“I didn’t need your help,” the woman continued.
“Yeah, that’s totally the sense I got.” She pulled herself upright. “What with him calling you a dyke and shaking the shit out of you.”
“He didn’t do any of that until you got involved.”
Was that true? Everything felt so fuzzy now. She wasn’t the first person to suggest Elliot’s temper caused situations to escalate quickly. “I just don’t like bullies picking on people.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t really any of your business.”
She threw her head back and almost fell over again. She had to get out of there. As soon as she stopped spinning she intended to bolt.
“Hey, are you okay?” the bartender asked.
“Yeah. Just give me a minute.”
“You’re bleeding,” the woman said.
“Don’t worry. You can’t catch my gay that way.”
The bartender and the woman exchanged an awkward glance but said nothing. They couldn’t even look at her. They didn’t want her there. No one wanted her there, but no one had the balls to say so. At least the big hairy caveman had been honest about his feelings. She almost preferred his venom to these people’s false politeness. At least people like him and Mrs. Anthony gave her something to rail against, some sort of legitimate outlet for her anger, but if she started screaming at people in bars who ignored her existence, they’d all think her crazy. Hell, maybe she was crazy. She certainly felt unstable right then in more ways than one.
Slapping a ten-dollar bill on the bar, she realized she’d way overpaid for her drink, but she didn’t want to wait for change. Change didn’t come nearly fast enough in places like this, and the only way to save herself was to get the hell out of there.
Kelly had finished only two tax returns in the last two hours. Not a terrible rate, for a rookie, or someone with time to kill, but she wasn’t new to the job, and she wasn’t anywhere near on schedule. She should’ve flown through returns at this stage in tax season, but she couldn’t get any momentum going. Between trips to the hospital and checking Elliot’s returns, she worked fourteen hours a day to do less than she should’ve accomplished in ten.
Yeah, blame Elliot, she thought. Blame her dad. Blame anyone and anything other than Beth. Beth with her impromptu visits and her soft touch and questions she had no right to ask. No, she couldn’t go there. She couldn’t let the anger well up again. Anger felt safe, and maybe it offered a relief when she was strong, but she couldn’t trust herself to stop there anymore. Anger was a gateway emotion. It opened the door to sadness and fear and regret. She had more than enough to contend with this tax season. She didn’t need to reexamine choices she couldn’t unmake. She couldn’t give in to distractions, not emotional ones. Once she wandered down that dark path, she might not find her way back.
She scanned the brokerage statement in front of her. Black and white. Clear lines. Neat rows and columns. The tangible, the concrete, the formulaic. She had to hold on to the only thing helping her maintain control, but a sound pulled her attention away once again.
She listened carefully. Something or someone shuffled the gravel near the back door. Please be a raccoon, she thought, but a key in the lock blew a pretty big hole in that hope. She looked at the clock. 10:15. Her chest ached.
Beth.
She took a deep breath and tried to compose herself as the heavy metal door swung open. It took a few seconds for the cloud of frozen air to snake its tendrils into the open door of her office. How long before they reached her heart?
Clearing her throat and trying to sound more perturbed than anxious, she called out, “It’s awfully late for you to be out in the weather, Beth.”
“Shit.” The startled voice definitely didn’t belong to Beth. “Kelly?”
“Elliot?”
“What are you still doing here?”
“What are you doing here?” she asked, perhaps a bit more sharply than she intended, but the emotional whiplash knocked her off guard and undercut her determination to stay calm. Turned out the only thing more unsettling than an unexpected visit from Beth was pre-paring for Beth, only to actually find someone else. Oh God, she’d said Beth’s name, acted like she expected her. What kind of tone had she used? Had Elliot noticed, or had she been equally startled by the unexpected exchange?
“I was out,” Elliot muttered, still standing outside the cone of light from her office. “And I needed to, um, use the bathroom.”
“Oh, okay.” Except the explanation didn’t make sense. “Out where?”
“Out. Just out getting a drink.”
