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…”