“I don’t doubt that you would.”
“Last thing, Elijah,” he said quietly. “She’s been good for you, so don’t push her away. Forgive yourself, open up to falling in love, and live your fucking life.”
With my eyes now locked with hers, I swallowed awkwardly. Could I do it? She'd helped me through so much since I’d met her. I’d found some of the funny personality I used to have, I’d engaged a softer side of me I only felt around my family, and I felt safe with her. But could I have a relationship? Those involved staying in one place, and becoming an us instead of an I.
Could I do that?
I knew Sadie was fragile, and I was so hard and rough that I was like a bull running through a priceless glassware collection. If I didn’t stay on this path that we’d started with friendship, I’d shatter her and ruin everything.
But she was different, and I felt more like me when I was with her.
God damn it.
“I’ll think it over,” I lied, turning away from her again. Like there was anything to think over, I liked and wanted her too much to not convince her to take a chance on me. It was that simple. “And I’ll stop ignoring your calls.”
Hearing the truth in my voice, he burst out laughing. “Make sure of it, or I’ll come and show her some of the videos I’ve got of y’all at the bars.”
Now that would be an issue. Sadie would hate me for life if she saw that shit.
“When you put it like that…”
Over his laughter, I heard a creaking sound and knew he’d just stood up from his desk. “Make her happy, E.T. And make yourself happy, too.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“That’s all we can ever do. And I want an invite to the fucking wedding, jackass.”
Before I could tell him to shut up, there was a click, and he’d hung up the call.
Something about what he’d said made me look around me like I was standing in a different room. I was looking at everything with Sadie differently, too. Instead of the oppressive, suffocating cloud I’d had around me, things looked and felt lighter and more straightforward. Even watching her walk around me to take the umbrella out of the sink, giving it a shake—a simple action—was different.
“Everything okay?” she asked as she swerved around where I was standing, leaning my ass against the counter. “You look weird.”
Shaking my head, I shot her a grin, hoping it looked real instead of confused. “Absolutely. That was my commanding officer, well, technically my old boss,” I explained, keeping it simple. Her brother was in the Navy, so there was a chance she might know the terminology, but I didn’t want to get into it. “He’s a good friend and was just checking in.”
Tilting her head to the side, she assessed me, forgetting about the still dripping umbrella in her hand. “You’ve been avoiding his calls?”
As I shrugged my shoulders, hoping it would reassure her, I realized the tight tension I’d had in them wasn’t as bad. It’d felt like a taut string was in there for months, but now it was looser.
“Elijah?” she prompted, and I realized I’d zoned out.
“Sorry, it was just strange hearing from him. Yeah, I’ve been busy trying to get shit sorted in my life, so I forgot about keeping in contact with people. I haven’t spoken to him in about four months and he was worried.”
“You know,” she said quietly, “I discussed survivor guilt with Dale after the whole thing with Parker’s evil ex-stepmother happened. Both of us have experienced it. If you ever need to talk about it, I’ll bet he’d be free, and the three of us could sit down. You don’t even have to get deep or anything like that, just listen to our stories, maybe?”
I wasn’t a deep talker. If I could avoid emotional conversations, I did. So this offer was like offering me ice cream with crushed chips and a pickle on top—repugnant. But something about it, and thinking about what I knew about Sadie and what she’d gone through, struck a chord with me. To open up about something like that would put her in a vulnerable position and state of mind, yet she was offering to do it to help me out so that I could understand why I felt the way I did.
If she could do it, could I?
Taking a deep breath, I nodded slowly. “We’ll work up to the full conversation, but if you’re free tonight, I’d like to spend some time with you talking.”
What the fuck, Elijah? You’d like to spend some time ‘talking’?
Any self-berating that I would’ve continued to do went to shit because the smile she shot at me made it all worthwhile.
“I’ll bet if I rang Lily, she wouldn’t mind getting someone to cover for me. Give me a second to put this and the groceries away, and then I’ll make dinner. After that, if you still feel you’d like to talk, we’ll do it.”
