Instead, I went and opened my mouth without thinking about what I was saying.
“I have a question to begin with.” When she nodded as she checked out my knuckles, I let fly the question that’d hit me as soon as she’d opened her door. “What the hell happened to your eyebrows and eyelashes.”
Her head slowly lifted and turned toward me as the hand holding my cut and bruised one clenched slightly. Fuck it, that hurt.
“I’m naturally very blonde.”
“That’s it? You’ve got them normally, though.” I was sure she did—something like that you’d notice.
Leaning in closer to her, I squinted at the areas in question. Sure enough, they were there, but the lashes were practically white.
“What, no jokes?” she snapped, reaching for the roll of toilet paper and taking off a bunch to put under my hand.
“Jokes?” I asked, watching her warily as she unscrewed the lid of the bottle of hydrogen peroxide. I hated that shit, it felt like acid.
I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek as she tilted the bottle so I wouldn’t make a noise. And then she poured—Christ, did she have to use so much?—making sure it got into each cut like she was being graded on it.
“Yeah, like, is your mum a sack of flour? I’ve heard a lot of shit like that over the years.”
Sadie didn’t look up from what she was doing while she spoke, and I wanted to say she was diligent because she cared about my wellbeing, but the likelihood was I shouldn’t have asked the question.
“Kids are assholes,” I mumbled, biting my lip when she prodded the deepest cut. “I used to get teased about my teeth.”
Her head came up quickly, and she stared at my mouth. Knowing what she wanted, I rolled my eyes and showed her my teeth.
“There’s bugger all wrong with them. Why did they tease you?”
“There’s nothing wrong with them now, but at the time, I had gaps at the top and weird overcrowding at the bottom,” I snickered, remembering them. “I was also scrawny for my age with really long arms.”
This time she looked at me like I was crazy, so I reached into my back pocket with my good hand and pulled out my cell to show her. Finding the photo that I wanted, I turned the screen back toward her.
Dropping my hand, she took it from me, staring at the screen in shock.
“I don’t believe that’s you. I mean—” Sadie paused, then held the phone next to my face. “Obviously, you look different with the thingy,” she pointed at my nose, specifically the tampon. “But it doesn’t even look like you. What happened?”
Taking my phone back, I wiggled my hand at her to get her to go back to what she’d been doing. If her eyes weren’t on me, it was easier to tell the story. Adolescent pain lasts, and the embarrassment was still there all these years later.
“When I was thirteen, I had my last baby teeth removed by the dentist. They’d caused major overcrowding, so he put braces on a week later, and I spent eighteen months getting teased about them until the summer break that I turned sixteen.”
Picking up a bottle of Betadine, she put some on a cotton ball and dabbed the cuts. “What happened that summer?”
Blushing, I tried to think of a nice way to phrase it. “I got the braces off at the start of it, had a growth spurt, and uh met some girls.”
One side of her mouth tilted up, giving me a half-smile as she finished putting the iodine on the wounds. “Basically, you shagged around that summer.”
Clearing my throat, I raised my hand to inspect the cuts, making sure I didn’t need any stitches. One of them could probably do with some adhesive strips, but I’d recheck it in the morning and see Parker if I needed to.
“When I went back to school, I was the tallest in my class, and I’d started working out because I’d visited my cousins and saw how to do it. The chicks dug it, so the teasing ended,” I shrugged.
“Which cousins?”
That was a fair question seeing as how I had a lot of them. One part of my family lived in a place called Piersville, about two hours away from where we were in Gonzales County. The others lived here and worked for Townsend Oil. It was only me and my brothers who were spread out over the country instead of all living in the same place. I missed the closeness with my brothers, but at the same time, I preferred having my own space.
“Ren, Brett, and Cole.”
They were the ones who lived in Piersville, and I think she’d only met Cole when he’d come to see Ariana, our cousin who lived here and was kidnapped by her boyfriend’s crazy ex-stepmother and her boyfriend a few months ago.
