’d managed to sleep until four o’clock in the morning—something I rarely did just now after getting kidnapped with Ariana and shot—and I felt excellent for it. I was averaging around four hours a night, so the extra two I’d had tonight was a luxury I was grateful for.
And I would have slept longer if it wasn’t for the sound of my flipping doorbell pinging every thirty bloody seconds.
Turning on the lights in the living room, I only just dodged the tipped over side table as I stomped to the door.
“Is there no respect for the sanctity of sleep anymore? First, Dobby takes out the furniture, then a flaming idiot bing bongs for—” the words died as I threw open the door, expecting it to be a drunk neighbor again, but finding a bruised and battered Elijah instead.
Looking behind him to make sure the hallway was clear, I pulled him inside. “What the hell happened?”
When he leaned heavily into the wall and groaned, I almost lost my mind.
Reaching up, he held his side, wincing again when he pressed against it.
“It looks worse than it is, but I didn’t think he’d get as many hits in as he did,” he explained, hissing when I touched his bruised knuckles and making me snatch my hand back. “I don’t want to get the third degree from my family, but I didn’t know where else to go.”
Pointing at the sofa, I followed behind him with my arms in the air in case he fainted—something that made him smirk when he looked behind him and saw them. To be fair, if he fainted or fell backward, he’d take me down with him, but I had enough padding to save us both so we’d survive.
When he got to the sofa, he eyed the knocked over table and looked up at me. “Did I interrupt something?”
“No, Dobby was his usual self. Just ignore it.” My cat, a Sphynx with issues, needed no further explanations.
Giving me a small smile, he sat down gingerly, making me wince with him over every movement. Once he was settled, I perched on the edge of my armchair and examined what I could see of him.
“What do you mean when you say that you don’t want the third degree from your family? You’ve been assaulted. You should call the police and then let your family know what’s happened.”
With his green eyes focused right on me, and I waited for him to explain. I knew he was hiding a lot, but I’d never seen this raw version of Elijah before, and I didn’t just mean the beaten to a pulp one I was looking at. Something in his eyes was different.
“Sometimes I get this feeling like I’m going to explode. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like pressure just fills up inside me. So, I started doing some fights to get it all out and feel like I was in control of something in my life.”
The reason I was biting my lip changed. I knew firsthand what that felt like and had been able to empathize with my friend’s boyfriend Parker when I’d heard a small part of his story, and how his stepmother had abused him. I’d never battered someone to release it, but I’d taken classes in Bartitsu for five years before I moved here, and I guess that’d been my version of what Elijah had done tonight.
I needed to track down a group that did that here once my leg was fully healed. I usually felt better after I’d done it, more in control like Elijah had said.
“Fuck, I’m such a dick,” he groaned, leaning his head back on my sofa and covering his face with a bruised hand. “I didn’t even think that seeing me like this might be a trigger for you.”
Apparently, when I’d gone into my head, it’d looked like I was heading into a ‘special Sadie’ moment. Now I was the dick because he was trying to get out of my sofa and struggling because he’d had the snot beaten out of him.
Pushing him back down gently and hoping that I wasn’t pressing on a bruised area, I waited until he’d stopped moving before squatting down in front of him.
“Sometimes something like this can be a trigger for me, but then sometimes hearing Dobby fart can trigger me. There’s no rhyme or reason with what can set me off—well, except dealing with someone who’s angry and leaning in my space. That does it every time,” I mumbled, thinking out loud.
“That’ll set anyone off, Sadie Odessa,” Elijah reassured me, still fond of my middle name.
Still, I had to concede that he was probably right about this, so I shrugged and continued. “I wasn’t having one of my moments, I was actually thinking about how I did Bartitsu for the same reason. Then I made a mental note to look online and see if there were any groups in the area once my leg was better.”
“Bar-tit-su?” he repeated slowly, frowning at the name. “Is that some kind of British joke?”
Ironically, I’d thought the same thing, but I figured it was just my friend Brixton taking the piss when he’d suggested it all those years ago.