Did she have to say do it?
“I’ll put the groceries away while you do what you need to do, then I’ll help you with dinner.”
I wanted to spend time around her with this new lighter feeling. She usually helped me chase the weight away anyway, but now it felt even better. It was like a drug for me.
“Cool. I’ve also got a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label in the cupboard. I can’t reach it because whoever installed the kitchen was a freak of nature, but if you can get it down, we’ll have drinks while we work.”
I could feel the small smile I’d had move into a grin as she spoke. Tiny little Sadie Dahl, drinking whisky.
“You little rebel.”
I’d expected it to be relaxing and fun—which it was—but I never once expected it to end up the way it did.
“I think I’d have liked Cooper,” Sadie slurred, waving her glass around and ignoring Dobby, who was darting around the room. “He sounds like he was a good egg.”
I’d taken a detour from telling her outright what my problem was and had focused on telling her funny stories about stuff me and Coop had gotten up to.
So far, we were three-quarters of the way down the brand new bottle of whisky, which was her grandmother's for when she came to visit, and still going strong.
“I think I’ll like your friends too. They sound weird, but fun.” That was an understatement. She had three male friends who called themselves Rice Crispies because they could snap, crackle, and pop, i.e., they made good beatbox music with their mouths, in Sadie’s words.
“They’re a blast,” she sighed, then jumped for her phone. “We should FaceTime them. What’s their number?”
Blinking at the question, I frowned when she started slamming her thumb down on the screen. “Is it broken?”
“It always does this. Oh, and now the thumb thing’s disappeared. Great,” she huffed, throwing it down on the couch. “I hate technology, it never works.”
Closing one eye to focus on the device, I noted that, yes, indeed, the thumb scanner had disappeared.
“Guess we can’t call them, then. What do we do next?”
I was expecting her to ask questions, pull out a deck of cards, maybe even pick up Monopoly. Instead, she blew my mind with her question.
“Lemme see your willie jewelry.”
“My what?”
“Your junk jewels.”
What the fuck was she talking about? “You want to see my nuts?”
“No, the pecker piercings. I looked them up online,” Sadie explained, making me growl. “But nothing really gave me a good idea what they looked like up close.”
This was a confusing situation for my drunken brain because part of me was pissed she’d looked at another guy—or guys—junk online. The other part was desperate to show her mine and glad she wanted to see it, too. What did it matter she was asking merely for the metal through it. It was still my cock she was looking at.
So, before I could talk myself out of it, knowing that drunken brains didn’t make good choices, I stood up and pulled my gray sweats down, grateful I hadn’t put underwear on after my shower this morning.
“You saw them this morning,” I belatedly pointed out, then tapped both piercings with my fi
nger. “This is one, and this is the other.”
“I saw them from a distance this morning,” she argued, tilting her head to see the mid-shaft one better. “And my room’s dark, so it was shit.”
“It was shit?”
“Yeah, like watching Netflix with no internet.”
What the fuck?
“You wouldn’t be able to do that because you’d have no signal.”
“Exactly,” she nodded like it made total sense.
Was it my drunk brain or hers that wasn’t making sense?
Deciding to leave it, I said nothing more as she leaned in closer. In fact, she was so close I could feel her breath as she exhaled on the tip, meaning that my cock started to react, getting harder. Willing it to stop and go back to sleepy penis, I closed my eyes and started thinking of things that would hopefully distract me. My brothers, getting a puppy, how ugly her cat was…
Cat—pussy, Sadie’s pussy…
And then I felt something soft wrap around my length with enough pressure to make me go from half-mast to full alert in a second. My eyes snapped open, and I saw there was now only an inch between it and Sadie’s face, as she leaned to the side and examined the mid-shaft piercing, the top of her head skimming gently over my bare hip.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, she had to then go and reach up to touch it with the tip of her finger, making a low growl burst out of me.