Sadie had ended up getting kidnapped with her and shot through her calf. Lucky for the man, he was in jail with his court date pending, or I’d shoot him through the ball for what he’d done to her. I’d been there when we found them, and I’ll never be able to get how pale she was and the amount of blood she’d lost from her leg.
Grabbing my hand back, she leaned in to inspect it more closely. “That one’s going to be a pain in your bum. You might want to see Parker in the morning about it. The rest look like they’ll be okay, so long as they don’t get infected.”
Then, she brought out a dressing and ripped the packaging open. Only, when she was holding it over my hand, she realized it was going to cover the whole thing. I would’ve warned her if I hadn’t been watching her as closely as I was, but everything she did intrigued me, so probably not.
Chuckling at her expression, I thrust my hand at her. “Just do it. So it’s a little big…” or a lot. Tomato-tomahto.
She’d just finishing taping me up when her ugly hell-feline came waddling in. I wasn’t a cat person, and I was definitely not a fan of this one. It was hairless, had a lot of excess skin, and it just looked fucking evil.
“Stop glaring at my baby,” she mumbled, gathering up the garbage then tilting my head back to inspect my nose.
Somehow, I’d forgotten I had half a tampon up there while she’d been fixing up my hand. “Has it stopped?”
Frowning, she gestured at me to stand up. “I don’t have a clue. All I can see is the blood that’s been soaked up, not what’s going on above it. I’m wondering, though, if maybe I should’ve given you one for a heavier flow?”
She’d been lifting my t-shirt to inspect the bruises underneath while she was talking, running her soft hands over me, so it took me a moment to realize what she’d said. “I’m not sticking a supersized tampon up there. I’ll be deformed for life.”
“At least you won’t ever snore with one gigantic nostril,” she snickered, then winced when she caught the bruising on my left side. “I take it he was right-handed, then.”
“They were right-handed,” I corrected, growling when she poked a particularly sensitive area.
Dropping my t-shirt back down, she moved and passed me the ice pack she’d brought through at some point. Had I even noticed her get it? Maybe I’d been hit harder than I’d realized.
“I don’t know where to tell you to put that first. If you pick an area, I’ll go and put some ice in two zippy bags and wrap them in a tea towel for you. I’ve only got one like this because Dad got it for my leg after the… incident.”
Tea towel—that was adorable.
Sitting back down, I stuck the ice pack between the left side of my back and the couch, not taking my eyes off the cat now that I was alone in a room with him. It was like he was looking for the best place to bite or scratch to kill me quickly.
“You look like an ass hole. I mean, you look like an asshole, too, but you look like the crinkled skin around a butt hole more.” Didn’t I feel like the big guy—sitting here with a tampon up one nostril, bruised all over, talking smack to a cat? It was true, though, he did look like a butt hole.
Like he understood what I’d said, his ears flicked out to the side, and the gnarliest hiss came out of it. Yet, he didn’t take his beady, assessing eyes off me once.
“I’m not a steak.”
Coming back through with the new ice packs, Sadie passed
them to me and sat back down. “Are you giving my cat abuse?”
Sticking one of the bags of ice on my hand and holding the other on my face, I wiggled to get more comfortable and stretched my legs out in front of me. “He started it. He just sits there staring at me like he’s searching for my jugular. Plus, he looks like an ass hole.”
“Well, he is a bit of an arsehole,” she mumbled, looking at the furniture that was knocked over on its side. “I don’t know how he does it. I was only in the next room, and the door was wide open for him.”
“You didn’t hear it?”
Blushing, she made a big deal out of letting her hair down from its ponytail and then tying it back up in a giant ball on top of her head. “I usually sleep like the dead after an anxious episode.”
I could understand that, seeing as how I did the same, except I had to go about releasing tension first to be able to sleep. A bit like I’d done tonight, which was going to be a problem.