One of the bars near the square, no doubt. She sighed. She didn’t have it in her to care about Elliot’s social drinking habits, but why not use the bathroom at the bar instead of walking all the way over here, interrupting her work, and startling her into feeling things she didn’t have to feel? Annoyance reigned at the forefront of her emotions once more. “Elliot, I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to come here late at night, especially if you’ve been drinking.”
“Yeah, you’re right. I’m sorry. I’ll go,” she said from outside the doorway.
Kelly’s suspicions piqued. She’d never known Elliot to agree with her so easily. She’d been contrary since the moment they met and argued over much less. Had she come around to being more compliant? Or was she looking for an easy out? And did it matter? She should let her go and get back to work, and yet, from the sound of her soft breathing, she hadn’t left yet. “Elliot?”
“I didn’t mean to interrupt. I’ll go.”
“Wait a second.” She closed the folder on her desk with an exaggerated exhale. “Come here.”
“What do you need?” Elliot asked from the hallway.
“Nothing, just stop lurking in the shadows.”
“Why?” Elliot’s voice sounded almost strangled.
“What do you mean ‘why’? It’s creepy. Are you high?”
Elliot laughed, a more normal sound from her, and Kelly’s shoulders relaxed. “I’m not high. Are you?”
“Me? Why would I be high?”
“I don’t know. You’re working at ten on a Friday night when any normal person would be exhausted after the day we had.”
“So what, you think I’m on speed?”
“No one does speed anymore,” she snorted, then added, “I thought you might be on meth, though.”
“Oh for goodness sake, do I look like I’m on meth?”
Elliot peeked her head into the open doorway, but before she could offer an assessment, Kelly gasped. A dark rivulet of blood ran down from her eyebrow around her almost incandescent green eye. The contrast of such bright color only made her pale skin and lips appear even more pallid under the florescent light. “You’re bleeding.”
Elliot shrugged. “I thought so.”
“You thought so?” Kelly asked incredulously. “That’s all you have to say?”
Elliot shrugged again.
Sure, now she had no comeback. The one time Kelly actually wanted to hear one of her flip explanations, Elliot offered no smart response. The silence made Kelly wonder how much blood she’d lost, and that thought made her stomach lurch. She couldn’t take more loss tonight.
Springing into action, she practically vaulted from behind her desk and crossed the hallway in two quick strides, grabbing Elliot’s hand as she went. She pulled her into the bathroom and flipped on the lights. Both of them winced at the onslaught from the overhead bulb, but Kelly recovered and rummaged through a small cabinet for the first aid kit.
“Sit,” she ordered, nodding to the toilet seat, and Elliot, for the first time ever, obeyed without so much as an eye-roll. She must feel bad. Maybe she had a concussion. Damn it, if she had to go back to that hospital tonight, she would have a nervous breakdown. “No,” she mumbled to herself as she found the metal box holding her first aid supplies. “No, you won’t. Everything’s fine. You have this under control.”
“What?” Elliot asked.
“N
othing. Just relax.” She opened the box and pulled out a washcloth before soaking it in hot water. “Look up.”
Elliot complied, shedding her dark chocolate coat before closing her eyes and angling her face toward the ceiling. God, she was beautiful. Kelly shook her head. That was not the kind of distraction she needed. She didn’t need to think about her flawless skin or the thick shock of auburn hair across her forehead.
Focus.
Kelly cupped Elliot’s chin firmly in one hand to hold her in place and then dabbed the warm washcloth against her bloodstained skin. She started down along the collar of her blue oxford shirt, her fingers brushing back the fabric from her neck. Working slowly, she inched up along the square line of her jaw and over the smooth plane of her cheek. Stopping to rinse the rag, she tried not to think about the amount of red-tinged water spinning down the drain or the sight of Elliot’s blood on her own hands.
“Thank you,” Elliot whispered, her voice startling in the previously quiet confines of the small space.