Not letting go, she tipped her head back to look up at me. “Does that hurt when I do this?” She rubbed her finger over it again.
I couldn’t talk. Well, I could, but it’d be something crude, and I only just had the presence of mind not to want to do that. Sadie deserved better, so I just shook my head.
“Your penis is much prettier than the ones I saw online. It’s the prettiest one I’ve ever seen.”
This time, I didn’t have the control not to talk. “How many have you seen?”
Leaning away from me slightly but still holding on tight, she lifted her eyes to the ceiling as she thought about it. Jesus Christ, it needed that amount of thinking?
“Uh, I dunno,” she eventually shrugged. “Like twenty, maybe?”
And here was the cure for a boner, hearing the magic number.
Grinding my teeth slightly, I thought about the hypocrisy in what I was feeling, but I couldn’t help it. “Twenty?”
“Well, I don’t count how much porn I’ve seen, Elijah,” she huffed, rolling her eyes. “It’s not like I keep a running tally of it. Porn is porn, it depends on my hormones.”
Blinking, I sifted through what she’d just said. She was talking about porn? And she’d watched enough of it to not remember how many penises she’d seen in it and not in real life? As in movie cock, not real-life ones.
Now that I could work with.
And just like that, my own dick decided he’d forgiven her enough to get hard again, making her giggle.
“He’s friendly,” she chuckled. “Penises are ugly, but he’s quite pretty with his earrings in.”
She really needed to stop talking. Some dicks might take offense at what she was saying, but mine just seemed to want her even more. It was a problem that I was losing control over, and I didn’t want to frighten her with her past.
I was just tensing the muscles I needed to move away from her, hoping at the same time that she’d let go of him when I did, when she moved forward and pressed a kiss to the tip.
“Sadie—”
Tipping her head back, she looked at me and whispered, “Elijah, will you teach me how to suck your pretty penis?”
All common sense fled. Moving quickly, I pulled my sweats back up, making her flinch back in disappointment, before I picked her up and threw her over my shoulder, and started walking toward the bedroom.
“I could’ve walked by my own self,” she rasped, reminding me of what someone sounded like when they were sick.
Then again, we’d had enough to drink tonight to maybe make her puke, and her hanging upside down wasn’t going to help that. On that thought, I tugged her back down until she was lying sideways in my arms and continued walking toward the bed.
“You’ve got little legs,” I pointed out as I lowered her onto the side of the mattress. “My way was faster.” She didn’t look pale or like she was scared, so I was hoping I hadn’t made her sick. “How do you feel?”
Frowning at me, she rubbed her hand over her body. “Uh, I guess my skin’s soft. I have this great moisturizer by L’Occitane, and my body wash has—”
Groaning, I stopped her hand from continuing its journey across her chest. “Not that, your stomach.” Again, her hand went to move to it, but this time all I had to do was tighten my fingers slightly to stop it. “I mean, do you feel sick?”
Her eyebrows shot up at the question. “No, why, is there something going around?”
“I was thinking the whisky might’ve made you feel sick if you’re not used to getting drunk.”
“Oh, that?” she snorted, waving her hand at me. “Nah, I might not get drunk often, but it takes a lot more than that to make me chunder.”
“Make you what?”
“Chunder,” she said slowly. “You know, like puke, barf, vomit, yip—”
Dropping to my knees in front of her, I cupped her face in my hands, grinning at how crazy she was. “I get it, pixie.”
It was like someone had frozen her in place as she stared at me, and I wanted to scream at the unfairness of it. Now that I’d brought up the alcohol puking thing, it’d finally hit her.
Looking around for a bucket or trash can, I wasn’t aware of her moving until she grabbed my face and turned me back to face her.
“Do that again?” she ordered, not letting go of me.
My brain was now at a weird semi-sober, semi-drunk state, so it took me a moment to run through everything I’d done that she might want me to do again. Maybe I was drunker than I realized, though, because not one damn thing struck me as a possibility.
