Rest & Trust (26 page)

“I’m so fucked up.”

His smile was almost sweet. “I got somethin’ for that. Let me hook you up. My treat. I shouldn’t’ve hit you.”

The tears must have drowned that screaming voice, though they hadn’t quieted the rest of her. The doubt about this choice was gone. “I don’t have a kit anymore.”

“You know that’s not a problem, kitten. I’m a one-stop shop.”

“Okay. But I can’t do it here. I need to go home. I need to be by myself.” The thought of Gage touching her while she was strung out nauseated her.

He picked up her hand and kissed it. “You can do it anywhere you want, Lady Sadie. You sure you don’t want company?”

She knew two things with perfect clarity, and two things only: she needed to fix, and she needed to be alone. “Yeah.”

“The customer is always right.” He smiled and stood, holding out his hand to her, the way Sherlock had held out his hand to that woman. Sadie took it and let him pull her to her feet.

~oOo~

An hour later, she sat at her own dining table in her own little studio apartment, plucking at the rubber tubing that was part of Gage’s starter kit. She’d never shot into her arm, not once, not even the first time. She’d known the places to shoot where nobody would know—she’d looked it up. Now she had weird scar tissue between most of her toes, but no track marks, even after years of drug use.

On the table in front of her were the contents of Gage’s starter kit, arrayed in a neat row, and half a gram of heroin. Not much at all. Just something to get her over.

And her one-year chip; it dangled from her key ring. If it had been some random piece of metal that she’d shoved into a drawer, maybe she’d have been strung out by now, but she’d gone and made a key ring out of it.

So now she was sitting there, plucking at the tubing, staring alternately at the little bag of white powder and the bronze coin resting on her keys.

What if she
was
pregnant?

No—that didn’t matter. Being pregnant was dumb, dumb, dumb, so fucking dumb. That couldn’t happen. If she was, then she would do something about it and not be anymore.

The voice in her head that hadn’t wanted her to go into Gage’s house piped up quietly, cueing up images of Sherlock’s fury when he’d thought she’d taken a morning-after pill, and the way he’d snarled the words that that woman had aborted his baby. If she was pregnant, and she ended it, then she and Sherlock would be done, too. She knew that.

Weren’t they done already, though? Wasn’t that why she was sitting here in her apartment, why she’d sneaked out of his bed in the middle of the night? Why she’d called Gage?

Gordon spoke up—fuck a duck, it was getting crowded and noisy in her head.
Okay, call me. Why haven’t you called me? This is your worst one yet, smarty. You need me.

She did need him. She needed Sherlock. She needed the shit sitting on her table. But she was tired of needing.

It was easier to be a junkie. Then she’d had control over the thing she was hiding from everybody. She’d felt strong, proud of herself for everything she’d accomplished while hauling addiction on her back everywhere she went. And when it got to be too much? Well, she’d had a place to go where it wouldn’t matter for a while.

She didn’t have that place anymore. The thing she was hiding from everybody now was how weak and small and scared she was.

But she
did
have that place. It was sitting right in front of her.

What if she was pregnant?

It didn’t matter.

What if it did?

Her phone was on the table, too. She could call Sherlock. He’d come to her. The last thing she could remember him saying to her was
I got you.
He’d said it over and over and over. But sitting here in her apartment, she couldn’t believe it.

She could call Gordon. He’d help her. He could make it better.

Instead, she got up and went to her bathroom, away from all those temptations and terrors, and toward the thing that always worked.

~oOo~

She hated the bright cold of normal bathroom lights, so she’d had an electrician install in the ceiling a little crystal chandelier she’d found at an overstock store. The dance of faceted light pleased her, when she was in a state where pleasure was possible.

Sadie stripped, folding her clothes neatly and setting them on top of the little dresser where she kept her bathroom linens. Then she opened the bottom drawer and reached way in the back to pull out a tin box. Not very big: about six inches long, three wide, and one deep.

Though she’d lived alone since her junior year of college, when she’d moved out of her father’s house, she still hid this box. She wasn’t sure why, but it made her feel secure—the same way that carrying a tiny box of razor blades in her backpack had helped her when she was in high school.