Kelly jumped, then internally chastised herself. She had to pull it together. Her nerves were too frayed. She needed to stay busy and not overthink anything. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“It was stupid.”
“Things that leave you bleeding from the head usually are.”
The corners of Elliot’s mouth quirked up. “I got into an argument.”
Her stomach clenched, but she kept her tone deliberately cool. “With whom?”
“Cowboy Caveman,” Elliot muttered, then flinched as Kelly dabbed the washcloth nearer to the cut.
She pressed the rag gently directly to the wound now. It wasn’t very wide. She’d expected worse, given how much blood she’d wiped away, but she couldn’t tell how deep it went. She focused more on the gash than the story Elliot wove beneath her. “And Cowboy Caveman is what? A cartoon?”
“More like a caricature of the Midwestern American male.”
“You got punched by a stereotype?”
“He didn’t punch me. He elbowed me in the face.”
She sucked in a sharp breath. “A man, an actual man, struck you?”
“Yeah. Did you think I got bloodied up while shadow boxing?”
“I thought you were drunk. I thought you were speaking metaphorically, or I don’t know, but I didn’t think a man would just hit a woman. I mean, I know it happens, but not out in the open, not in a bar fight, I am … I am …” She fought a wave of nausea at the thought of someone striking Elliot.
She reached for a large Band-Aid and tried to steady her hand as she unwrapped the paper casing. The idea of someone purposely hurting Elliot caused something fierce and frightening to fill her chest, and she worked hard to force it down. She took Elliot’s chin in her hand once more, tilting it up so she could patch the wound.
Only this time, she’d lost her ability to remain clinical. She saw the blood, saw the residual fear and uncertainty in those green eyes, felt the blow as surely as if it had been delivered to her. Her vision narrowed as the darkness rose up to meet her.
“Kel.”
The name hurt to hear, so soft and dreamy with a hint of concern. “What?”
“You’re kind of hurting me.”
Trying to blink away the haze, she glanced down at her own hand as it clutched Elliot’s face, her knuckles as white as the pale skin beneath them.
Pain on top of pain.
She released her grip and looked away, but the tiny room tilted in her field of vision. Wringing her hands, she stood in limbo, the two-foot gap between Elliot and the sink seemed an endless chasm. Her thoughts spun. Pain, fear, helplessness— she’d held them at bay for so long, but suddenly there, with blood in the sink to one side, and that perfect, beautiful face sliced open to her other, she couldn’t take any more. She barely had time to wonder why this, of all things, sent her over the edge. She felt herself falling before it even happened.
Then Elliot caught her, swift and sure, as if she’d seen her more clearly than she saw herself. The whole thing happened so fast she didn’t understand how it had happened at all. One second she didn’t know which way to turn, the next Elliot cradled her in her arms. Kelly felt the rise and fall of Elliot’s chest against her back and the warmth of her breath against the side of her face.
“What happened?” she whispered hoarsely, as she tried to pull away, but Elliot’s arms clasped tightly around her waist, pinning her close.
“You wobbled.”
“I didn’t.” Had she?
“Your face went white,” Elliot said softly, leaning down so her lips brushed close to her temple. “And then you closed your eyes and swayed.”
“I don’t think I did. That doesn’t make sense.” Nothing made sense anymore. Nothing had made sense for weeks. “I was fine. I just needed, you needed—”
“Just stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Kelly,” Elliot said as if it were the most obvious answer in the world. “Look at me.”
She tried to do the opposite. She tried to turn more fully away, but doing so left her staring straight into the mirror, the mirror that reflected the most intense green eyes she’d ever seen. Those eyes held her every bit as tightly as the arms around her waist.
“Stop fighting.”
“Says the woman who’s here because she got into a bar fight.”
Elliot smiled at her in the mirror. “I told you we had more in common than you thought.”
Kelly shook her head. “You’re a mess.”
Elliot laughed. “So are you.”
She wanted to protest, but her shaking muscles gave her away. She could barely stand anymore, literally or figuratively.