So, I went with the last thing that I’d done, thinking I could work my way back. “Look for a trash can?”
“No,” she snapped, shaking me gently. “Smile again. I’ve never seen you do it like that, and I want to see it again. In fact, you have to do it all the time from now on.”
Only this woman could do this to me. Turn me on, make me laugh, and smile like I had no problems in the world. She made me want to hide her away in my pocket, so no one else got this feeling from her.
That didn’t stop the laughter that burst out of me, though, or the huge grin that followed it as I lowered my head down to look at her, seeing the same expression on her face as before. The best way to describe it was dazzled, and fuck me, that worked for my dick as well.
“Sadie?”
“You’re beautiful,” she breathed, tracing her fingertip over the bristles on my chin. “It’s really not fair.”
“It’s not?”
“No. You’ve got a pretty pecker when they’re just ugly things, and you’ve got a beautiful face. That’s not fair to the rest of us. Women who normally wouldn’t want to come face-to-face with a penis will see yours and want to kiss it all over, ruining it for the rest of the men in the world.”
Whatever followed, “they’re just ugly things normally,” was lost on me because the fact she thought mine was pretty was an ego boost.
Then she pulled me out of my euphoria with something else, “And your face—I didn’t have a type until I saw it, now my type is green eyes, a straight nose, a jaw like this,” she poked mine, and then did the same to my mouth, “and lips like these. I can’t even go to my happy place thinking about Bane.”
What the fuck? “You have a crush on Bane? As in Batman bane?”
“Yeah,” she sighed, her eyes going unfocused. “Well, not him, but the guy who plays him—Tom Hanks.”
Now, it had to be said, I wasn’t fully drunk, but I wasn’t just buzzed—I was somewhere in the middle. But for the love of fuck, even I knew Tom Hanks didn’t play Bane.
“Uh, Tom Hanks was Forest Gump, pixie, not Bane.”
The unfocused look shifted out of her eyes as she glared at me. “I think I know the man I’m having babies with, Elijah, and it isn’t Forest Gump.”
“But Tom Hanks played him,” I stressed, pinching the bridge of my nose. “He wasn’t Bane.”
“Oh,” she hummed. “Then I mean Tom Cruise.”
“Maverick from Top Gun didn’t play Bane either. Tom Hardy did.”
“That’s the one! I knew I’d get it in the end.”
Something uncomfortable occurred to me, if she was so drunk she couldn’t remember who the actor she had a crush on was—was I taking advantage of her right now?
“On a scale of one to ten, how drunk would you say you were right now?”
Closing one eye, she looked up at the ceiling. “Three. No, a five. No, wait, a four, definitely a four.”
Four wasn’t bad. Heck, even five wasn’t bad, was it? “Do me a favor, touch your nose with your fingertip.”
Sighing, she did it without even giving it much effort. “Now, you do it.”
Thinking I was smart, I did it and ended up poking myself in the cheek. “Okay, we’ll forget that. Now, you mentioned wanting to do something in the living room?”
A huge smile took over her face, and she nodded her head rapidly. “Do you have to do it differently with piercings in?”
Thinking about it, only a couple of things stood out—along with my dick. “Normally, teeth are a matter of preference, and that’s still the case here, but you need to be more careful with them so that you don’t tear the piercings out.”
Eyes wide, she glanced down at my crotch, smiling slightly when she saw exactly how excited I was, and then nodded.
“Also, rolling your tongue around them or even moving them with it is okay, but try not to pull on them. There’s a fine line between pleasure and pain with my two, and it’s easily crossed.”
“Pleasure and pain, don’t pull them, watch teeth, got it. Now gimme!” she held her hand out to me and waved me over.
Closing the distance between us, I couldn’t help wondering how we’d gotten into this situation while I did everything I could not to move in case it distracted her. Hell, at this stage, even breathing was a movement that worried me so much that I tried to do it as shallowly as possible.
Great Sass: Providence Family Ties Series Page 6