And with that, I walked around him, leaving him rubbing where I’d maimed him, and exited out of the room, thanking every God there was that I didn’t trip or walk into a door on the way out. No one wants their grand finale to include a bleeding nose or picking themselves up off the floor. Can you imagine having a moment of grandeur, an awesome exit with dignity, then you walk into a wall, your nose is broken and hanging off your face, and that’s it—fin. It’d be utterly humiliating and a total anticlimax, and I wasn’t going out like that. Not today, Elijah Satan.
So, with dignity, I followed the hall to where it opened up into the bar and took my place back at my section for the night. It wasn’t until ten minutes later that I realized that my anxiety was still deeply buried, something that’d never happened to me. Usually, once the monkey was out of the cage, he danced around, hid behind it, and then went on a rampage around my body.
And it was all thanks to the pain in my arse, Elijah Townsend-Rossi.
Oh, bloody hell, I was going to have to thank him, or at the very least say sorry for assaulting his shin.
That meant I’d have to speak to him, something that, again, would’ve usually had my anxiety running riot.
It didn’t, but my vagina almost did. The dirty bitch.
Elijah
Anxiety recognizes anxiety.
Once you’ve had it, you become aware of what the symptoms are as they take over inside, so you’re able to notice it in other people.
With Sadie, it’d been the pulse in her neck, her pupils dilating, and the way she fisted her hands. Add onto that, whenever someone spoke to her, she looked like she was going to pass out… and I hated that she had to go through it. It’d taken me a while to get to grips with my anxiety issues, but I could remember losing control of them, and it hit hard that Sadie was experiencing it too.
I’d only followed her to make sure she got to a safe space without anyone cornering her to talk, but when we’d gotten there, I’d been unable to stop my feet from following her inside.
And what I saw wrecked me.
It was ingrained in me to respect personal boundaries, and I’d never been so appreciative of that before in my life.
And she’d let me in.
For someone who felt like they had no control, letting someone into their personal space was huge. That feeling only got better when what I was doing helped her.
Sadie Dahl was an enigma in many ways. She looked genuinely confident and had a smart, sassy mouth, but if you looked at her eyes, you saw the truth. She watched anyone who approached her with wariness and caution, and sometimes when men made sharp moves with their hands or arms, I swear she was doing everything to stop herself ducking and hiding.
I was still mulling over the riddle of Sadie Dahl as I walked back to where Archer was waiting for me at the bar when I heard my name being hissed by the riddle herself. Pivoting, I leaned on the bar top and waited, admittedly amused by it all because she was scanning the area around us like she was about to divulge top-secret information.
When she finally looked back at me, I grinned and raised an eyebrow, deliberately goading her into feeling slightly pissed at me so that she wouldn’t feel vulnerable while she was saying what she needed to.
“Okay,” she huffed, crossing her arms. “Thank you for the daisy. I really appreciate it.”
Not wanting to make a big deal about the reason she’d used the daisy, I went with a dirty response, which would hopefully piss her off enough to distract her from the problem for the rest of the night. Hopefully, it would also get her thinking about a specific body part of mine that definitely thought about Sadie a lot.
“Baby, you can pluck my daisy anytime you like.”
And with that, I carried on walking to my seat. A glance over my shoulder had me bursting out laughing, though, when I saw how red her face had gotten in the time I’d had my back to her.
Sure enough, she shot me the birdie and then hurried over to where a customer was waiting to get served.
I made sure to keep an eye on her the rest of the night. I didn’t see her hands shake, but I definitely saw her mouth “wanker” at me a couple of times.
Chapter Two
Elijah
Life out of the Coast Guard was like the brakes in your car failing when you were at the top of the hill with a descent that went for thousands of miles ahead of you.
One minute you were stable, you could see the whole world ahead—the next, you were falling with zero control over your fate.
Added to that, I no longer had my best friend, so I had zero foundation under me.
Some weeks I had no nightmares, some I had them frequently like the one I’d had tonight where I was being dragged underwater while I held onto Cooper. I swear I could even taste and smell the sea.
Mind and heart racing over the memory of holding his body, I threw the covers off my legs and got out of bed. It was better to beat the shit out of something than to relive one of the worst moments of my life. At least for me, it was!
So, picking up my phone, I dialed the number I’d gotten after taking part in a fight in Florida when I’d visited my parents.
The underground circuit was a close-knit community. One organizer knew another, fighters had heard of each other and knew who they wanted to fight at some point, and the spectators were eager for the thrill of seeing it play out in front of them.
Me—I just wanted to get rid of some tension and to have the pain snap me out of this repetitive cycle of bullshit I had going on inside my head.
“Pepper Pizza. How can I help?” a young guy’s voice answered after it’d rung three times.
“I need a pizza with just pineapple and anchovies,” I told him, following the directions I’d been given and holding back the gag that wanted to accompany the words.
This time when he spoke, he sounded slightly sharper than he had previously. “Just pineapple and anchovies?”
“Yeah, hold the cheese, too.”
There was some rustling, and then a deeper voice asked, “What’s the name?”
“You can put it under Ross,” I instructed, giving him my fight name.
For some outrageous reason, people always went with a dramatic name when they fought. The Indestructible, Hulk, The Hermanator, Good Will Thumping, and shit like that. Me, I’d gone with something that made me seem regular and average, and it’d worked for me until I’d won enough fights for people to realize I was far from it.
The sharp breath my name received showed the organizer had heard of me. There was only one Ross actively fighting right now—me.
“I see. Our Bakeridge Pass restaurant’s open, so they’ll have your pizza ready for you to collect. What time would suit you?”
“What times have you got?”
“How about forty-five minutes?”
And with that, I was ready to go. Bringing up directions on my phone to where he was talking about, I pulled on shorts and a t-shirt and got into my truck, my head already focused on how I was going to fight tonight.
Sadie
Somehow, I’d managed to sleep until four o’clock in the morning—something I rarely did just now after getting kidnapped with Ariana and shot—and I felt excellent for it. I was averaging around four hours a night, so the extra two I’d had tonight was a luxury I was grateful for.