“It sucks to feel helpless,” Elliot said softly.
She nodded, unintentionally relaxing against the steadiness Elliot provided.
“I get it,” Elliot continued. “When Mrs. Anthony lashed out at me today, I wanted to cry, and I hated that. I hate that people still have the power to make me feel vulnerable. I hate myself for giving her the power. And then tonight, when I saw some douchebag do the same thing to some other woman, I just snapped. It felt good. I felt strong. The anger felt so much better than the pain or shame, but it doesn’t last.”
She didn’t reply. She couldn’t. Her heart seemed to have crawled into her throat only to pound painfully there. Elliot had given voice to everything she’d tried so hard to deny, even to herself. She couldn’t hold the emotions back any longer. Giving them a name gave them all the power she feared.
“It’s okay,” Elliot whispered again, her lips so soft and close. They brushed her ear. “I mean it. We really are more alike than you want to admit.”
She lifted her eyes, once again meeting Elliot’s in the mirror. The light green she’d grown accustomed to had turned darker, almost as dark as her own expanding pupils. She saw herself, her fear, her need in their shared reflection, physical proof they were more alike than even Elliot knew.
She could deny it. She could lie. She could look away from what she saw. She could fight herself and everyone else the same way she had for years. She could still walk away. She turned slowly in Elliot’s embrace and placed her hands flat on her chest. She could push her away. She had to.
Instead she clutched her shirt and pulled her closer until their mouths collided.
Holy shit, Kelly was kissing her … hard.
And amazingly.
Elliot’s shock quickly gave way to surrender, which burned into abandon. Wrapping her arms tighter around Kelly’s waist, she held them together even though she didn’t need to. Kelly wasn’t going anywhere. She still held Elliot’s shirt in two tight fists as she arched up to keep Elliot tightly against her in as many ways as possible. One kiss blurred into hundreds. Opening their mouths, tongues sought and found more fully, more completely. Stealing air in tiny breaths, they refused to break the connection.
God, her mouth felt fantastic. And skilled.
It had been too long since she’d held a
woman like this. Maybe she’d never held a woman quite like this. Whatever they conveyed to each other with this clash of bodies and emotions, it was bigger than attraction. It amounted to more than lust. Kelly exuded a need that made her dizzy from the mix of power and raw vulnerability. Passion verged on desperation that hinted not at exploration, but at something well known or something long lost, having been found just in time. Kelly kissed her like Elliot’s lips held the key to survival.
Perhaps they did. Maybe the pain and the fear and the futility could only be endured if met with equal doses of pleasure. What if their mutual combustion wasn’t just the result of a breakdown? What if it offered their only salvation?
She slid her hands down, cupping Kelly’s ass through her skirt. If drinking from this cup provided her with the life needed to endure whatever came next, she wouldn’t sip; she would guzzle. She would take every drop until Kelly cut her off or until they both grew drunk on each other.
Kelly released one hand from her shirt long enough to snake it up into Elliot’s hair. She raked her fingernails across her scalp, pulling her head down farther. Elliot willingly bowed to the exquisite pressure, tearing her lips away only as far as Kelly’s neck before renewing the feast. Her skin tasted of sweat and the sharp winter wind.
She licked along the curve of her throat to the tight muscle of her shoulder and then across the defined ridge of her slender collarbone. She inhaled the scent of shampoo and perfume, something clean and crisp, like fresh air after being locked inside for too long. Every inch of her flesh begged to be united with every ounce of Kelly. She intended to take her, right here. Right now.
Thoughts flowed, fast and loose. Passion, lust, need, greed, control, boss, straight, sex.
Oh God, what were they doing? Where could they go from here? Could there be anything but oblivion after this moment? The question filtered through the haze only to disappear quickly in the murky dark of moral ambiguity as Kelly began to unbutton Elliot’s shirt. She wouldn’t think. She couldn’t. She had to have her the way she had to have air. Maybe she’d lost her grip on sanity, or maybe this was her only way not to.
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