Despite the psychic maelstrom she’d been caught in during her high school years, she’d never had to cut when she was away from home, and she thought the reason she’d been able to avoid it was that she’d had the tools for it with her, should an emergency have arrived. Having the option had given her the strength to avoid using it.

That probably would have made no sense to anyone else. She didn’t know; she’d never told anyone.

Hiding the box was a little bit like that, though. It wasn’t an out of sight, out of mind thing; it wasn’t like hiding it made her think about it less. Hiding it was familiar, and the familiarity gave her calm.

Naked and with the box in her hand, Sadie stepped into her empty bathtub, sat down, and stretched out.

She opened the box and surveyed her supplies. There was a pattern, a ritual—that was part of the thing that made this work. She didn’t just hack at herself. It was methodical. There was purpose and intent. The right tool had to be chosen, and the right place.

Sometimes cutting wasn’t what she needed. Sometimes a needle sliding into the meat of her thigh, that strange, hot itch that rose up around the point of penetration, was it. She had some little alligator clamps, too; sometimes their toothy bite was the right medicine. Those tools left no lasting marks, shed no noticeable blood.

Tonight, though, she needed the blood and the mark. She had different tools for that, too, things that made different kinds of cuts, from scratches to something deeper.

She selected a single-edged razor blade and then closed the box and reached down to set it on the tiled floor of her bathroom.

This was good. This was right. This was how she could keep that bronze chip on her key ring and how she could make things make sense. When things made sense again, she’d know what to do.

It was hard to find a place on her thighs where the pain she needed could get through anymore, though.

The scar on her left arm caught her eye. Two months old now, it was still pink. The seam was straight and thin; Sherlock had done a good job sewing her up.

Sadie smiled. She’d liked him from the moment she’d seen his eyes. She really did love him now.

She drew the blade over the scar. It opened and bathed her arm in bright blood.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Sherlock ran up to Sadie’s door and tried the knob. Locked. Taking that beat to check had just about finished his self-control, and he pounded on the door with both fists. “SADIE! SADIE, LET ME IN!”

Without waiting to see if she would, knowing in his heart, in his gut, that something was wrong, he backed up and prepared to kick the motherfucker in.

“Sherlock!” Gordon topped the steps leading to this second floor. “What the fuck are you doing, son?”

“She’s in there”—they both knew that; her car was in its space in the lot—“I don’t have a goddamn key!”

“I do. Take a breath, son. You’re doing nobody any favors right now.” Gordon dug into a front pocket of his khakis and came up with a key on a plastic fob.

Never had Sherlock felt the way he felt right now. He was desperate to get through that door, to get to Sadie, but he was absolutely fucking terrified, too—a kind of fear he’d never known.

He’d woken an hour ago, alone in his bed. The house had been dark, and Sadie gone. Her old Beemer hadn’t been parked out front. She’d left without a word, and the last he’d seen of her she’d been nearly catatonic, and then unconscious.

First thing, he’d called her. Her phone hadn’t even rung, just gone straight to voice mail. She’d turned it off. Next, he’d called Gordon, who’d given him his number when he’d barged into the clubhouse after the pre-rally party.

Gordon hadn’t heard from her, either, and that was when Sherlock had first known panic. Gordon had suggested they meet here, at her apartment, and work from there. Seeing her Beemer in its assigned spot should have calmed Sherlock, but instead, his stomach had boiled with acid. He didn’t know why this fear and certainty had taken him over so completely, but he knew—he
knew
—that whatever was on the other side of the door was bad.

Gordon turned his key in Sadie’s lock, and the door swung open. Sherlock pushed past the older man and scanned the empty room.

It was tidy as ever. Since he’d been back from South Dakota, she’d only been here to work a shift or to pick up some things. He’d fallen into thinking of his house as their house without even realizing it.

“Ah, smarty, no,” Gordon muttered at his side, and Sherlock turned to take in the other half of the apartment.

And the paraphernalia arrayed across the table. Oh, God. “Sadie! Fuck, no! What did you do?!” God! Fuck!

While his mind tried to exert some control over this new level of panic, he realized the missing component to the picture: no Sadie. Swiveling his head to the bathroom door, he saw the halo of light around the jamb, and he nearly flew across the room.

