There hadn’t been a discussion about the status of our relationship and the fact he was still living at my place, and quite frankly, I hadn’t needed one either. I was too focused on living in the now and enjoying the new freer life that I was living.
Noticing the two strips of paper from the fortune cookies, I picked one up and read it, remembering it as the one from mine.
Something small this way comes.
Definitely not Elijah’s penis, then.
The other one was his.
Pain brings you life and love.
Well, that was true, I guess. I wonder if someone was having a bad day when they came up with that gem?
Fiddling with them, I wondered if Elijah would open up. Obviously, seeing something about a boat sinking and men missing would bring back memories of losing his best friend, but I didn’t know much about that night aside from what he’d told me. Trauma affected everyone in different ways, and the rational brain and irrational brain separated to create a reality that either was or wasn’t there. What if that’s what the news report had done tonight?
Elijah had taken the responsibility of losing Cooper, and it seemed like he was torturing himself with it, which didn’t seem fair. Then again, hadn’t I done the same with getting away from Orson? I’d felt guilty when I’d met the women who hadn’t managed to. I’d also done the same after Mum died, wondering if I’d just looked to the side and pushed her away… Dale suffered from the same guilt when it came to Parker’s abuse, and Parker still felt guilty that his step monster had kidnapped Ariana and me. It was hard to break the repetitive cycle.
That was something else that’d been weighing on me. I’d been hit by a bloody vehicle—granted with no damage—held in a shack and shot, but none of it had come back to haunt me yet. I wasn’t green enough to think that I wouldn’t ever get hit by a flashback of something from it, but so far, I hadn’t. Did that make me cold?
Holding my leg out in front of me, I saw how raw the scar still looked over three months after it. I still had a lot of pain and aching in the area, and the exercises that the physio guy had given me sucked balls, but on the whole, I was doing okay, and I didn’t—
Being the arsehole he was, Dobby chose that moment to come zooming out from wherever it was that Satan’s minions liked to eat the souls of innocent bunnies and launched himself at my leg. As the claws on his front paws embedded themselves in my ankle, I let out a screech that would’ve woken the dead.
Which, of course, meant that Elijah came running out of the bedroom, naked as the day he was born, willy bouncing around like a baby elephant discovering its trunk, and tackled me to the floor.
As all of the air left my lungs, all I could think was: wow, penises can really move. With that thought in mind and whatever little oxygen I could pull into my crushed chest, I started laughing, except it sounded like a dying crow.
“Jesus, Sadie,” Elijah rasped, getting up onto his knees and running his hands over my body. “Christ, fuck.”
When he got to my ankle and saw the dots of blood on it, he stopped his movements and looked around for the responsible party, who was sitting on the other side of the room, licking his paw happily. The big, fat wanker.
“I’m okay,” I wheezed, still laughing but wondering at the same time if that was true. Could boobs burst on impact?
Clenching his jaw repeatedly so that the muscle on the side went pop, pop, pop, he got up onto his feet and held his hand out to me. Of course I took the opportunity as my face passed his pecker to tap it into moving again—who wouldn’t? But I did it hoping that he’d burst out laughing like he would have before tonight.
He didn’t, though. Instead, he walked back down the hallway to the bedroom and got back into bed.Chapter EightElijahFor a brief moment, I’d manage to suppress the emotions and images. I hadn’t forgotten, but I’d been able to breathe. Then that news report about a fishing boat sinking near to where Coop’s had was aired, and the guilt swamped me. I was tired of rehashing it, tired of my emotions being tugged around, but survival came with guilt. A lot of fucking guilt.
It’d been four days of kicking my ass to snap the fuck out of it and nightmares that I’d managed to keep hidden from Sadie, and I felt like the world’s biggest asshole. I should just talk it out, open up to her, but the words got stuck every time I tried. I’d gone from switching off to acting like nothing was wrong, but I could see she wasn’t buying it even though she played along.