Turning as much as I could before the pain in my side screamed at me to stop, I bit the bullet. I hated doing shit like this, but I had to. “Sadie, I need a favor.”
Instead of recoiling or looking irritated by it, she just raised her eyebrows and hummed, “Hmm?”
I didn’t know her as well as I liked to think I did, but from the little I did know, I loved that she was like this. She didn’t pry, didn’t begrudge people anything. She was a good person to the core.
“If they see me looking like this,” I pointed at my face, “my family’s going to ask questions. This is how I cope, pixie. If I have to explain that to them, I won’t get any space. I love my family, but they’re kind of…”
“Involved?” she suggested, nodding her head slowly.
“Yeah, involved. Part of me needs them to be like that, but I don’t know how to cope any other way than how I’m doing it right now.”
“And you think they’d stop you if they saw you like this?”
“No, I know they would.”
Rubbing her lips together, she stared at the hand she’d just bandaged, thinking it over. Finally, she took a deep breath in and blew it out again. “I get where you’re at, and you can stay here and hide, but you need to tell them you’re staying with friends so they don’t panic when they can’t find you.”
“Thank you,” I started, but she held up a hand to stop me.
“And I won’t lie. If they ask me if I’ve seen you, I’ll say yes. Your family are great people, and I consider myself lucky to have them in my life. I don’t want to ruin the trust they have in me or betray them by lying.”
See what I mean? She was a great person, always putting other people ahead of her.
“I wouldn’t put you in that position. All I need is to just lay low for a couple of days until all of this,”—I gestured with my bandaged hand to my banged-up face—“has healed. If they ask, just say I’m rooming with you to help you out with your car.”
Her car was also known as the heap of shit, but we refrained from saying that out loud while she was around.
Rubbing her lips together, she eventually sighed and nodded. “Right. Do we need to go and get some of your stuff?”
“It’s in the truck. I kind of presumed and packed some stuff before I came over.”
With another sigh and an amused eye roll, she got up and moved through to the kitchen and started to go through what sounded like a junk drawer. “Ah-ha, I knew you were in there.”
Carefully—because, no lie, every movement hurt by this point—I turned to see what she was doing, feeling the good corner of my mouth lift in a semi-smile when she held up a set of keys and jingled them around. “Thanks.”
Putting them on the counter, she went back to the drawer and pulled out two bottles. “I’ve got Tylenol PM and Mefenamic Acid, which is like ibuprofen. We’ll dose you up, and hopefully, it’ll help you get some sleep.”
Liking how her mind worked, I prepared myself mentally to get off the couch while glaring at Dobby as she moved around getting whatever else she needed. He was sitting licking his paw as he stared at me like he was sterilizing his nails to slit my throat.
“Why is he such a psycho?” I asked as she sat down, passing everything over to me. Shaking out three of the ibuprofen pills and two of the Tylenol, I threw them in my mouth and swallowed them down with a mouthful of the water she’d brought back with her.
“I think it’s to do with something from his past. When I first found him, he was tiny, obviously bald, and so skinny I could count every single bone.” She snickered when I looked at her like she was talking shit when she said he’d ever been skinny. I was sure the bastard had probably eaten his siblings in the womb. That’s what evil did, right? “I took him to the veterinarianan,” she explained, totally tripping over the word, “and he said he figured he was about eighteen months old. That’s old enough for someone to have abused him—”
“Or he ate them.”
“—or for him to just be scarred from not having a home and love.”
Snorting, I stretched my arms, groaning when it pulled on my side. Fuck me, that last guy had to have been on something. The way he’d landed punch after punch, not even showing a hint of pain until I’d hit him with three uppercuts and knocked him out.
“Right, gob shite, bedtime,” she sighed, patting me on the thigh and then squeaking. “Fuck, sorry, I forgot you’re bruised everywhere.”