At least that door wasn’t locked. But what he saw inside made him yell in despair.

She was naked and fetal in the bottom of the tub, dry but for her blood, which was spattered and smeared all over the white porcelain and all over her—her face, her hair, her body.

So much blood. That couldn’t have just been cutting—and it looked like it was coming from her arms. He could still see fresh blood pulsing wetly from her skin.

Her fingers gripped a razor blade. He could just make out the glint of metal in the blood.

Everything that he’d feared had come to pass.

He grabbed a bath towel off the rod on the wall—it was white, but he didn’t give a fuck—and dove to his knees at the side of the tub.

“No!” she cried, curling into an even tighter ball. “Go away! It’s not working yet! No!”

He ignored her, barely even heard her except to be relieved that she was conscious and strong enough to yell, and snatched the blade from her, then covered her body with the big towel. He’d teased her about her decadent taste in bath towels—they were huge and thick and dwarfed her when she wrapped herself up in them after a bath or shower. In turn, she’d called his towels ‘napkins.’

Glad for the thick blanket he could cover her with now, he leaned over the tub and began wiping the blood from her, starting with her arms, dark red with thick blood.

She fought him, her exertions flinging fresh drops and sprays, and he got into the damn tub, on his knees, so he could overpower her.

“Lord,” Gordon lamented behind him. “I’m calling 911.”

“No! No! No!” Sadie screamed, trying and failing to free herself from Sherlock’s hold.

He got the towel and his arms around her, and that would have to suffice until he could get her calm. Holding her, close and firm, he looked over his shoulder at Sadie’s sponsor. “She’s strong. Gimme a minute to see if we can handle this. They’ll put her on a hold if she goes to the ER.”

Gordon stared hard, and then, with evident reluctance, nodded. “One minute. That’s a lot of fucking blood.”

“Spilled blood looks like a lot long before it really is,” Sherlock answered and turned back to the tense, struggling girl in his arms. That was true. It was also true that he didn’t like how much blood there was. Enough to pool in the bottom of the tub.

“I guess you’d know that better’n me.” With a shift in his tone, Gordon added, “Sherlock—the shit out here. It’s clean. Unused.”

Relief hit him so fast that his head dropped and landed on hers. He realized that she’d stopped fighting.

“Sadie, sweetheart. Let me help you. Let me see what you did.”

“Go away,” she moaned. “Please go away.”

“Never gonna happen, sorry.” Blood was soaking through the towel. He had to see if she’d slit her fucking wrists. “What did you do, sweetheart?”

“I was trying to make it better.”

Now that she was quiet in his arms, he pulled the towel back. The first thing he saw was the scar from the bullet wound he’d sewn up. She’d cut it open, and it was still bleeding freely. “Fuck,” he muttered and then lifted her arm, steeling himself for what else he’d see.

She hadn’t opened her veins, not in any intentional, irrevocable way. Instead, she’d drawn a row of two-inch gashes laterally through the meat of her forearm, starting at her elbow. Each gash was a nearly-exact copy of the others, and the spaces between them were uniform. This was the pattern of scars that covered her thighs, too. He supposed she’d run out of room down there.

The cuts were deep, though, and a few were bleeding heavily, as if those had caught veins after all.

He shifted her in his hold—she neither resisted nor assisted—and checked her right arm. It looked like he’d interrupted her work on this side. She was right-handed, and the few gashes there weren’t as controlled.

A check of the rest of her body showed no other wounds.

“I think we can handle this here, sweetheart. I need some help, though.” Again, he shifted his grip, freeing a hand to go for his phone in his pocket. He found the contact he needed and started a call.

“J.R. Sadie’s hurt. I need you. Bring your kit.” At J.R.’s agreement, he gave Sadie’s address and ended the call.

“Okay, little outlaw. Let’s see if we can get the bleeding to stop. I’m gonna owe you a bunch of new towels.”

Gordon was still hovering in the doorway. “What can I do?”

“I need to get her out of this tub. Strip her bed and put towels down. She keeps them in that chest. We should ice the cuts that are still bleeding, too.”