“No, but I can understand why you’d think that. Bartitsu’s an English martial arts style with things like jujitsu, Savate, and bare-knuckle boxing. There’s even Vigny in it,” I told him excitedly, listing some of my favorite parts of it. Sure, when I’d gone to the first three classes, I’d almost peed my pants, but once I started to understand it, I was hooked. “It’s also known as the martial arts style Sherlock Holmes used.”
Elijah stared at me with his mouth open for a moment. “I need to break this down.”
Standing up, I held up a hand to stop him. “First, you need some tissues and ice packs. Sit still, and I’ll be back in a second.”
Not waiting for a response from him, I hurried to the bathroom and opened the cupboard under my sink. I had a kit with an assortment of first aid stuff in it so I grabbed that. Then I plucked out the little plastic basket thing that had painkillers and tampons, picking up the latter and dropping it back on the shelf because they weren’t going to help.
“Sadie, my nose is bleeding again. I don’t want to get it on your couch, so I need to know where the paper towels are.”
Apparently, the tampons would come in handy after all, so I grabbed the box back up and put it in the basket, making sure to get a fresh roll of toilet paper as I headed back to him with it all.
Passing him the toilet roll, I sat down and twisted so that I had one leg on the couch between us and gestured at him to get on with it. “Give it a clean, and we’ll stick a tampon up it. It sounds weird, but it’s a pretty good trick.”
He was already holding a fistful of tissues under his nose, but when I mentioned shoving a tampon up there, he looked at me out of the corner of his eye like I was crazy. “You’re not shoving that shit up my nose.”
Ignoring him, I looked in the box for one in a pink wrapper, not wanting to shove a super plus up his poor nostril.
“The good news is, you can have a light flow one and not the log sized version. Aren’t I kind?” I snickered, pulling one out and tearing the paper wrapper off it.
Leaning slightly away from me, he shook his head as much as he could. “I don’t care if it’s the size of the moon—”
“Trust me, you would.”
“—I’m not having a tampon stuck up my nose. Do you know how unhygienic that is?” he continued, ignoring my sage advice.
“How’s it unhygienic? You just saw me take it out of its wrapper—it’s sealed wrapper.”
“Because…” he spluttered, waving at my crotch. “It’s a vagina thing, not a nose thing.”
Tilting my head, I tried to understand where he was coming from. What was it with men and periods? A majority of women suffered when the lit
tle buggers came to town, and he had an issue with something designed to help us with it being put up his nose? I’d like to see him shove a super plus one up his arse and see how it felt after six hours. Inconsiderate bastard!
“Elijah, it might be intended for the vagina, but it’ll be doing the same job up your nostril, won’t it? And it’ll put pressure on the area that’s bleeding and stop it,” I reasoned, doing my best to sound patient.
“If you shoot that up my nostril with that cardboard thing, it’ll end up in my brain, and I’ll be the guy on the internet who has an x-ray of a fucking tampon in his head. Do you know the kind of shit they’ll say about me on social media? The number of reporters who’ll harass me for an interview? How do I explain that? Have you met my family—I’ll never live it down.”
Holding it up in front of him, I removed the aforementioned cardboard from around it, and then pulled the small pair of scissors I had in the basket out, cutting the tampon in half in front of him.
“Take the half that doesn’t have a string hanging off it first. If that doesn’t stop the bleeding completely, I’ll cut the string, and you can replace it with that one.”
Giving me a frustrated glare, he shoved it up his nose and grimaced. “This is just so wrong. It feels like I’ve got a…” he stopped and tried to think of an object.
“Tampon?”
Grinding his jaw from side to side, he scowled at me. “If you tell anyone about this, I’ll get you back, and I won’t be gentle.”
Now, why did that make my nipples feel like smarties?
Chapter Three
Elijah
I’d have to be blind not to see her reaction to what I’d just said, but I was trying to be a gentleman and not stare at them. The problem was, they were pointing at me and staring.
Great Sass: Providence Family Ties Series Page 2