Ironically, where she’d patted me had been about an inch away from where my dick was sitting. The second her hand had touched me, he’d raised his head like he always did when she was around. But I’d totally blame the flinch and groan that’d come out of me on the supposed bruising in the area.
Standing up, I motioned to the door. “I just need to get my shit out of the car. Do you need anything when I come back in?”
Getting to her feet, she fidgeted as she watched me move to the door. “Uh, could you make sure all the locks are in place when you come back in?”
Frowning, I looked at what she was talking about and growled when I saw she had six locks and two chains on it. Not flimsy chains either. These were substantial ones from a good security company.
Glancing back at her, I didn’t like the blank expression on her face as she watched me nab the keys and flick open the main lock. “Not a problem, pixie. I’ll make sure you’re locked up tight. Have you checked the windows?”
“I never open them, just that door.” Her voice sounded faint, like she was distracted by something, but the words were very telling.
The only thing she opened the lock on was her front door because she was too afraid even to run the risk of undoing any of the others. Her apartment wasn’t big, but it wasn’t tiny either, and there were a lot of windows in it.
I inspected them carefully as I walked down to where my truck was parked, and sure enough, she had different locks on the windows than were typically installed in apartments like these. Her neighbors' windows had smaller flip locks on them, ones that I’d expected to see in her apartment, too. That meant she needed to lock herself in to feel safe, basically.
Grinding my teeth, I unlocked the truck, glancing around the parking lot when the hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I reached in for my bag.
What was she so scared of?
Keeping my word when I went back in, I locked all of them and put the chains on, then made sure all of the curtains and blinds were down as I moved toward her bedroom. And there she was, lying under her duvet with a book in her hands as she watched the door.
“I’ve only got one bedroom in the flat, but so you can take this side.” She patted the mattress beside her. “I also have a lot of pillows, so we can just put them between us and call it Switzerland.”
Snickering at her nervousness, I moved over to my side of the bed and carefully toed off my boots, grateful that I hadn’t tied them up after the fight. The pain of bending over to undo them would have been insane.
“Do you mind if I have a shower first?” I felt guilty asking because
the noise would keep her up even later, but I didn’t want to get into her bed and ruin the clean haven she’d made for both of us.
Clean was the keyword. My life hadn’t felt clean since that night. It was dark, dirty, and suffocating. With Sadie, I could breathe, I felt some of the weight lifting off my shoulders, and I couldn’t taint it with anything I’d brought with me.
“Of course, you smell like a beefy kebab anyway,” she winked. “Clean towels are in the cupboard inside the bathroom, and you can help yourself to whatever you need.” She paused, then added, “Including tampons.”
Holding my side, I burst out laughing as I walked across the bedroom. Sure enough, inside the bathroom cupboard were fresh, fluffy towels that smelled like fabric softener and felt like cotton wool.
My Sadie, making even the most inane things perfection. And this was why I couldn’t resist her and why she affected me so much. She brought a new light into my life and opened my eyes to things I’d been blind to.
Including the promise of a future I’d never even dreamed about.
Chapter Four
Sadie
He was around here somewhere, waiting for me around a corner.
Sticking my head out the hole slightly, I looked around the room, but it was empty.
Maybe he was asleep?
Creeping forward, I followed the heavenly scent and swallowed the saliva that filled my mouth. I knew what that was. Sweet Lord in Heaven!
There was a cloth hanging low enough off the table for me to use to get where the smell was coming from, so I jumped onto it and dug my nails in, then scrambled up it. I needed to work out more, my upper body strength was embarrassing. Stupid little arms.
But cheese was cheese, and it was waiting for me. A lot of it was waiting for me.
My arms and legs were burning by the time I got to the top, and it felt like I’d scaled Mount Everest. But there it was… an actual mountain of cheese.
Danger forgotten, I ran over to it as fast as my legs would take me and sank my teeth in as hard as I could, groaning when the flavor hit me.
Great Sass: Providence Family Ties Series Page 3