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“Don’t.” She looked past me, avoiding eye contact, and I was watched her evading me. I wondered what the fuck was going on. “Are you going to tell me what happened to you?
“That’s not important. Forget it, it’s done.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” She was looking at me as though I’d just been beamed down to earth from an alien planet. “In what parallel dimension is getting half beat to death not important?”
“In the dimension where I said this doesn’t matter. Stop being dramatic. It’s not that bad. Subject closed.”
“You’re insane, it’s absolutely that bad. Have you seen your face? You’re a mess. You look like you’ve taken up cage fighting. Not to mention the potential internal damage. This is the definition of something that matters. Whoever did this to you needs to get what’s coming to them—it’s a police matter. You should call them.”
“No!” She jumped a mile in the air at my booming voice. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you, but you need to let this drop. Nobody’s calling the police. I mean it, so don’t go getting any ideas about going behind my back. That won’t end well for anybody.”
She stared at me with a mixture of contempt and another emotion I couldn’t quite define, but it had her bottom lip protruding in the sexiest pout I’d ever seen. It also had my dick twitching to life, yet again, and I realized I wanted to bite her bottom lip like my life depended on it. I also realized that I really desperately needed to pee, though I really wasn’t looking forward to the effort it was going to take to make that happen.
“I need to, umm... use the bathroom.” As I started to maneuver myself into a sitting position, my entire body screamed in agony. It was like feeling the sound of metal on metal when train brakes ground against the track. Except the result wasn’t sound, it was searing pain. Even my eyelashes hurt. I braced myself to try not to grimace as I moved, despite really wanting to curl up into a ball and cry like a little kid. I must have failed, as Kik scrambled to her feet, looking pained herself.
“Here, let me help you.”
I shooed her away gently with my hand. I appreciated her wanting to help—I couldn’t deny she’d been a godsend—but I hated that I’d looked and felt so weak in her presence earlier, and even though I could really have used the help, I didn’t want to stoop any lower. I definitely didn’t want to seem dependent on her.
She maintained a neutral expression and didn’t say a word, but the silence was loud, and I could hear her thoughts anyway. She thought I was being a stupid, proud, jackass, and she wasn’t altogether wrong. But, I’d rather that, than a weakling who needed rescuing or taking care of.
The shuffle to the bathroom felt like the longest walk of my life, when in reality it was nothing more than a few handfuls of steps. Once I’d peed, thus taking away one pressing need, I had room to think about what else was going on with my body. Apart from the widespread pain, I felt dank as fuck. I couldn’t remember ever needing to wash as much, even after a week camping with boy scouts as a kid, or after a football game when I was caked in mud and covered in sweat.
I shuffled over to the shower area and set the water running. While it warmed a little, I went about undressing. A simple concept to say or think, but an almost-insurmountable hurdle when my entire body was essentially one giant bruise, interconnected by cuts of varying severity, and a few broken bones. The effort was so much, I almost needed to sit down to collect myself before attempting to get clean. It was only pure pride and stubbornness that prevented me from doing so.
I staggered into the cubicle, and had to bite my lip to stop from crying out when the water hit my tender skin. Somehow, the shower had gone from its usual gentle waterfall to what felt like a thousand sharpened butcher’s knives raining down on me. I was in absolute agony. At one point, stopping to get some respite and trying not to pass the fuck out, I stood out of the stream of water, my head leaning on my forearm as it rested on the glass screen.
I made it through the torture of showering, glad to be rid of the caked-on blood in some places, but having been careful not to wet the cut above my eyebrow, then dried myself with the speed and finesse of a one-hundred-year-old man. As much of an ordeal as it had been, I definitely felt better afterward. I headed to my room through the adjoining door, and managed to ease into a pair of sweats without giving myself a hernia, before heading back into the bathroom to dose myself up with meds again.
As I peered at the steam-obscured mirror on the medicine cabinet, my mind suddenly cleared until I could only focus on a single thought—I had to bring my father down.
Chapter 30
Kik
When Drew emerged from the shower my breath hitched at the sight of him. Even beaten, battered and bruised, he was beautiful. His hair was still wet, slicked back away from his face, revealing the deep gash above his eyebrow in all its glory. He was going to have a scar there whether he had stitches or not, but I figured it would be worse if he let it heal without getting it seen to. Stupidly, I couldn’t help but think that the scar would probably suit him.
Against my better judgment , the whole beat-up vibe was really doing it for me. Not only that, but it totally suited what I knew of his personality. For someone with a mean, controlling streak as wide as his, the beefcake, preppy look he normally rocked was kind of false advertising. The world should probably be forewarned that below the cool, calm and buttoned-down exterior, a wild animal lurked just below the surface.
Case in point, if the sorry state of his knuckles—bloodied and bloated—was anything to go by, however badly off he was, the other person went away looking at least as bad, if not worse. They definitely weren’t defensive wounds.
I tried not to look below the waistband of his gray sweats as he headed toward me, but it was like trying not to lick my lips while eating a sugar doughnut—the more I told myself not to, the more I was compelled to do exactly that. Not wanting to overtly leer at him, I quickly skirted past the obvious, and brought my eyeline down to his bare feet as he crossed the room. Big mistake. Big. Huge.
There was something so intimate about him padding about like that, it had me freaked out. What the fuck was I doing cozying up and playing nursemaid to a guy I hated for twenty-three and a half hours a day, but who knew exactly how to make me love him for the other thirty minutes? When he reached the couch, Drew looked at me as though he’d read my mind.
“What are you doing?” He lowered himself painfully slowly as he spoke.
“Nothing.”
“Then why do you look like a kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar?”
Because you make me think of nothing more than putting my hand in my cookie jar twenty-four seven. “I don’t.”
“Lie.” Beat up or not, there was nothing wrong with his reflexes, as he reached out and grabbed my phone from my hand before I knew what was happening.
“Give that back.” I swiped at him, conscious not to do anything that could hurt him, which meant there was nothing I could do at all.
“Why? What are you doing that you don’t want me to see? Arranging more dates, I bet.”