Gordon nodded and got to work. Sherlock sat down in the tub and pulled Sadie onto his lap, wrapping his hands over the towel around the worst of her self-inflicted wounds.

He supposed they weren’t entirely self-inflicted. He thought he had some blame for them, too.

She was quiet, but her eyes were open and staring at the wall. Not sure if she’d fallen into that alarming catatonia she’d been in earlier, after Taryn, Sherlock nudged her gently. “Sadie?”

She sighed. “It’s all fucked up.”

“No, it’s not. Just a rough night.” Maybe another man would have seen these events—the scene with Taryn, Sadie’s jealousy, her clearly fragile state, this mess they were sitting in now—as a red flag, a tub full of red flags. But no. If anything, he loved her more. If someone were to ask him to explain how that could be, he didn’t know if he’d have an answer. But he felt responsible, and he wanted more than anything to help her, to feel her trust in him again.

He wasn’t sure he deserved to have lost it in the first place, but he understood why she’d faltered. He could imagine what that scene had looked like to her, and he knew he should have handled things differently. Sadie didn’t understand about exes.

“I can’t stop fizzing.” Now that she was calm—and he was, too, more or less—she sounded almost like herself. “I couldn’t make it stop.”

“Maybe that’s because this wasn’t the way to do it.” He brushed her sticky hair back from her face, wiping blood from her cheek as he did so. “Sweetheart, you’re not alone”—he stopped and wiped her cheek again. She was bruised. A kind of bruise he recognized. “Who hit you?”

She shook her head and turned her face toward his chest. It was the first time since he’d come into the bathroom that she was turning to him rather than pushing him away, so he dropped the question. But somebody had hit her, and that was going to be addressed.

He held her close and kissed her forehead. “Let me help you, Sadie. I want to take care of you, but I can’t if you run off when you’re hurting.”

“You lied.”

He took her chin in his fingers and made her meet his eyes. “I didn’t. I avoided, and I’m sorry for that—but that was about me, not you. It makes me tired to think about Taryn. She fucked me up, yeah. But there’s no pull there at all. It doesn’t matter what she wants, or what she thinks. She doesn’t matter. I love you. I’ve never loved anybody else, not like this. You can trust me, Sadie. Believe in us.”

“I get so jealous. I hate it. I wanted to kill her. I would have. I meant it.”

“I wanted to kill her, too.” Sitting in this tub, holding his bleeding girl, he still wanted to kill the woman who’d made this crisis. “But you didn’t. Think of what happened today as a mulligan. You know what that is?”

She nodded. “My dad plays golf.”

Of course he did. “You didn’t hurt her, and now you know something about yourself.”

“That I’m a killer.”

Sherlock had killed, more than once, and he felt the self-condemnation in her voice acutely. What would she think of him if she knew that he was—in fact, in deed, in truth—a killer?

“No. That you don’t want to be. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be tearing yourself up like this over something that
didn’t happen
. Taryn went home to be a bitch again tomorrow. You’re the one who’s suffering.”

Gordon came to the doorway. “I got her set up. Ice packs, too.”

He nodded and turned back to Sadie. “Okay, little outlaw. Let’s get you fixed up.”

~oOo~

While they waited for J.R., Sherlock helped Sadie get better cleaned up and into some clothes—no way was J.R. going to see her whole body; it was bad enough that Gordon had—and then washed himself up as much as he could. Then he sat on the towel-draped bed with her and held ice packs on her arms. By the time the Horde medic arrived, bearing a huge tackle box that made Sherlock’s own fairly capacious first aid kit look like a box of Band-Aids, most of the blood had stopped, except for a few very deep lacerations—which included the bullet scar. She’d carved nearly to bone there. But even that was down mainly to dark seepage as J.R. sat and pulled on a pair of blue gloves.

When J.R. learned that real pain relief wasn’t going to happen, he used a numbing agent. But he was still hurting her, and Sadie—tired and over-stimulated already, and, for a girl who cut herself routinely, not remotely stoic about pain she wasn’t self-inflicting—kept whimpering and chewing her lips. The need to intervene and stop J.R. from hurting her, possible strategies for which included beating his brother unconscious, was making Sherlock crazy.